Growing
vegan impact
Meet our Operations Manager Jeremy
When you think of Brammibal’s, you likely think of the tasty donuts and drinks. However, Brammibal’s is now far more than that. While originally we started selling our handmade donuts at a stand at a weekly market, in the past few years, we’ve scaled up and opened several stores.
2022 was an incredibly special year for us because we also opened stores in a second city: Hamburg! In our Impact report you can read about how we grow this company, what’s important for us, and which environmental metrics really matter!
We spoke to our operations manager Jeremy for more insights on how to grow a vegan business:
Jeremy, can you tell us more about the recent expansions?
When I joined Brammibal’s in 2018, we only had two locations. In Berlin, it’s six locations now. In 2022, our main focus was to get up and running in Hamburg.
I’d say we now know what it takes to open a café, but opening a bakery in another city was a whole new challenge. On one hand, it was a dream because we could optimize the new bakery to fit our workflows and make it more sustainable and much safer for our employees. On the other hand, we had to plan our processes in much greater detail because starting in a new city also means building a whole new team.
What has been especially challenging expanding to a new city?
I’d say transplanting our Brammibal’s culture to a new city. We want people to communicate and treat each other a certain way. We don’t want our managers to be hierarchical, and they have to be open to constructive feedback and criticism. At Brammibal’s, we’re very focused on feedback and have regular check-ins. What’s especially nice is that a lot of our employees in Hamburg (but obviously also Berlin) are from the alternative, vegan community.
How do you manage the risks that come with expansion?
I guess Hamburg for us was an obvious choice for where to expand outside of Berlin. Most of our customers from outside of Berlin are either from London or Hamburg, and we just had a lot of followers from Hamburg on Instagram even before opening there. And then, Hamburg is very close. If something bad happens, I can just hop on the train and be there in two hours, so it’s definitely a good first place for us. We’ve learned to document everything in great detail. We now have documentation of what it means to work a certain role at Brammibal’s, what responsibilities one has
in that role, how the day looks, etc. Having all of these guides has been a really big help and lowers the risk because you just have everything documented.
Learn more in our impact & sustainability report👇
