Located in Marshall, Virginia, with a second smaller café in Warrenton, Virginia, the Red Truck Bakery has been called “one of the best small town bakeries in America” one of “America’s 13 sweetest bakery, destinations”, and one of “America’s 50 best bakeries.” And President Obama said “I can confirm that the Red Bakery makes some darn good pie”.
Brian Noyes is the owner of the Red Truck Bakery and he’s published or Potter books has “Red Truck Bakery cookbook; Gold Standard Recipes from America’s Favorite Rural Bakery.”
We spoke with Brian Noyes about his bakery and his life.
Q – Brian, how different would your story have been if you’d bought a yellow truck or green truck or purple truck? Red truck just sounds so nice!
A – Well, you know, I often think about how cool these little red trucks look sitting on gift shop shelves or in toy stores. I mean you never really see a blue truck. I’m an art director who long before the bakery came I had a little farmhouse and I thought I need a red truck sitting out here. So, that’s what I pursued. I never considered any other color. I wouldn’t have bought any other color. That’s what you have to have on a farm. I shopped online and found this thing that was in gorgeous shape through Motorsports Company in New York. Once I was vetted and ready to go, they turned me over to the owner, the seller who turned out to be fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger. So, he had the vision to have a red truck. So, thanks to him I started baking goods out of our farmhouse, peddling them in the back of this old red truck that’s kind of where the name came from.
Q – And it doesn’t hurt when a President of the United States endorses your product.
A – Yeah. That was pretty tasty for him and for us. One quick mention, every now and then, especially in the Warrenton, our original store front which was an old 1921 Esso service station, an old truck would show up in the parking lot. It was always green or blue. I always looked at it thinking yeah, red would have never worked, but, I’ll keep that in mind for green truck bar or whatever the next thing up our sleeve would be but, they look gorgeous and nobody ever forgets it. I always think about it when I made deliveries. If I was showing up down a dirty country road with the cake delivery and I was in a new Jeep or an SUV, people would be a little alarmed if they didn’t know who I was coming on their property. An old red truck is immediately discerning and full of charm. I’ve gotten into more places so fast with a big smile when that thing shows up.
Q – So, there’s a psychology involved here in what people will respond to.
A – Well, somebody figured it out long before I have. Obama didn’t hurt at all. Once he was out of office he asked us to create breakfast for his news’s staff in their new office buildings and we did and we brought more pie for him.
Q – Your background as an art director must have served you well in not only the presentation of your product but advertising as well. I don’t even know, do you advertise?
A – We don’t really advertise, but, it definitely guided my marketing hand, everything from the website to the labels on our packaging with that picture of that red truck. I do it all myself, our logo. I like to tell people I art directed the heck out of this place. Even the items on our shelves that other people make, I mean, they really have to look good, the labeling has to have some nice typography on it, just so the whole place has a well-designed feeling to it. I mean, it’s something I always watch for.
Q – You tell the story about John Wayne making you a tuna fish sandwich and how he did not make it the conventional way. Your take away from that was there are no rules. That’s being the case you went ahead and enrolled in a culinary school when there are certainly rules to how food is prepared. What were you expecting to get out of culinary school?
A – Well, they’re kind of a guiding hand and then knowledge I think. I still needed to know how to make things. My background wasn’t in food. It was in publication design. So, I know that really well. Everything could look good, but, it’s got to taste good. Here in DC was just an incredible high end cooking school that was helped by being launched by a former White House pastry chef. He got the staff going and the curriculum going. I learned so much from them, I mean French tarts, things that I hadn’t even come across. I also went through the CIA “Culinary Institute of America” in Hyde Park and I learned a lot there, but, I learned so much more form L’ Academie de Cuisine just outside of DC. So definitely schooling was important. They might even mentioned to you there are no rules and they kind of inspire you to run with their parameters and training but to do something you really like doing yourself to put your mark on. That is really what I kind of learned from this John Wayne thing, smashed his potato chips into my tuna fish sandwich and almost told me that’s why I was going to like this. So, who was I to argue with him?
Q – You traveled the southern US going to cafés, barbecue joints, grocery stores and bakeries. What were you looking for? How these people made their food or presented it? Were you looking to find out the preferred eating habits of people?
A – That was long before I even knew I was going to do something so I wasn’t doing the research as much as I was loving hitting these kinds of places. It started out with this book called “Road food” which I kept in my glove compartment. Jane and Michael Stern wrote it. It was great to keep as a guide traveling up and down the East Coast throughout the South. I’m in some dinky, little town and say South Carolina or Georgia and I’d look in there to see where is someplace fun, homespun, mom-and-pop that would be fun to eat in? I really love those places off the interstate. That guidebook is really great. It really inspired me to do something on my own, but, in those days I was just looking for the charm and something unique. I always thought, if I ever quit publishing I’d love to have a little food joint somewhere in then I kind of did. It was an attraction that I had. That book may be inspired me to pursue it a little bit further. So, then I would go out and chase down places once I thought I might be doing this and just see you but other people are doing. Then I launched the bakery and darn if Jane and Michael Stern didn’t show up there one day. My jaw just dropped so I told them it was all their fault. They remain pretty good friends. They write about us a lot. They did a really great splendid table piece for NPR on us.
Q -What did that Parade magazine article do for your business?
