Chandler's stops making bread, breakfast items

Citing increased pressure from high-end, big-box grocery stores, Chandler’s Bakery has decided to stop producing bread and breakfast items.

But customers who have grown to appreciate their handcrafted sweets and treats needn’t worry — the bakery will continue to produce cakes, dessert pastries, pies, cookies and wedding cakes. The change took effect Wednesday.

“We decided to make the changes for business reasons mostly,” said bakery owner Carolyn Chandler Mucherino. “We’re feeling pretty brokenhearted ourselves about the lack of bread, but I’m pretty excited about being able to focus on the things that I do best and love the most in the bakery.”

Mucherino founded the bakery in 1995 at the Albemarle Square shopping center after coming to Charlottesville from Connecticut. The business employs about 10 people. Her father, Peter Chandler, is one of them.

“The decision that Carolyn has made to reduce the bread line is one that we understand there’s going to be some people that are disappointed,” Peter Chandler said. “We just hope they will understand [that] given the current conditions, it is just not economically feasible for us to continue the bread line.”

Mucherino agreed.

The shopping center’s loss of several tenants, including anchor Circuit City in 2008, has been a tough hurdle to overcome. Chandler also said the loss of the ABC store at the center put a dent in customer traffic.

“I can remember snickering to myself saying, ‘I can’t see what ABC will do for us,’ but when ABC closed … it’s like somebody flipped the light switch.” Chandler speculated that people grabbing a drink to accompany their dinner would see the bakery and decide to make an impulse purchase.

“Unfortunately, with the loss of foot traffic, we got to a point where we were throwing away just about as much, basically, as we’re selling,” Mucherino said.

The reason, she explained, is that it takes basically the same amount of effort to make 10 loaves of bread as it does to make 50. And although they didn’t actually discard the bread — they gave it away to local food closets — the effect was the same.

“It doesn’t really go in the garbage,” Mucherino said. “But when it comes to your checkbook, it’s going in the garbage.”

Gerry Newman owns the Albemarle Baking Co. along with his wife, Mille Carson. He expressed empathy and understanding at the Chandlers’ recent decision but said he doesn’t have any plans to reduce his product line.

“We haven’t seen enough of a dip in [sales volume] to make a change in who we are,” Newman said. For businesses, he said directing attention and resources to the products and services that perform the best is simply a smart, albeit occasionally tough, decision.

Newman said he thinks that his bakery and other local businesses that produce handcrafted food will continue to face pressure from the chain stores, yet they’ll continue to thrive, thanks to customers with discriminating palettes.

“We just try to be the best bakers we can be every day,” Newman said. “We let the customers do the talking for who we are.”

Although the Chandlers said they’ve considered relocating elsewhere in the region, they don’t feel that’s the right decision right now.

“We’ve always very much liked our location,” Mucherino said. “We’ve been here since the day we opened, we’re established here, people know where we are. I think they think of Albemarle Square and they think of Chandler’s Bakery.”