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Did you enjoy home-baked bread at Thanksgiving and think to yourself that you’d have it more often if only baking weren’t so involved?
A La Crosse man, Chris Wysong, is hoping to hit it big on such wishes.
Thanksgiving is followed, of course, by “black Friday,” retailers’ day to get out of the red. How about keeping the Thanksgiving gratitude going another day, spending a moment Friday to realize that in our land of liberty, there are entrepreneurs trying to get ahead by thinking up new ways to please us, a thing to celebrate in a state that’s only middle-of-the-pack in entrepreneurship.
Take Wysong, for example.
The Iowa native, 51, settled in Wisconsin after retiring from an Army career. He was doing this and that when, he said, he had a middle-of-the-night dream about making a living from bread. He’d enjoyed baking since childhood — always the guy tapped to make bread for fundraisers. During a deployment to Iraq, the Iraqi army bakers on his base taught him flatbread and, “Next thing you know I’m having lunch with them.”
So he wrote down his 3 a.m. dream idea and, when it still made sense the next day, he started Bucket of Bread, his company. He sells flour (certified organic) and all other necessary dry ingredients for bread, premeasured in a bucket (recyclable plastic). You add the specified amount of lukewarm water, stir, leave it for two to three hours, and you have four pounds of dough ready to become bread, rolls, pizza crust, what have you. There’s white, wheat, seven-grain, and no oils, preservatives, dairy or kneading.
And, for now, there’s just him — founder, bookkeeper, flour-measurer, sales guy. “I’m a solo entrepreneur who wants to be America’s next favorite brand,” he said.
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