Brian Noyes chased a dream to start his own rural bakery, and the Great Recession nearly robbed him of everything. With hard work and an economy on the rebound, business bounced back. His staff grew ten times over. Most importantly: I can confirm that the Red Truck Bakery makes some darn good pie.
—Barack Obama, and my shirt now in his presidential library
On a sleepy rural road with many businesses shuttered, a bakery arrived and revived a village
The back story: While the art director of the Washington Post, Smithsonian, and Preservation magazines during the week, I baked pies and breads on weekends in my Virginia Piedmont farmhouse and sold them out of an old red truck that I bought from designer Tommy Hilfiger. When a New York Times story sent 57,000 people to my fledgling bakery website after just two dozen hits the day before, I left publishing to launch the Red Truck Bakery in an old gas station in Warrenton, Virginia. A few years later, after surviving the Great Recession, I opened a second location and headquarters in an old pharmacy and Masonic lodge on a Marshall, Virginia, Main Street down on its luck. The bakery helped spark a food renaissance that revived the village, received accolades from Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, and many national publications, and ships thousands of items nationwide each year.
