The Edmonds Food Bank helps to feed an unbelievable number of families — nearly 1,000 families a week — and among their most pressing and persistent needs is bread. As food bank volunteer Tom Treanor says, “it’s a big factor for us. We’re consistently short on sliced bread; we only get 15 to 20% of what we need.”

Enter Community Loaves, bread and energy cookies “home-baked by neighbors.”

In Edmonds alone, 40 local bakers make and donate more than 100 fresh whole-grain, honey-oatmeal loaves and 200 energy cookies every other week. But it’s a drop in the bucket. The food bank could use twice that many.

“The cookies have gone over very well,” says Andrew Brokaw, food bank programs manager. “They’re a perfect fit for snacks at a local school and distribution at the hygiene center. We can also take on additional loaves thanks to the bread slicer — up to 100 more loaves each donation would be perfect.”

The bread slicer at the Edmonds Food Bank is a game-changer. Sliced loaves make life easier especially for seniors, so Community Loaves founder Katherine Kehrli wants to get bread slicers at all the food banks. She and her husband Tim donated this large machine to Edmonds for a trial run.

“It takes two hours to slice 100 loaves,” says volunteer Nancy Winch. “The hardest part is getting the twist ties off.” It’s a funny problem — home bakers are so diligent about packaging the loaves tightly to keep them fresh, but some people twist left and some twist right.

Why bake bread at home when commercial bread is so cheap and easy?

Community Loaves’ whole-grain loaves are not just any old bread. Store-bought bread can never compete with homemade and especially not when the homemade is baked with freshly ground locally grown wheat, plus olive oil, honey and oats. The energy cookies, too, are packed with nutritious ingredients, and while the recipes are proprietary, the whole enterprise is about individuals sharing with their neighbors.

Baking bread at home is a fragrant, delicious way to serve the community. It’s a way to give on your own time without overcommitting.

Community Loaves provides online training for bakers of all levels, from professionals to absolute beginners. Volunteers bake in their home kitchens; they don’t need to have commercial equipment or food-handling licenses but for food safety’s sake, Community Loaves regulates the ingredients and the process.

About Community Loaves

Community Loaves is entirely the brainchild of serial entrepreneur and visionary Katherine Kehrli. During the COVID shutdown, Kehrli worried when her students at Seattle Culinary Academy lost their part-time restaurant jobs. As associate dean, she wanted to help them, but in doing so she uncovered a larger need in the community. Community Loaves is the collaborative result.

In April 2020, Kehrli engaged some friends and together they donated 19 loaves of fresh bread to Hopelink in Kirkland. Six months later, some 300 bakers donated 4,000 loaves. Now it’s close to 900 bakers. As food insecurity grows, the Community Loaves organization also grows throughout Washington and now Oregon, Idaho and California.

Behind each loaf of bread is a whole army of volunteers. You can’t imagine how many people it takes to get that loaf or cookie from farm to table.

First, the flour.

Early on, Kehrli established relationships with two mills in Skagit Valley that were producing organic flours from local grains: Cairnspring Mills and Fairhaven Mill.

“Our farmers are contractually prohibited from using glyphosate … and from using neonicotinoid-coated seeds due to their documented harmful effects on humans, pollinators and wildlife…” says Kevin Morse, founder and CEO of Cairnspring. “Our wheat is never blended with commodity wheat or any other wheat we didn’t buy directly from the grower. Our flours are not artificially enriched or treated. We don’t add dough stabilizers or conditioners such as enzymes, ascorbic acid, mononitrate or malted barley. None of our flours are bromated or bleached.”

Morse says the relationship with Community Loaves is a true partnership. “Katherine Kehrli and the hundreds of bakers in the Community Loaves network are an inspiration to me and to all of us at Cairnspring. We’re proud to be a part of the Community Loaves story”

This short video by Kevin Morse will give you confidence in the nutritional quality of Cairnspring’s flour.

Flour is a fundraiser for Community Loaves. A slight markup still makes it less expensive than the specialty stores, and bakers can get their flour directly from Community Loaves once a month.

David Johnston, Paul Tollefson and Bob Witzgall alternate driving the Edmonds Food Bank van to Burlington each month to pick up 1,500-lb. pallets of flour. They deliver the flour to Community Loaves’ central office, where volunteers divide it up for distribution to the hubs.

Below, Chris Fleck picks up 2,000 lbs. of supplies from Kirkland, stops off in Green Lake and then delivers to the Edmonds Waterfront Center, where more volunteers sort the orders.

Then, the bakers.

Renowned food writer and teacher Nancy Leson started the Edmonds hub in the fall of 2020. She still bakes but has passed administrative duties on to Lynne Behrendt, an Edmonds School District educator. Valerie Stein, a retired school librarian, handles flour sales, and retired police officer Lori Tollefson delivers the loaves to the food bank, where, as Bob Witzgall reports, “they fly off the shelves.”

Bakers pick up their orders of flour, yeast, sourdough starter, flour mix for cookies and branded packaging at the Waterfront Center. They buy their own honey, oats, oil and cookie add-ins and pay for all ingredients as a donation.

Everyone uses the same recipes or “formulas” that they get from the website after signing up online. They bake over two weeks, freezing whatever they’ve baked ahead, and they deliver loaves and cookies to the hub leader’s home on the second and fourth Sundays each month. Bakers come by car, on foot, by bicycle and even on a Vespa.

And finally, the food bank and its clients

Community Loaves delivers the loaves to the food bank on a Monday morning, and most of them are out the door in 24 hours.

The Edmonds Food Bank has been an extraordinary partner, lending their van for just the cost of gas, sharing resources, providing dedicated volunteers and distributing the baked goods where they are needed. Many Community Loaves bakers also volunteer there.

Every aspect of Community Loaves is a labor of love, from donating ingredients to volunteering physical labor to the baking itself. As Kehrli says, “bakers already love to bake, and they love to nourish. And Community Loaves is a matchmaker of that heart and passion directly into the emergency food system.”

Want to help? Here’s how.

—Edmonds photos by Chris Walton. Other photos by Katherine Kehrli and Nancy Leson.

–Story by Marty Ronish