Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in food and beverage but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Maya Munoz, co-owner of Motzi Bread, located in Baltimore, MD, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Motzi Bread is a neighborhood bakery dedicated to making the best breads and pastries possible. We use freshly milled flour and long fermentation to make our breads. We source our grains from local farms in the Chesapeake Bay area. Above all, we believe in making great, nutritious food that's accessible to all our neighbors.

Tell us about yourself

We're Maya Muñoz and Russell Trimmer, bakers and owners. We live above Motzi Bread and are invested in the community because we love our Charles Village neighborhood of Harwood, Baltimore, and the Chesapeake region. Russell worked as a farmhand at a diverse, small-scale farm that started growing grains. We became interested in how to support and foster grain agriculture in the Mid Atlantic for the health of people and regenerative soil health practices. We're committed to the future of excellent, accessible food in our city.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

We're proud of our "pay-what-you-can" model. We offer suggested prices, and anyone can pay less, more, nothing, or the listed price. We want to make sure that anyone and everyone can access nutritious and tasty food.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

As small business bakery owners, we wear a lot of hats. Luckily, we love the work of day-to-day production. Still, it can be a challenge with other administrative tasks needed all the time, not to mention marketing, management, and customer service. We do our best to set boundaries with our time, but especially as we've been in operation a little under two years, work does often spill into our weekend days.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Look at all the available resources in your area for grants and loans. Baltimore offers many of them, and it's made a huge difference in our financial health as we started the business.
  2. Look for any used equipment that you can get--we scoured restaurant auctions up and down the east coast. It was a big-time investment, but it saved us a lot of money and really helped us have the right equipment for the tasks we wanted to do.
  3. Start small and grow from there. We started with a subscription business, and then we were set to open the storefront at the start of the pandemic. The pandemic forced us to have a very deliberate soft opening and then slowly expand from there, which ended up being the best way to settle into our best practices and grow sustainably.

Is there anything else you'd like to share?

We work with local farmers/value-added producers for over 90% of our sourcing. When this isn't possible for items such as spices and chocolate, we source from producers that source directly from farmers and center their business practices around the well-being of the farmers. Many of the things that we do (work with local farmers, being whole grain, milling our own flour) align with our values and also happens to be the more delicious way of doing things.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.motzibread.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MotziBread/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/motzi.bread/?hl=en
Twitter: https://twitter.com/motzibread

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solopreneur that you'd like to share, then email community@subkit.com; we'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

Feel inspired to start, run or grow your own subscription business? Check out subkit.com and learn how you can turn "one day" into day one.