Boston, MA | Bakery, Cafe & Commissary | Dinner & Provisions Club Subscription

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Key Results

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• Dedicated R&D time for the culinary team
• New commissary revenue that flows down to strengthen the entire ecosystem
• A flexible partner, with Table22 accommodating menu changes even close to launch

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A commissary with plenty left to give

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Joanne Chang opened the first Flour Bakery + Cafe in Boston's South End in 2000, baking sticky buns and shaping loaves long before sunrise. Twenty-plus years and a James Beard Award later, Flour has grown into a beloved multi-location bakery and cafe across Boston and Cambridge, all fed by a central commissary that handles the production the individual shops can't do alone.

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Peter Doire, Flour's Culinary Director, oversees the kitchen behind the kitchens. The commissary bakes off dough, builds cakes, and preps the components that keep every cafe running, but it also has capacity and talent that a menu of pastries, sandwiches, and soups doesn't fully utilize. That extra bandwidth became the opening for something new.

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More than pastries and sandwiches

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Peter and his team wanted to do more than a cafe menu usually calls for, both for guests and for their own chefs. "It's fun to develop dinner menu items when we're a cafe chain," Peter says. "And also to just try to reach another audience, to show them what we can do. We can do a lot more than just make pastries and sandwiches."

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That was the opening Flour saw in a supper club: a chance to put dinner-service creativity in front of guests who only knew Flour as a lunch stop or a coffee run, and to give the culinary team a broader canvas.

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Building the Dinner & Provisions Club

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Working with Table22, Flour launched the Flour Dinner & Provisions Club, a monthly membership that delivers a full, multi-course meal. Members can choose an option for two or for four, and can add a rotating seasonal pizza, a coffee and beverage bundle, or one of Flour's multigrain home loaves. Each month's menu is a mix of savory, sweet, and unmistakably Flour, built around what the team is excited about at that moment.

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The club runs out of the commissary rather than any single cafe, which turned out to be one of its biggest structural advantages. “That provides a revenue stream for the commissary instead of directly to the bakeries,” Peter explains. “And that in turn flows down to the financial impact of the bakeries. If we can produce more affordable products for the bakeries through the commissary, it's better for everybody."

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The club also became the proving ground for one of Flour's most talked-about new items. "Particularly at Flour right now, I'm really excited about our Sicilian pizza program," Peter says. Most pizza in Boston runs thin; Flour's take is a thick-style Sicilian square that debuted as a winter pop-up and returned again over the summer. Developing it gave the team dedicated time to work on fermentation and flavor, time that came directly from the space the club created. That pizza now shows up as a standing add-on in the club and, according to Peter, has raised the quality of Flour's pizza program overall.

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"[The club] gives us a little bit more time for developing flavor profiles with fermentation. It's been great. And we serve that pizza in Table22 all the time."

— Peter Doire, Culinary Director, Flour Bakery + Cafe

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Feedback & flexibility

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Guest response has been consistently strong, reflected in the club's 4.8-star rating. But it's the unsolicited notes that stuck with Peter most. One member, a parent juggling dinner on a busy night, wrote in to say the box had made her a "super mom," that it was the best food her family had eaten, and that her kids thought she was amazing. That put a smile on Peter’s face.

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On the partnership side, Peter points to responsiveness as the difference-maker. "The connection with Table22 and everybody we've dealt with is fantastic," he says. "They're really easy to work with, really flexible. If we want to make a change in the middle of the month, or close to when we're developing that month's program, they're open and flexible to do that."

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"The connection with Table22 and everybody that we've dealt with there are fantastic. They're really easy to work with, really flexible."

— Peter Doire, Culinary Director, Flour Bakery + Cafe

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Peter's advice to another operator considering a club is simple: go for it, keep it simple, and put the effort into taste and packaging rather than overcomplicating the format. 

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What started as a way to stretch the culinary team's creativity has become a steady piece of Flour's business, one that keeps commissary ovens working, bakery economics healthier, and Boston's favorite bakery showing up on dinner tables across the city.

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Our platform, your possibilities. Welcome to the club.

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