About the Project

The Benevolent Bread Project in a nutshell

A Breadcrumb trail is a chain of baked goods. I've been baking bread and giving it to friends, family, neighbors, etc. After a baked good gets delivered, I encourage the recipient to make a baked good and give it to someone. Afterwards, I ask them to send an update over to [email protected] so that breadcrumb trail can be updated.

My hope is that we can keep each breadcrumb trail going and that each trail will have a timeline showing it's rich history. If you'd like to start a new breadcrumb trail, send an email to the address above and I'll send the information over to get it all set up.

Brief History of the Project

It all started sometime around 2022-ish, even though I didn't have a specific plan or mission in mind. I just made bread and gave loaves to friends and family since it made them happy, and it made me happy too. I did however, have an idea that started with a question. How far can one loaf of bread go? I don’t mean in a pragmatic way, like, a basic loaf can make around 8 sandwiches. I mean, what if I give a loaf of bread to somebody, then they in turn make another loaf (or cookies, or rolls, or even store bought pastry, or anything really) and give it away to someone else, and so on and so on in a (hopefully) never ending chain.

You see this happen from time to time around the holidays. For example, in our neighborhood around halloween, our house usually gets “boo’d”. That’s where someone secretly brings a treat to our house along with a paper encouraging us to then make a treat to share with a few other houses in the neighborhood.

We love stuff like that. We get the whole family involved. Our son loves helping us gather the treats, package everything up and do a quick drop off. You also see this happen a lot around Christmas time. Home baked goods and candies delivered to friends, neighbors and loved ones.

I believe there’s a power in giving, both in our time and efforts, so I want to see how far we can push this envelope. What if I were to create a system that could keep track of these "chains" in the form of a simple website to showcase just enough information to make it interesting, but still keep personal information out of the mix. Going along with the bread theme, I'll call each chain a breadcrumb trail. Every time that I make a loaf a bread and bring it to someone, I'll include instructions on how they can continue the breadcrumb trail and how to send the info back to the project so we can document it and add to that specific bread's trail. Oh, I'll throw some recipes on the site as well.

The Benevolent Bread Project has four main goals

1. Have a platform I can use to document my baking (I'm still trying to get better with each loaf)
2. Encourage others to get in on the joy of baking, and share that joy with friends, neighbors, and loved ones
3. Keep the website ad-free
4. Give out at least two loaves away per week