Q&A with Shawna Rae’s Bakery & Café owner Shawna Atwater

Listen to this story

Subscriber Benefit

As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now

This audio file is brought to you by

0:00

0:00

Loading audio file, please wait.

Speed
1.00

• 0.25
• 0.50
• 0.75
• 1.00
• 1.25
• 1.50
• 1.75
• 2.00

Shawna Atwater opened her first storefront, Shawna Rae’s Bakery & Cafe in Shipshewana, in 2020 during the pandemic. Forced out of her usual business catering luncheons, weddings and other events, Atwater evolved with the times and was met with immense success.

Baking and cooking with her mom from a tender age, Atwater nursed a dream of someday opening her own establishment. She launched her catering business in 2016 and traveled across Chicago and Indianapolis for work.

Now, Atwater plans to open a new restaurant, The Black Sheep, in the LaGrange County town later this summer.

Atwater spoke with Inside INdiana Business about the new restaurant, receiving the first beer and wine license in Shipshewana, and farming over 100 acres of land with her husband.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What exactly inspired you to start your business?

When I was younger, my mom did wedding cakes and catering, and I helped her out with all of that. So I just grew up in it. Then I worked in food service for a while, and then I decided to give it a go on my own because it was kind of a dream of mine from when I was younger to have a bakery. In fact, when I got my first bakery case, I gave them a hug, because I was so excited to see dreams that I had when I was younger actually come true. I worked really hard so I could save up the money for it because I’ve done all this without taking loans.

Of all the places in Indiana and Chicago, how did you find Shipshewana?

I grew up in Elkhart, which is about 45 minutes from Shipshewana. And my husband was born and raised in LaGrange, which is about 15 minutes from Shipshewana. He had a lot of friends in the area, so we moved out here to farm. We live on 300 acres, so we are as farm-to-table as we can be. A friend of my husband’s found this little building and wanted us to check it out, but I was a bit hesitant because I assumed no one would want my stuff in Shipshewana. But it just exploded.

During COVID, we started doing these fun Friday night family meals. My mom’s from the South, so we always sat down to really big meals and so I thought, well, people can’t go into restaurants, so we’ll do these Friday night meals instead. So we just spread out all these big picnic tables around in the grass and we’d smoke chickens and then have all the fixings that went with it and people could either sit on these picnic tables or take it back home. I probably wouldn’t have even come to Shipshewana had COVID not hit. We have quite a following now, it’s pretty cool.

Tell me about obtaining Shipshewana’s first beer and wine license?

We’re the first restaurant to get an actual liquor license. There had been people that pulled temporary permits for festivals or other events, but we are the first business to acquire a full fledged liquor license. For me, not being from here, I think it’s partly because it is a religious area and partly because folks don’t want things to change. Something new is scary to people, but I’m not really 100% sure why.

But we decided to apply for the license after customers consistently asked for either a burger and a beer or a salad and wine. The closest place is about 20 minutes from here in another town. When we set out to do it, I knew it was going to be a challenge for us. But I knew it would be such a cool addition because there is a need for that with the tourists. They’re accustomed to certain luxuries, so even if they come to a small town that offers something different I feel like they still are looking for the familiar. So this is an attempt to do it in a very tasteful way; it’s going to be a really cool place where people can sit and have a glass of wine or a beer and some really good food.

So what was the process like to get that license? How long did it take?

We had to apply for it from the Indiana Alcoholic Beverages Commission. They do background checks to ensure you don’t have any felonies. Right before us, a liquor store had been denied, so I decided to take a different approach. I actually held a meeting at our town hall and invited the town to ask questions and ease their minds. The meeting happened about a month before we had to go in front of the LaGrange County Alcoholic Beverage Board that would recommend us to the state for the license. The meeting helped us gain a lot of local support, but there were still some people who didn’t want us to get it. But the people on our side outweighed the people that weren’t.

How will The Black Sheep differ from the business you currently run?

Most people are either a baker or a chef, not many people that do both. People are usually surprised at events when they find I’m also the chef and the baker. But because I cooked and baked with my mom while growing up, I have both of those inside of me. The Black Sheep will serve sandwiches, fun foods and drinks. The bakery is more fancy with the cupcakes and the cheese cakes. Both businesses give me the opportunity to creatively let both of those expressions out.

When do you plan to open The Black Sheep?

We are honestly waiting on doors right now, it’s pretty much done. We were hoping for the first of June and now we’re just kind of hoping for the first of July, but it will definitely be summer. It’s just hard to pinpoint a time because we’re waiting on other people to do what they need to do. Everything’s been delayed since we got started. First, it took us almost five months to get the building permit, which was crazy. And then we are still experiencing supply-chain issues from COVID. We’ve had a few speed bumps, but we’re really close to the end, so I’m looking forward to that.

How did you get into the farming side of things?

