Published on Long Beach Post website August 15, 2012
Crustic is a brand-new artisan bread delivery club based in Long Beach that intends to change the way you experience bread by delivering freshly baked artisan breads made with organic, sustainable, and local ingredients directly to the doors of its members.
“I started up Crustic because I wanted to make sustainably-produced artisan bread accessible to everyone,” said founder Madelaine Ambrus, a lifelong native of Long Beach and an alumnus of Wilson Classical High School.
The inspiration for an artisan bread club came from Ambrus’s intense cravings for good bread after she spent a year teaching preschoolers and middle school students in South Korea—a country where noodles are everywhere but bread is scarce.
“I was in South Korea teaching at a private school,” said Ambrus. “I would say two thirds of my day was teaching preschool students and the rest of my day was teaching middle school.”
Though she came back from South Korea in November 2011 with some savings to help start her business, Ambrus’s parents lent her money to help make her dream into a reality. Her father, who is from Hungary, and her mother, who is from Austria, had introduced their daughter to freshly baked bread at a very young age.
“I’ve always grown up eating really good bread because my parents are European and so we would go the little German deli and when I traveled to Europe with them, I would always have fresh high quality bread,” Ambrus said. “I’ve realized that that’s something that people here don’t have access to on a daily basis.”
Crustic is a brand-new artisan bread delivery club based in Long Beach that intends to change the way you experience bread by delivering freshly baked artisan breads made with organic, sustainable, and local ingredients directly to the doors of its members.
“I started up Crustic because I wanted to make sustainably-produced artisan bread accessible to everyone,” said founder Madelaine Ambrus, a lifelong native of Long Beach and an alumnus of Wilson Classical High School.
The inspiration for an artisan bread club came from Ambrus’s intense cravings for good bread after she spent a year teaching preschoolers and middle school students in South Korea—a country where noodles are everywhere but bread is scarce.
“I was in South Korea teaching at a private school,” said Ambrus. “I would say two thirds of my day was teaching preschool students and the rest of my day was teaching middle school.”
Though she came back from South Korea in November 2011 with some savings to help start her business, Ambrus’s parents lent her money to help make her dream into a reality. Her father, who is from Hungary, and her mother, who is from Austria, had introduced their daughter to freshly baked bread at a very young age.
“I’ve always grown up eating really good bread because my parents are European and so we would go the little German deli and when I traveled to Europe with them, I would always have fresh high quality bread,” Ambrus said. “I’ve realized that that’s something that people here don’t have access to on a daily basis.”
Made with organic flours, nuts, dried fruits, and herbs, and local raw honey (which is used as a sweetener in an effort to stay away from processed sugars), each Crustic loaf is packaged in a 100% recycled container and hung from bread club members’ doorknobs upon delivery.
Consumers sign up for three-month memberships on Crustic Bread's website under one of two options: one having bread delivered to their home once a month for $72, or two deliveries a month for $132.
While customers have a choice between white, rosemary, garlic, sourdough, asiago, light rye, oatmeal honey wheat, or almond coconut chocolate for their basic monthly bread, the specialty bread of the month is always different. June’s was the Double Jalapeno Jack bread and July’s specialty bread was the Apricot Sage.
Crustic is almost entirely a one-woman operation, with Ambrus doing everything herself, from designing the website, doing the social media on Facebook and Pinterest, and even delivering the bread to people’s homes.
“As of right now we are only doing a 25-30 mile radius of Long Beach,” she said. “Once we finish baking the bread for whoever we are delivering to that day, we go and deliver the bread directly to their door within three to five hours”.
With Crustic, Ambrus wants to do more than create a successful company. She also hopes of helping her home community by donating one loaf of bread to a homeless shelter in Long Beach for every Crustic club member, with the intention of paying it forward to those who could use a little help.
“We think it is important to be a triple-bottom-line company, one that always keeps people, the planet and profit in mind,” said Ambrus. “We are passionate about what goes into our breads, but we also care about the greater impact Crustic is having on our community. We want it to be a wholeheartedly positive one.”
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