LEOMINSTER — The delicious aromas of fresh-baked sourdough bread and coffee greet customers who walk in the door at Bread Boy, a bakery and café that opened in the city this spring.
Customers can sit and enjoy their goodies in the spacious, light-filled eatery located at 1039 Central St. that has green Japanese Smiski figurines hidden around it or take it to go. Online ordering is also available and co-owner Guilherme Salles, who goes by Guigo, said that “the support from the community has been incredible” since he officially launched Bread Boy on May 6.
“It genuinely feels like each week has been better than the last,” the newly minted bakery owner said. “I think the biggest surprise has been the sheer volume of customers and how quickly word has spread. We have people coming in telling us their friends or family told them about Bread Boy, or that they’ve been seeing us all over social media. We sell out of things regularly and seeing that many people genuinely enjoying the food we make and the service we give them is a really amazing feeling.”
Salles, 30, has lived in Leominster basically his entire life except for a couple of years when he was very young and lived with his family in Brazil. He went to Leominster High School, where he graduated from as part of the Center for Technical Education Innovation, and after trying college for about a year he “realized pretty quickly it wasn’t for me.
“After that I started traveling more around the world and eventually became a flight attendant with American Airlines, which I still do today,” Salles shared. “Through flying I’ve lived in Dallas, Washington, D.C., Charlotte, and Miami, but Leominster has always been home.”
He lives with his parents, who are also small business owners in the city. His dad owns Roasted Peppers in downtown Leominster, and his mom runs a house cleaning business, facts that made Salles realize that “owning a business runs in the family.”
He has been baking since sixth grade and his dream back then was to become a famous cake decorator.
“I decorated cakes for years but eventually I started getting into bread and completely fell in love with it,” Salles disclosed. “There’s something beautiful about the simplicity of bread and how far back the tradition goes, especially with sourdough. Flour, water and salt can become something completely different depending on the person making it and I ended up loving that much more than cake decorating.”
His first bakery job was during his freshman year of high school at a bakery owned by one of his mom’s friends.
“I would get up early Saturday and Sunday mornings and work for $10 a day,” Salles recalled. “I only did it for a couple of months, but looking back now, it’s funny that this has basically been following me my entire life.”
During COVID he worked for a few months at Nashoba Brook Bakery in Concord, where he culled useful knowledge about sourdough and bread production and all of this experience set him on the path to Bread Boy. He said the name for his own bakery comes from some of his flight attendant coworkers having trouble pronouncing his name.
“I was constantly bringing breads and pastries that I made with me on trips and eventually they just started referring to me as the bread boy, so when it came time to name the bakery, it felt perfect,” Salles said. “It’s an homage to that little sixth-grade version of me who wanted a bakery someday but also to this completely different part of my life that somehow brought me back to baking.”
He went on to say that while owning a bakery one day was always his goal — “even when I had other dreams and went in completely different directions in life, somehow I always came back to it” — he admitted had some self-doubt as whether he was actually ready to do it.
“When I found out Central Cup was closing and there was an opportunity to purchase the equipment and take over the lease, I sat down with myself and my partner and really thought everything through,” he shared. “Suddenly it made sense and we decided to take the chance. It has worked out better than I could have imagined.”
Salles said it’s hard to calculate exactly how many hours a week he is present at Bread Boy.
“I’m there most of the time, including plenty of hours when it looks like we’re closed,” he said. “There’s always recipe testing, improving something we already make, coming up with ideas for our weekly flavors, ordering, prepping or solving whatever problem decided to appear that day.”
On top of all that, Salles still spends around 40 hours a month in the air as a flight attendant, and those are just the hours when the aircraft door is closed and doesn’t include time spent in between flights or delays. Fortunately, he has great staff in place at Bread Boy that includes eight employees on top of him and his partner “who handles a lot of the logistics, bill paying and behind-the-scenes parts of the business.”
He relayed that when he’s at the bakery himself, he doesn’t really have one station that he sticks to.
“I’m usually floating between the front of house, back of house, baking, helping wherever someone needs me, or realizing we’re out of something and running to the grocery store,” he said.
He emphasized that he couldn’t do any of it without his hardworking, dedicated team — Angela, Deandra, Jackie, Madi, Morgan, Neddie, Sophia, Zanaiya , “and of course Teddy.”
“They are the reason this place runs. They work an incredible number of hours, show up every day with so much care and somehow put up with me constantly moving the kitchen around and changing things,” Salles quipped. “I truly couldn’t do this without them and I’m beyond grateful they’ve stuck through all of this with me.”
When asked what he likes most about owning his own business is, he was very clear.
