Bakery ovens hum again

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Jim Galipeau is going to be feeling his way through owning and operating a bakery for the foreseeable future — taking over a generations-old beloved business in a small town when your professional background is otherwise working as an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science instructor, will always a learning process and an adjustment.
But Galipeau seems to be winning over even the most skeptical of critics that he might successfully pull off reopening the bakery, and while he’s at it, satisfy even the most devout of longtime Flandreau Bakery goers.
If you haven’t yet stopped back in to the newly reopened Flandreau Bakery, know that there is again a line at the counter again each day, or each day that it is open. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, folks are hearing that they had better stop early if they want to get anything.
That’s not necessarily the case, not anymore anyway.

Galipeau and his crew of both workers and volunteers (who were there the day we stopped in, frosting donuts) are getting the process down. They may be taking up a bit more room to do it — the old coffee shop side of the store is now additional work space. But your favorite standards have reappeared alongside other new baked goods. He’s got an energetic local young bakery manager hired and a full-time baker coming on board. More products are hitting the shelves each week.
The ovens humming in the kitchen, the team bustling to get things done, the chatter of customers coming back in through the doors, all of it seems a comforting sound for the community, the downtown, and longtime Flandreau Bakery fans.
“It seems a lot more open…I’m very happy the bakery is back, even with limited inventory. Very happy that it’s here,” said Dominic Popowski. Popowski grew up coming to the bakery and was a classmate of the former owners. Hearing the bakery was open once again, he and his wife, Susan, who now live in the Ivanhoe/Hendricks area, had to stop in.
They were impressed, they said, and smiling as they ordered a few boxes of freshly-made donuts to take back home.