Blacksmith Bakery is an artisan bakeshop, cafe and pizzeria located in Fort Langley, BC. Built on the original site of Reid’s Blacksmith Shop, circa 1910. With a second express location recently opened at the Langley YNJ airport this summer.
Blacksmith Bakery creates real food using traditional artisanal methods, baked fresh daily, on-site, in open kitchens using locally sourced and seasonal ingredients. The hand forged viennoiserie, patisserie, cakes, eclairs, tarts, cookies, savouries, soups, thin-crust pizzas and gourmet sandwiches crafted by their passionate team are worth the trip. It’s not just the food! Blacksmith Bakery prides itself on having master baristas on staff to provide a delicious range of espresso based coffee drinks using their own Anvil espresso blend made from organic beans roasted locally.
Question: How are you supporting other local businesses?
Answer: We always look to BC first, and try to support our Langley and Fraser Valley farms whenever we can, before we go elsewhere.
Our coffee roasting partner is the amazing Agro Roasters in East Vancouver, which is owned and operated by master roaster and Q-grader Dusty Smith. Agro custom blends and roasts our Anvil espresso, and also provides our medium and dark roast drip coffees, and bagged retail coffee that we sell.
Our bottled drinks are supplied by Fort Langley-based Pacific Bottle Works, and the Good Drinks Beverage Co. We love how GoodDrinks (GoodWater, GoodDrink bottled teas) match the volume of their beverages sold with the same volume of support for global clean water projects.
Our fruit and berry supplier Vari Berry does an amazing job of providing us with berries, soft fruits and veggies purchased from many of the best farms throughout the Fraser Valley, Okanagan and Similkameen Valley.
Our main meat supplier is Langley’s Bonetti Meats, and our dairy supplier is Birchwood Dairy in Abbotsford. Our beers on tap are provided from local brew houses like Parkside Brewery in Port Moody.
We always look locally for any seasonal produce or specialty products such as the organic honey we buy from Bee Ingredients in Glenn Valley. Canadian Linen in Burnaby provides our linen and towel service and we purchase all of our service based services from local BC companies. Our banking is with Prospera Credit Union, and our brand management and marketing agency is Crocodile Creative who are also located right here in Fort Langley. We always look for a local company when we can, and we use GFS and Snowcap for anything else.
Question: What social and environmental practices are you proud of?
Answer: Social responsibility and being a good employer are huge part of our brand. With two locations and a processing kitchen, we currently have about 35 employees, and we’re growing. We offer competitive wages and recently added a health and dental benefits plan. We’re proud that during COVID-19, we managed to quickly shift to adding an online store and we managed to keep a lot of our staff employed. We also started selling some of the products from our farm gate suppliers like jars of honey, produce, dairy products, and specialty baking products. This helped our customers buy local and at the same time helped keep our purchases from our suppliers steady to help keep our local supply chain intact.
We feel that charitable consideration and social responsibility start with our own purchasing decisions, and we try to maintain a build local and help global philosophy. By selling Good Drinks, we are not just supporting a neighbourhood business; we are also contributing to global clean water projects. We purchase reusable tumblers to sell to customers from Miir because every product sold helps fund trackable giving projects focusing on clean water, health environment and strong communities.
Much of our charitable focus is spent on our special partnership with the local non-profit PA-MOJA, which was started, by a group of teachers at the Langley Fine Arts School. PA-MOJA helps Kenyan girls and boys go to school while supporting the conservation efforts of the Ol Pejeta Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya. All of the money they raise goes towards Kenyan student bursaries, infrastructure projects, and wildlife protection initiatives. Locally children in our community receive life-changing experiences and global perspective through their involvement in PA-MOJA initiatives, cultural exchanges and student programs like “The Butterfly Effect”.
At Blacksmith we make a special rhino cookie that we use to bring awareness to the Ol Pejeta Wildlife Conservancy’s fight to save the worlds critically endangered Rhino population. Significant portions of sales proceeds have directly gone to supporting bursaries for Kenyan girls through PA-MOJA. This fall we are very excited to have Agro Roasters join us in creating a Kenyan coffee roast coffee that we will sell to directly support PA-MOJA.
The GoodWater and PA-MOJA projects are excellent examples of build local and help global, but we also look to our own community in terms of providing donations and support a variety of projects in the Fraser Valley and Metro Vancouver area.
Environmentally, we don’t cut any corners. Our operational decisions always consider the impact we have on the community. We focus on minimizing our use of plastics, choosing paper-based compostable packaging (yes our coffee cups are compostable!) and we strategically sell reusable containers to encourage less consumer waste. Minimizing food waste is another area we have focused on, and there’s very little waste created in the way our business is run. We rarely have much of end of day product as we bake everything in small batches multiple times daily and have specific controls in place. On the rare occasions we do have excess product, rather than wasting, we have proudly donated it to Kimz Angelz who distribute it to local struggling families and homeless individuals.
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