“One of my favorite parts is actually watching our team work together,” he said. “Everyone can be doing something completely different but somehow it all comes together into one big project. I always think of it almost like an orchestra. Everyone is playing a different instrument or a different note, but when everyone is working together, it creates this beautiful final product. Getting to build that kind of team and environment has probably been one of the most rewarding parts for me.”
The biggest challenge for Salles when it comes to Bread Boy? Things fellow small business owners can relate to, “the hours and simply figuring everything out as I go.”
“Before Bread Boy I had never even been a supervisor or manager, let alone owned a business. I basically jumped straight into the deep end,” he disclosed. “And then add being a flight attendant on top of owning a bakery and café and it can definitely get intense. There’s always something to learn and always something that needs your attention, but when I see what we’re building, it’s worth it.”
He gave a special shoutout to Gertie, “a 215-year-old sourdough starter, our all-star employee,” and said that while opening day for Bread Boy “came up on me incredibly quickly because the entire process happened so fast, I’m glad we did it when we did.”
Salles said Bread Boy is unique in the sense that “it comes down to how much love and thought goes into everything we do.”
“We make things from scratch and by hand and I’m constantly thinking about how we can make something better. Even something as simple as lemonade gets that treatment here,” he said of another of their best sellers. “Our lemonade actually takes us two days to make. We zest the lemons, massage the zest with sugar to extract all of the oils, let that sit overnight to fully infuse, and then the next day combine it with fresh lemon juice and water. It sounds a little excessive for lemonade, but that’s kind of the point. If we’re going to make lemonade, we want it to be the best lemonade you’ve ever had.”
Some of their most popular items are of course their classic sourdough bread and the jalapeño cheddar version has also been a big hit along with sourdough focaccia and other offerings.
“One of the funniest examples is our lemon blueberry muffin,” Salles said. “It was originally supposed to exist for one week during Lemon Week, but when we took it off the menu afterward people basically freaked out. Needless to say, the lemon blueberry muffin came back and now it’s one of the things we’re known for along with our sourdough.”
Customers also love their Chunky Monkey açaí bowl and overnight oats. Salles reported that folks really get into their rotating weekly flavor of overnight oats and that “surprisingly, the homemade lemonade has developed a following of its own which makes me feel a little better about spending two days making lemonade.”
Salles said he thinks what makes Bread Boy special is that it “goes beyond the food.”
“We have some of the hardest-working and most caring employees I could ask for. They treat the products and the bakery almost like it’s their own, and they genuinely care about the people who walk through the door,” he once again praised his staff. “We try to learn our regulars’ names, remember their orders and even remember little things they’ve told us about their lives. I want coming to Bread Boy to feel personal. You’re not just customer number 47 getting a latte.”
And when it comes to his level of appreciation for their customers and the community in general supporting his business endeavor, Salles said, “the support means everything, especially because I grew up here.”
“Leominster isn’t just the city where I happened to open a business. It’s my hometown. I went to school here, my parents own businesses here, and now I get to build something of my own here.
“Seeing people come back week after week, bring their friends and families, share our posts, recommend us to other people and get excited about what we’re making is an incredible feeling,” he continued. “Small businesses really do depend on their communities. Every coffee, loaf of sourdough, muffin or açaí bowl someone buys allows us to keep doing this, employ people from our community, and continue building Bread Boy into something bigger.”
Salles is keeping the future plans and goals for Bread Boy under wraps for now but shared that “there are definitely plans.”
“Bread Boy has grown much faster than I anticipated,” he said. “Right now, I’m really focused on making sure we grow in a way that doesn’t lose what people love about us in the first place. I have a lot of ideas for where Bread Boy could go next and some of them are probably bigger than people would expect this early on, but I think I’ll keep those a little mysterious for now. Let’s just say this little Bread Boy still has some growing to do.”
His final thoughts focus on what the business means to him as well as all the people who work there and come through their doors.
“I think the biggest thing I’d want people to know is that Bread Boy is still growing up right in front of everyone,” Salles said. “We haven’t been doing this for years and we’re learning every day, changing things, improving recipes, figuring out what works, and occasionally making something for one random flavor week that our customers then refuse to let us discontinue.
“There’s something really special about getting to build this in the same city where I was a sixth grader dreaming about owning a bakery someday. I’ve gotten to travel around the world and have a career that literally takes me around the world but somehow the dream kept bringing me right back home to Leominster. Now I get to make bread here. And I think sixth grade me would think that’s pretty cool.”
For more information call 978-751-8503, visit breadboybakery.com, and Follow Bread Boy on Facebook and Instagram.
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