Home Baked
Henry Clay freshman starts his own bread business
By Kristina Rosen
Baking homemade bread was once a popular pandemic pastime, yet no one seemed to be as successful in turning this trend into an enterprise quite like Clint Corkran. The 14-year-old, Henry Clay freshman launched his own made-from-scratch bread business, Clint’s Home Baked Bread.
“A friend made a passing remark about selling the bread because it was so good,” he says. “It turns out she wasn’t serious, but I took her seriously. And now I’m selling a ton of bread.”
Inspired by a recipe given to him, Corkran tweaked the white-flour artisan bread, received his home-based processing license, and began his own business. It took about a month to receive his license, which gives him the permission to bake and sell bread from his home.
Juggling the new normal of online school while baking two loaves of bread a day, he admits online school has been helpful for integrating his business and baking schedule with his education.
The application process was seriously specific. He explains, “It asked for the address of my house, and if I knew the exact GPS coordinates? As if suddenly it turns out my bread is making tons of people sick and they called in the SWAT team or something? And they need to know the exact coordinates to drop an attack helicopter? I don’t know, that seemed funny to me.”
When tweaking the recipe, Corkran did a trial run with six neighbors. He delivered bread with handwritten notes saying, “Hey, I’m going to experiment with a business. Would you like to get a free loaf of bread? All you have to do is fill out this survey.” With five responses in return, two of those people ended up being his first two customers who now want a weekly subscription.
Corkran plans to develop a subscription system where customers can choose to receive a loaf of bread on specific days each week, biweekly, or once a month, depending on their preference.
He offers one type of bread, which is baked in the evenings and delivered shortly after. “About 15 minutes after the bread is done, it’s on someone’s porch. I like to have it delivered fresh and warm.”
Orders can be placed through email and paid through PayPal, with delivery available to areas in close proximity to the Kenwick / Henry Clay neighborhood of Lexington.
“All the craziness going on —and all this stuff I can’t control — it’s nice to have something that is just that simple,” he says. “Like a warm loaf of bread.”
He adds, “Just to be able to sit down every day and put a loaf of bread in the oven, having something I can control and knowing whoever it is going to is going to enjoy it too.”
Although he’s always loved to be in control and create, he claims not to be artistic. He just turned his creativity toward organizing and setting up systems, into making a business.
____
This article also appears on page BLANK of the October 2020 print edition of Hamburg Journal.
For more Lexington, KY, Hamburg area news, subscribe to the Hamburg Journal digital newsletter.
To advertise in Hamburg Journal, call 859.268.0945
