Small Ovens and Big Hearts - Meet Local Bonus Bakery!

Bonus Bakery has been creating delicious, plant-based baked goods out of their downtown bakery for the past 3 years. Ahead of their Dining Hall pop-up (Feb 3rd, 11:30am - 3:00pm!), we talked to them how they've faced running a bakery during a pandemic, what advice they have for students interested in running their own food business, and more! 

What inspired you to start Bonus Bakery?

After creating Virtuous Pie we realized there weren't a lot of options for vegan baked goods, so we turned that observation into an opportunity! Bonus opened its doors in Dec 2018—it’s pretty crazy considering half of that time has been during the Covid Pandemic! 

There are a lot of preconceived notions attached to plant-based foods particularly: too expensive, bland, weird-looking and odd locations. Bonus’ mission is to break all of those in order to appeal to as many people (vegan and especially non-vegan) as possible!

We wanted to create appealing, affordable, great-tasting baked goods out of our bakery. And this is where the name came from: you can get awesome treats from us without sacrificing price or taste so really, it’s a Bonus that it’s plant-based! Our logo comes from the fact that a Bonus life in a video game is often represented by a star :)

What kind of goodies do you bake at Bonus?

We have an assortment of cookies, scones, brownies, cinnamon buns, cakes…We have a small bakery and an even smaller oven so it’s difficult to bake everything we’d like but we try hard!

After a year in business we realized that cookies were quite popular so in February 2020 we released a new line up of Stuffed Cookies and they are VERY popular! Unfortunately we closed our doors a few weeks later to keep people safe. So we started offering Home Deliveries (and still do!) and our cookies took off! Think Cinnamon Roll Cookie, Sprinkle, Nanaimo, Nutella (homemade Nutella!), S’Mores, and more!

Shortly after, we released our first cake (Naked Sprinkle Cake) and that was also very popular. We now have 3 cake flavors that come in 3 sizes, with a 4th flavor on the way!

We try to innovate as much as we can and keep up with holidays (we just had our Eggnog, Peppermint and Gingerbread Cookies making an appearance!) Stay tuned for a new cookie flavor coming up!

What advice do you have for aspiring foodpreneurs?

The food industry is super exciting with new trends and flavors coming up all the time. So keep up with them! Innovation is super important, especially in the digital age where everyone seems to be looking for new content all the time!

While passion is important, I also always recommend doing some homework prior to getting started. It’s not super exciting but food businesses are a numbers-game and unfortunately a lot of them don’t make it. Make sure that you know your costs and that you price your items accordingly. How much does your cookie cost you? How many do you need to sell to cover rent? It always breaks my heart to see cool concepts not surviving because the math didn’t add up. You have to be both a chef/baker and have some accounting knowledge. Or have a partner who does! 

What advice do you have for SFU students who aspire to have their own business one day?

I know what I would have liked to hear when I was younger: You don’t necessarily need a lot to get started. 

It can sometimes be daunting to have your own business and you can enter Analysis Paralysis if you overthink everything. But you read stories all the time with people starting in their kitchen, their garage, as a side gig… Meaning that you don’t have to have tons of funding to start with. Or tons of expertise! Start small and grow from your learnings! 

Also, if it doesn’t cost much then try it! There are plenty of things you can do to push/grow your business that don’t require investing a lot, if any, money! Run a new promotion, test a new caption on Insta, rearrange your website…experiment all the time!

Where can people find your products?

We used to have a lot of traffic out of our downtown location (Georgia & Bute) but…not anymore as a lot of people are working from home. We are still open though Monday to Saturday 9am to 2pm!

When the pandemic hit we turned to deliveries & wholesale and it’s been keeping us busier than ever! You can find our products in a number of cafes all over the Lower Mainland (North Vancouver, New Westminster, Surrey, Langley…). You can find all of them on our website bonusbakery.com! 

We also do Home Deliveries on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, just order on bonusbakery.com!

What’s coming up next for you?

2021 was our best year and we hope 2022 will be even better! We have a number of things coming up:

• New Cookie Flavors!

• Croissants!

• Expand our frozen items selection

• Maybe another location!

Join us on our Instagram and check out our website to keep up with what’s new at Bonus Bakery!