A – Well, there were a couple of them I think Michael Stern wrote one or both of them. I’m not remembering the first one. He later did a piece on one food item to represent every state and for the state of Virginia he picked the red truck bakery and our Shenandoah Apple cake. Were kind of on the edges of the Shenandoah Valley here and it’s Apple pie country. Only during fall and winter Apple season do we make that. That really got us on the map. Representing the whole state with that.
Q – You count Robert Duvall as a customer. Are you able to reveal any other of your famous customers?
A – Yeah. I’ll share that. He has a farm near here. He comes in every now and then. He was coming to our Warrenton store, the first one, the old gas station since we opened. We didn’t bother him. It was great having him around. People would suddenly realize it was him and talk to him. I kind of cut on that if you ever wanted to engage him don’t talk about his movies which are exactly what everybody does and he hears all the time, but, talk about meat. He loves Texas brisket, a good steak. You know a good place anywhere in the country and you want to talk about meat, he’ll listen. I’ve also noticed that even as he’s getting up ready to leave, if somebody’s walking in with kids, he’ll just sit right back down. He just loves kids. We’ve been a big supporter of his Robert Duval’s children’s fund. He showed up here in our martial bakery with actor James: Caan one day who’s a real favorite of mine. I didn’t even recognize him at first. He was dressed just like my dad dressed when he was out working on the car. Duvall barked at me, hey, meet my friend Jimmy. I realized who it was. Oh, my God! It was perfect telling these two actors who were here eating a tuna sandwich about my John Wayne story making me a tuna sandwich in his kitchen. They got a big kick out of it but, the two falls have been really good to us. They send over breakfast in a box package to some of their Hollywood chums during the holidays. Mary Chapin Carpenter, country singer/songwriter from Charlottesville, but world-renowned lives near here. She’s a regular. She comes in. She has been writing some albums on her laptop perched in our table on the window. Her dogs would be on the back of her truck or she can keep an eye on them. That would kind of be it. There are a lot of food folks that come through here.
Q – Did it take a lot of money to start Red Truck Bakery?
A – Well, I had some investors lined up. I was doing it out of the farmhouse, out of the back of the truck while still working at the Washington Post and the Smithsonian magazine and selling them (pies) on Saturday mornings at country stores. The New York Times caught on and wrote a piece about us. I had a fledging little website with 24 hits. On one day the New York Times story came out the next day, and suddenly I had 57,000 hits. Many of them wanted to take advantage of our nationwide shipping and wanted a cake sent somewhere. So, the mailman just kind of dropped his jaw when he pulled up to see what he had to pick up to deliver. Right then I realized we got to make this thing go. So, I quit my job. I had investors lined up and then the great reviews hit and they all bailed and I was left to do it myself. I got no financial help from anybody other than me emptying out my savings and some of my retirement in just launched it that way. It didn’t take a lot of money but, it took all of my money. (Laughs).
Q – Thankfully you got it all back and then some!
A – Where hoping. Once we realized we had outgrown the old gas station and needed a bigger location especially to grow shipping; I was kicking our bakers off of our stainless steel tables in the kitchen at 11 o’clock in the morning so we start boxing up these cakes and getting them ready for the UPS guy to pick up. We had no room to do that. Shipping was growing. We rented a couple of stores down the street, empty offices. But, that’s in the middle of winter at Christmas time and were pushing cakes down through ice and snow or rain and that doesn’t work. We found this new location, now our main headquarters in Marshall, Virginia, just off of I 66 direct shot into DC still keeping the other location but it’s all done here. Nice couple rooms for shipping. We have a loading dock in the back that the UPS guy can pull right up to.
Q – Are you shipping cakes and pies overnight? One day? Two days?
A – That’s up to the customer. They can order them online. We don’t ship everything we make, but, everything we ship is kind of designed to get to the West Coast where I grew up. I got a lot of family out there. But, it’ll ship into were three days and still be tasty. So much of our shipping is local and that’s one day away. Even second day via ground is fine. Anything over two days like to the West Coast we really encourage shipping UPS like second day air. We ship to pies. We’d love to ship our fresh fruit pies. Were kind of a seasonal bakery so were making things only when that fruit is being grown nearby. You can’t get a cherry pie in the middle of November but during June and July were making them and their great. The fruit pies you can imagine what they look like after UPS has thrown it into the back of their truck and onto somebody’s porch. They laughed when I put this end of on some of the boxes. We’re not going to pay attention to that. (Laughs). So, we ship our solid mincemeat pie and Kentucky bourbon pecan pie with chocolate. Both those are pretty sturdy in they don’t slosh around. All the cakes we ship get there in fine shape. We don’t do decorated cakes. They’re just bunt cakes or flat cakes.
Q – And of course you don’t ship overseas do you?
A – No. Early on people wanted some things to go even to Canada. Some of those things spent almost a week and customs. You can imagine how that tasted.
Q – Could you franchise the Red Truck Bakery?
A – I always wondered about that. But you know we opened up the second location and that became the hardest part of the job, keeping two different staffs, going every day and ensuring the cake were making today taste just as good as the cake we made yesterday as well as what our other stores are making yesterday or even a year before. Watching new staff come and go and just ensuring the quality of consistency from day to day, store to store. I’m just one guy and sometimes I feel like I’m the only one watching that closely and I don’t see how we could even do one more store let alone franchise. At that point it just becomes bagged cake mixes. That’s not what we do. So many people in DC want us to open up near them in their shopping areas or something. I can’t see that happening. It also kind of loses the world destination charm of what we have going on here in Virginia.
Official Website: www.redtruckbakery.com
