Hey Friends,
At the beginning of 2025 I had a lot of hopes and goals, but no idea if any of it would work.
I’m a maker. I know how to make things. I love making things. And for the first 20 years of owning Butterfly Bakery of Vermont, I focused on making more than selling. In other words, I made the best products I knew how and hoped that they would sell themselves. And for the most part, they did! But that is not a stable way to pay the mortgage or meet the payroll.
So this year we finally built a real marketing and sales strategy. Some state grants let us take risks we never could have afforded on our own. Even then, it was $$$ and a gamble. If you have been with us all year, you have seen a lot of what we tried. We went to trade shows. We upgraded the website. We did more in person events than ever. We even ran paid ads for the first time. But the most important thing we did in 2025 was something we did not plan.
I learned how to tell our story.
For years we have worked closely with small farms and made the best food we know how, but I never knew how to talk about it. How do you engage with customers about milk pickups or February pepper orders or a 2000 sq ft freezer? How do I talk about the trajectory of flavor development or our choice to sell primarily to small independent stores, rather than focusing on distributors?
It’s hard to believe that “Small Farms, Big Flavor” is less than a year old. We’ve been living that life for over 20 years, but only gave it a name in the last few months. And when something has a name, it has power.
Honestly, I’ve been scared for most of this year. Scared the money would not stretch. Scared no one would care. Scared we would do all this work and end up exactly where we started (or worse). But I’m a little less scared now. Because we’re trying. Because it’s working.
Learning how to tell our story has changed everything. Sales are growing because people are understanding the meaning behind what we do. More stores have reached out. More customers have found us. For the first time, growth feels intentional rather than accidental.
We’ve still got a long way to go. We’re still learning. But we have some really exciting things happening in 2026 and I cannot wait to tell you about them.
