The Rose family, or Team Rose Bread. Photo courtesy

Doug and Kait Rose had a good cry one day during the summer of 2020, on their wedding anniversary, under their carport. How could they piece together the life they wanted to live? Doug had a leather goods business that wasn’t growing the way they needed it to, and the couple wanted to maintain a creative freedom and lifestyle that nine-to-fiving and conventional schooling do not always permit.

They will celebrate a different sort of anniversary this month, under that same carport, which now happens to be a bread shop: one year since Team Rose Bread first introduced itself to the Charlotte market. 

“We didn’t set out with a dream to be bakers,” Doug Rose says. “We just had a very strong vision for ourselves of who we wanted to be in terms of the time we spend together. We wanted to figure out a way to provide for our family and align our vocation with that value.” 

Team Rose Bread offers a selection of rustic loaves, as well as some more unique offerings. Photo courtesy

The answer came in the form of bread baking, now a thriving cottage food business for the family of six. Brand awareness happened fast. “To this day, we haven’t spent any money on advertising,” says Doug, who manages Team Rose Bread’s social media. “When we first launched, we didn’t even have a website. 100 percent of our business was word-of-mouth. Until this January, every one of our orders came over text or direct message. Payment was manual and Venmo. There are a lot of hours having a site has saved us.” 

With such a rapid launch, the learning curve has taken on its own rise. “We’ve gone from preparing 1 to sometimes 150 loaves in a day. We’ve had to figure out how to completely scale bread. We’re folding 50 pounds of dough now instead of 2 loaves,” says Kait, who tinkered with sourdough years before Covid-19 made it cool. She and a friend started experimenting with breadmaking in 2017. Doug grew up smelling yeasty deliciousness from the bakery below his family’s Manhattan apartment. 

While not classically trained, he has acquired significant skill through trial and error. Doug sees that as one of the benefits of being a small shop without all the hype. “I feel free to take risks and make mistakes.” Mentors like Peter Reinhart of Johnson & Wales and Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills have also been instrumental to developing their approach and process. 

Their kids are dough-hooked too. When Kait is not homeschooling their four children (ranging in age from 4 to 11), the couple’s two sons and two daughters play hard for Team Rose. Doug and Kait welcome them to help when and how they like, but they truly are helpful when they do. “We’re not asking them to get in there with their hands and fold dough. They’re little, and it’s hard. We’re going fast. They’re helping more with stamping the bags, making boxes, and interacting with customers,” Kait says. Doug recalls a recent Saturday when their seven-year-old daughter was helping an older woman with her order, who then recounted for her how she too, as a child, grew up working in her father’s Italian bakery. “It was an invaluable experience.” 

Team Rose Bread may know how to hustle, but they also know how to slow down for special moments like those. In fact, it’s the unexpected customer interactions Kait and Doug have come to value most. There are two men, friends for more than fifty years — one from Germany, one from South Africa — who are once-a-week regulars they look forward to seeing each Friday. 

Work and rest ebb and flow in the Rose household since they bake, school, and live all in the same space. Their den is adjacent to industrial ovens and refrigeration, shelves of bannetons and dough-rising buckets, and a substantial marble island, so it’s easy for those lines to blur. They’ve had to set boundaries to take breaks, much like their dough needs time to do its thing. “It’s definitely important in our rhythms to not be here. To get away to the mountains, the beach. To completely turn off. It’s been crucial to have that time. We don’t have a normal weekend where Friday night it turns off and we start back up Monday morning,” Kait says. 

This is also one of the reasons the couple has committed to having a stall at the Matthews Community Farmers’ Market only every other week. While the couple would love to be there every week and is open to growth, “It’s not sustainable,” Doug says. “The impetus that started this was to create a culture with our family around time together. Doing that right now would sort of fly in the face of why we started.”

Customers often wonder what’s next for Team Rose Bread. Will they continue to bake from home or open an off-site bakery? While they are not quite ready to make such a commitment to expand, they are taking small steps by hiring an additional Team Rose Bread member because the physicality of it all can be overwhelming. Doug, a college athlete, never sustained injuries in his sport but has developed tendonitis twice as a baker. Still, it’s evident he enjoys his work. His excitement is contagious as he describes the miracles wild yeast can perform to create an unleavened, flavor-packed, gut-friendly bread versus what most consumers are familiar with: a mono-cropped, dwarfed, and mass produced commercial yeast product. 

Visitors shopping on the site will not find gimmicky or wild flavors, but they will find traditional ones like their signature Cinny Swirl, baguettes, and rye — as well as a few interesting varieties like a pimiento cheese pullman, monkey bread brioche, or rice challah. Doug’s eyes widen and his voice intensifies as he describes how their Anson Mills rice challah riffs on a rice pudding technique and is inspired by the history of antebellum Jews living in Charleston. As he explains, part of that foodways tradition involved using plentiful plantation rice as a base for challah loaves. They both laugh when Doug acknowledges, “Our kind of ‘wild’ is a little more nerdy.” 

The energy from Team Rose is also palpable whenever the Shopify notification dings. “We’ll be riding in the car and hear it, and the kids will shout, ‘Order!’,” Kait laughs. 

“I still tell Kait, ‘I can’t believe people are buying bread from us this week,’” Doug says. “The novelty hasn’t worn off for us.”

Order loaves online for pick up between 1 and 4 p.m. on Tuesdays and Fridays. Team Rose Bread offers limited local delivery and pickup or purchase at the Matthews Community Farmers’ Market twice a month. Watch for their quarterly sourdough doughnut and cinnamon roll pop-ups, too.