The Blank Page Cafe at Bread & Butter Farm in Shelburne has been around for almost a decade. The cafe serves up breakfast tacos every Friday morning, along with gluten-free treats, coffee, drinks and to-go meals.
Jackie Spinnell of the University of Vermont Community News Service recently spent time there with owner Mike Proia.
This story was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript below.
Mike Proia: My name’s Mike. I own and operate Blank Page Cafe, which is a small coffee shop, gluten-free bakery and catering kitchen that’s located within the farm store at Bread & Butter Farm here in Shelburne, Vermont. And our primary mission is to really connect our community of eaters with our community of producers.
I moved to Vermont in 2013. And previous to that, I was charting a much different path in life. I was a finance major in college and pursued a career in investment management for the better part of a decade before deciding that I wanted to dedicate my working life to something that was going to be in service of a bigger, broader good.
Operating a small business is like riding a roller coaster. There are times where you’re hanging on for dear life, and times when you have to just close your eyes, smile and throw your hands up in the air.Mike Proia
I came to understand that a lot of the big, conventional agro-industrial companies that really are the main drivers to our food system exist in a way that is extractive and degrading for not just the soil and ecosystems where that food is produced, but also the communities and humans that are a part of those communities, both hyper-locally and abroad.
So my goal from the beginning was to shorten the supply chain as much as possible. So if I could both produce the food myself, and then sell that food direct to the consumer through a cafe, I thought that would be an unbelievable way to vertically integrate both food production and food consumption.
I think I was a bit naive in realizing how much work that would actually be at the time. So yeah, owning and operating a small business is kind of like riding a roller coaster. There are times where you’re hanging on for dear life and white-knuckling your way through certain periods of the ride. And then there are times when you have to totally just close your eyes, smile and throw your hands up in the air.
And I think being able to connect on a human and intimate level with our community of customers has been an amazing benefit to owning and operating this business. And so it’s not it’s not easy, but it is a lot of fun. And that’s the space that I like to approach my day-to-day from.
This story comes from a collaboration between Vermont Public and the Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship. Production support by Kelsey Tolchin-Kupferer.
