Where We Came From, Where We’re Going
Messenger Cafe + Ibis Bakery at 1624 Grand Blvd in Kansas City’s Crossroads district.
When you walk into Messenger Cafe + Ibis Bakery in the Kansas City, MO’s Crossroads district, you experience the vision founding partners had from day one of building their coffee-roasting business. Seated in the heart of the Great Plains and Midwest, it looks unlike anything you’ll find nearby: three stories of high ceilings, open-concept coffee roasting and bakery floors, and verdant plants.
Chris and Kate Matsch at Messenger Cafe + Ibis Bakery.
What the founders didn’t necessarily foresee in the manifestation of their dream is that Ibis became a brand in its own right—far beyond the rather straightforward bread provisions that founding partner Chris Matsch felt would complement coffee.
“The intent was that we would have an ethical coffee company,” Chris says. “We would have bread as part of the coffee experience because bread and coffee go well together. At that point, I don’t think we knew how big the bakery piece was going to get.”
Selling Gluten in the Gluten-Free Wave
People in the Kansas City area first saw Ibis at the Overland Park Farmers Market in the summer of 2013. Newly married Chris and Kate Matsch applied to sell at the market assuming they wouldn’t actually be accepted.
“We had no mixers and no walk-in cooler,” Chris says. “We just had a table and bins and one standalone refrigerator. We were rising our bread against the metal fridge because that was the coldest place, and we just hoped it wouldn’t overproof overnight.”
Around the same time, Chris’ parents, Ron and Carole Matsch, purchased Black Dog Coffeehouse in Lenexa, KS. In addition to the market, Kate developed a toast program and began the work of explaining to the community what sets Ibis bread apart from what they’d find in a supermarket.
Kate at the pastry and bread counter at Messenger Cafe +Ibis Bakery.
“The challenge I faced was helping the public understand why our bread had a higher price and ‘Why bread?’ at all at the height of the gluten-free craze,” Kate says. “I explained the quality of the ingredients we used and that the lengthy, painstaking process actually made a difference for people’s health.
“Every time I explained to a gluten-free customer that our bread was digestible and nutritious, their response—whether through body language, verbal engagement or a purchase—gave me data on how to explain what we were doing more concisely and effectively.”
Kate came up with a curriculum for communicating to customers, including a way to answer the many customers who asked, “Do you have anything gluten-free?” She explained the breakdown of gluten during the sourdough process—where good bacteria does its part to sort of “pre-digest” flour—and trained staff members on educating customers as well.
“As a former teacher, training staff and educating customers was an easy fit for me,” Kate says. Exposure to the food-service and farming communities also provided Kate with avenues to be taught and to learn more from the farmers, customers (many of whom were home bakers, world travelers or very health-conscious) and staff who had been in the food or coffee industry longer than she had.
“The exchange of knowledge energized me, and I worked hard to communicate the absolute delight I felt to our small and growing customer base,” Kate says. “Six years ago in Kansas City, there was not much public awareness about the differences between grocery store bread and small-batch sourdough bread. Showing up every day and repeating the narrative about the benefits of fermented dough eventually led to an enthusiastic, well-educated customer base that seemed to grow exponentially as people shared what they knew about Ibis Bakery with their friends, families, and places of work.”
Fresh-Baked, Fresh-Milled
With Chris baking, Kate selling, and a Kansas City Star article about the brand, Ibis started taking off in earnest, and two things became apparent: As much as he initially thought he was learning bread as an avenue to move back toward coffee, Chris loved the process. And he wanted to expand their offerings with pastries.
Chris went to San Francisco Baking Institute in November 2014 at the end of the farmer’s market season to take a viennoiserie course. Wanting their own space at the end of the market season, they took over the former dojo next door to Black Dog to begin Ibis Bakery’s first brick-and-mortar storefront.
Through this, the founding partners maintained their goal of an open-space cafe with coffee roasting and now, Chris envisioned, flour-milling on site.
“We knew we wanted to mill probably about a year into our baking business, but we didn’t have room to do it in Lenexa, so we were waiting for the space in Crossroads to open up,” Chris says. “It really originated with our approach to coffee; we wanted to have an ethical sourcing structure. So when we translated that to bread and pastry, it made sense to source locally because those are the farmers we can support realistically.”
Having started at the farmer’s market, Ibis was well-connected with local farms and made a point to source all they could locally, including produce, meat, and eggs. When Chris started looking into sourcing grain, he found he could have overall more flavorful, more nutritious products once Ibis began milling its own grain.
Chris at 180 Farms in Sweet Springs, MO.
“The flour we were getting previously was good quality, but it was in storage and transit so much and for so long that it lost a lot of what it had to offer in the first place,” Chris says. “We were getting less nutritious, less flavorful flour. If we’re getting that, everyone is.”
Having a consumer experience what different types of grain milled into flour taste like when it’s fresh would mean collaborating with local farms growing grain, so Chris worked with 180 Farms in Sweet Springs, MO, to plant wheat for Ibis (sourced from Janie’s Mill in Ashkum, IL).
In October 2017, Messenger Cafe + Ibis Bakery opened, and visitors could come see the flour mill at work at the back of the first floor. Chris says he struggled with the reality that milling in-house with local grains means that there are more variables than if he used commodity flour—as seasons and weather changes, flour could be more or less dry, for example, which sets off a chain reaction of adjustments for bakers throughout the process.
But Chris can see a not-too-distant future where this hard work could pay off in a bigger way.
“Committing to milling makes me think about things more broadly,” Chris says. “It’s unrealistic for a restaurant that makes its own pasta, for instance, to justify sourcing and milling grains for themselves. So how does that happen in Kansas City? How do we access that?”
The Road to Centralized Milling
Citing coffee-bean production, Chris points out that many farms will contribute to one coffee station where beans are fermented and processed, and the mill coordinates logistics from then on out. He thinks there’s a way to mimic that for grain.
“It’s ultimately up to us to be a catalyst and be the trial-and-error for that so that everyone can access fresh-milled flour,” he says. “There isn’t anyone else who has the volume-capacity and demand for flour-produced products to justify planting 80 acres of wheat on a test basis.
“My end-goal is to have a centralized milling component through building enough demand for that product.”
Chris is already drumming up additional business by milling flour for local partners, like Tom’s Town Distilling Company. Ibis is supplying Tom’s Town with fresh-milled rye for rye whiskey—a product which, by virtue of whiskey production, won’t be ready for a while yet. With a centralized mill concept, even a small farm could have grain milled, and many local businesses can benefit from regional flour for their product.
For all this to happen in the middle of the map instead of a saturated coastal city or powerhouse middle-of-the-map cities like Chicago or Dallas is an exciting venture. Better yet, Mid-America has plenty of farms from which to source.
“I see the Kansas City community being a really cool opportunity for us to engage with hyper-regional food culture and identity,” Chris says. “There are people doing what we’re doing in other cities. I get excited talking to people about how to do this successfully throughout the U.S. because that can open up a lot.
“I think there’s an opportunity to figure out how to do it.”
The flour mill at Messenger Cafe + Ibis Bakery.