Meet baker and local market owner Aura

Recently we sat down with Aura, the owner of Aura-la’s Pastries + Provisions shop in Waterloo region. Aura spoke about how her own online market works, how they strive to stay completely local, and how the OFN platform has helped her business adapt through the pandemic and beyond.

Can you tell us a little bit about your business?

We’re a community-focused bakery called Aura-la Pastries + Provisions, based in the Central Frederick neighborhood of Kitchener. We’ve been in business for over four years. We did a rebrand last year because what we found during the pandemic is that we became more than a bakery. We also became a neighborhood convenience store for provisions, and so we were very intentional of the type of provisions that we bring in, so highly curated. We found during the pandemic, that’s when we were using OFN the most, because we didn’t have anybody coming in the store. So it really gave us the ability to test new products, and expand beyond just bakery goods.

How does Aura-la contribute to the local food and flower movement?

All of the ingredients we’re sourcing for our baked goods are locally sourced. We’re very fortunate that we live in Waterloo region, and so we have access to an egg person who drops off the eggs, the milk producer drops off the milk for us. 

We’re really fortunate we’re able to use high quality products in our baked goods that are sourced and produced locally. We obviously use ingredients, so we’ll go to the farmers market for inspiration that way.

With the provision side of things that’s where we are supporting the community, and bringing in products from small producers that maybe haven’t been highlighted or people don’t know about. We have also become quite a destination for people visiting from outside the city, so when they come here they’re sort of like ‘oh wow, you got all these things locally’ so they’re able to get a taste of the Waterloo region by being in our shop.

How does your online OFN market work? 

So the reason that we went with OFN and not other third party options, was because we found that other options are all consumer focused. What we really liked about OFN was that it’s producer focused. The way that it’s built is like, ‘This is what I have for sale. Would you like to buy it?’ With baked goods, that’s how we have to sell. That was a big attraction to OFN for us because we got to decide what we had to offer, the days we were going to offer it and then put it up on the site. When I looked at other sites, there were all these work-arounds, which was so much work, whereas OFN was more supporting the producer.

 I used to work at Bailey’s Local Foods, and so I was familiar with OFN. When we first started using it, the pandemic had hit and it was really easy for me to navigate because I worked at Bailey’s, which is an online farmers’ market. I had the familiarity, so it was really easy for us to adapt here at our bakery. Another thing that’s really great is because of my relationship with Bailey’s we’ve been able to share inventory: sometimes she adds somebody to her hub and then I can access it as well. So that’s been really great in terms of cutting back our admin time.

How has OFN helped your business?

We really used it hard during COVID. Now people really aren’t pre-ordering. So we switched from really relying on it so much to now… being an addition to our business… We find as soon as we hit a holiday, that’s when we see a really big uptake, so having it ready to go and just being able to add or change things, has been very useful for us.