My husband and I are overachievers. I just baked 60 dozen cupcakes and later this evening, we will bale hay we cut yesterday. We have 110 acres of hay to cut and bale, and we raise the cattle too. We also help my father-in-law on his farm that has been in his family for over 100 years.

What’s the most challenging thing about farming and what do you grow?

It’s the weather for us and probably every other farmer, especially when you do hay. Our 110 acres, knee-high hay has to be mowed, then it has to sit, and then we do something called tedding, where you fluff the hay so it dries quicker. After that we have to rake it into big piles before the baler makes it into a bale. All the different steps take about a day each, depending on how big your field is. At any step of that process if there’s too much humidity or any rain at all, the hay will be ruined. We’ve had to shred 26 acres of hay and we lost probably about $25,000 because it just kept raining and we couldn’t get it up off the ground. So weather is definitely the biggest challenge for us.

We don’t really have any interest in crops because we’re not really big enough for it to be profitable for us, and we actually really enjoy doing hay. So we decided to kind of just put all of our money in one basket and buy better hay equipment because the equipment we had to do all the other different crops was old. We rent our grounds because it has to go through rotations. When it comes back in the rotation for hay, we take it over for about five years until it’s ready to go back into rotation for something else.

So where do you get the produce you use for your salads and sandwiches?

Especially in the summer, we will buy local. We have a local vegetable auction. Most of the meat comes from our farm, the beef especially. We get our pigs from a farmer now. We used to raise pigs but he has a huge farm and is organic, so it’s just easier for us to get those from him. We also patronize a few Amish families that raise vegetables. The only things we struggle with a lot are tomatoes and lettuce, people don’t grow those in this area. We try to find locals but that’s not something we can always do. In the winter time, it’s harder, so we have a couple of suppliers but not any of the big chains. For our bakery, we handpick everything that we get just to make sure it’s good quality.

What’s it been like working with your husband on the business and farm?

So he used to work for a big printing company in Elkhart and had been there for over 20 years. So when he started thinking about it, I didn’t ask him to do it because I didn’t want it to be like, “Oh, I gave up my career to come help you.” But I was at a point where, if I was going to grow any bigger as a company, I had to have another person helping me. I was doing weddings for about 200 people by myself. Before COVID, I drove 42,000 miles, doing seven to nine pharmaceutical luncheons every single week. So my husband was going back and forth thinking about if he wanted to be that person because I was like, “I just need one person that I can trust, that will work hard.”

Plus we’ve farmed together for 14 years, so we already worked together. And we work well together. So he went from running this $6 million press that came in from Germany to working in the food service business, an industry he swore never to work in.  So it’s been really fun.

And what’s the community favorite on the menu?

We do a pulled pork mac and cheese; anytime we have that on the menu we sell out. Our bacon gouda dog mac & cheese is also a really big seller. Pretty much anything we do that’s barbecued sells well. On the dessert side, the key lime is our number one selling cheesecake and the turtle cupcake is probably our number one, but they all sell really well.

What’s so important to you about cooking food from scratch as opposed to buying from big retailers?

For one, I didn’t grow up that way. We went to school with homemade breakfast and had homemade dinners. In fact, when we moved in with my mother-in-law while our house was being built, I cooked meals for the family. After two weeks, she was like, “Shawna, you don’t have to impress us. You don’t have to cook like this.” And I’m like, “This isn’t really anything special; this is just how I grew up.” I’m just not a big fan of all the dyes and food coloring in the processed products. I personally love the experience of cooking. And I feel we’re getting away from that a little bit because we’ve got so much fast food—and there’s nothing wrong with any of those things—but one of my daughter’s friends came over and she had never seen a whole head of lettuce.

So for me I feel like showing how it was back then, when we did things from scratch and used real whole ingredients is important. Everybody can do whatever they want, but for me, I’m gonna peel a potato and then mash it. With us, people are still able to go out to eat but it feels like you’re having it cooked at home. If you were to come into our bakery, every morning we make fresh salads or sandwiches packaged to go. So you can just walk in there and then five minutes be walking out. I actually had a lady thank me. She said, “You know, sometimes I’m in such a hurry, I have to go get fast food and it’s not the greatest. It’s not the healthiest. I love having you here because I can just run in and know that I’m getting a fresh salad or a fresh wrap in the same amount of time.” So that’s what I do it for, I love being able to offer that service and give people healthy options and some of the stuff we do is not healthy, but they are at least made with really good ingredients.

What’s your advice to someone who is trying to break into the food industry?

When you get started there’s a lot of people that have opinions of what you should be doing. And sometimes it’s hard but I feel like just sticking to what you want to do, what your heart is telling you to do would pay off. It takes a minute, so don’t get discouraged because it normally never happens right away. It takes a minute to get settled, so just be patient, follow your heart and just just keep doing what you’d like to do.