Image: Trevor Nichols
Dan and Mike Bronswyk draw on 166 years of family tradition at The Bread Co.
It’s somewhat of a tradition among tradespeople for children to take up the (sometimes literal) tools of their parents and continue the family trade.
Kids of carpenters, farmers, butchers and bakers often follow in their parents’ footsteps, but when it comes to “the family business,” the Bronswyk brothers have just about everybody beat.
Dan and Mike run The Bread Co. in Kelowna. They are known for their hand-made, artisan breads, and the sandwiches they serve on them out of their Bernard Avenue bakery.
The brothers have run the business for close to 11 years, but their family’s history as dough punchers spans continents, and stretches back centuries.
It began with their great, great grandfather, who in 1851 started the original Bronswijk bakery with his brother and wife, in the village of Poeldijk in Holland.
Generations of Bronswijk bakers spread across the country from there, until two generations later W.A.F Bronswijk established his bakery in Apeldoorn, putting his six sons to work there.
“Those were all my uncles, and we would go visit when we were young, and go to those different shops,” Mike recalls.
Image: Contributed
Eventually the sons branched out to start their own bakeries. Many stayed in the Netherlands, but a pair of them (including Dan and Mike’s father, Henk Bronswijk, who changed his name upon arrival) came instead to Canada.
Dan and Mike, like just about everyone in their field, will tell you that almost every baker has thought about leaving behind the grueling early-mornings of the profession for something else.
Henk wasn’t that different.
When he arrived in Canada he worked first as a farmer in Manitoba, then as a lumberjack on Vancouver Island.
But his yearn for yeast eventually lead him back to his family trade, and in the 60s he opened his first bakery, The Dutch Maid, in Castlegar.
It was there that Mike and Dan were born, and throughout their teenage years the pair cut their teeth in the flour-filled rooms of the family business, which by then was a bakery in Red Deer.
“As a family bakery in the 60s and 70s we had to contribute,” Mike recalls. “In the summertime I would either be packing crusty buns in bags, or I would be flipping doughnuts in the fryer.”
Both Mike and Dan are now trained in the field, but in 1986, like so many before them, they decided they were finished.
Image: Contributed
“Mike and I both said ‘OK, I’m done with baking. I’m done. I’m over it,’” Dan recalls. He jetted off to Australia for a while, but when he returned he needed a job.
“So guess where I ended up?” he says with a chuckle.
He and Dan ended up running the Chalet Bakery in Revelstoke, which they kept going for 16 years, until deciding once again in 2004 they were finished with the profession.
Of course, a short time later they had opened up The Bread Co. in Kelowna.
But this time something was different.
For years the convenience of pre-packaged, pre-baked goods had been chipping business away from old-school bakers, who woke up at ungodly hours to knuckle their dough by hand.
“The writing was on the wall for the old-style of bakeries, because of the Safeways and all the in-house baking in the grocery stores. That old style of baking had run its course, so we had to find another avenue to start in,” Mike explained.
Image: Trevor Nichols
But instead of going with the quick-and-convenient trend, when the brothers opened The Bread Co. they were inspired to double down on the “old fashioned” methods their great, great grandfather used, and go totally artisan.
“It ignited a new passion in us, doing artisan breads, it was something to be excited about,” Dan says. “We don’t want to be the hot dog bun maker. We don’t want to be the white bread guy. We like what we’re doing. It’s like creating art every day.”
Today, the Bread Co.’s breads are made using the natural yeast in the air, for the most part without additional sugars or oils (Dan says they have been nursing the same sourdough starter for more than a decade now).
The breads are baked without pans, warmed from the inside out while sitting directly on the deck of the oven.
They’ve modernized a bit, with a large chunk of their business coming from what is essentially their restaurant on Bernard Avenue, but all of their products are still made “the way they would have been done when Christ was walking the Earth.”
With more than 160 years of family experience to draw from, it seems unlikely the Bronswyks would end up taking any other approach than the the old-school one.
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