Syracuse’s student bakes a business from scratch

Entrepreneurship has always been a highly-valued quality in Audrey Adam’s family. Her father founded and manages his own company, and her parents encouraged Adam and her three sisters from a young age to pursue their own business ventures. While she and her sisters were still in high school, they were already running their own bikini and jewelry-making business.

“My friends joke that I have a different business every week,” Adam said. “I feel like I’m always doing something to make some money on the side.”

When she returned to Syracuse University for the fall semester of her senior year, Adam established a new business, Bread by Aud. She had learned to bake bread working at a bakery while studying abroad in Strasbourg, France, and she further honed that skill to relieve her boredom while stuck at home during the initial weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the fall semester approached, Adam realized that she could take her interest in baking and sell fresh, homemade bread to her peers when she moved back to SU, she said.

Adam operated Bread by Aud out of her apartment over the course of the fall semester, managing every aspect of the business almost entirely on her own, from preparing the bread to baking it, to packaging and delivering it to customers, she said. She developed her own recipes from modifying existing recipes, and experimenting with different flavors, including olive bread and chocolate chip walnut bread.

Bread by Aud largely functions through the business’s Instagram account, where potential customers can view photos of the bread Adam has made and place orders by sending direct messages to the account. The account expanded much more rapidly than Adam had anticipated when she first began the business, and after only about a month of accepting orders, her calendar for orders was already filled and she had customers on a weekslong waiting list.

“People just ordered the bread, posted pictures of it, talked about it with their friends — that’s how it took off,” Adam said. “I didn’t think that many people would want it. I figured it was just going to be my friends and people that I know, like friends of friends.”

Adam has fulfilled dozens of customers’ orders since starting Bread by Aud, and the business’s Instagram account has over 300 followers. To continue building on the success of her start-up, she plans to bring the business to her hometown of Andover, Massachusetts during winter break and hopes to continue to run Bread by Aud during her final semester at SU.

“When you start something, you never know if it’s going to take off,” Adam said. “But … if you have people to support you … and then spread the word, it’ll work out, usually.”