The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
Bakery duo to reopen cafe in leap of faith
The award-winning Bad Girl Bakery cafe is to reopen in Easter Ross after being closed for nearly 10 months.
Owners Douglas and Jeni Hardie admit it has taken a lot of “number crunching” to make the decision.
But the couple, who live in Muir of Ord, said they have missed being part of the community and are keen to get the cafe in the village back up and running.
The cafe shut its doors in June last year with a number of factors blamed including the impacts of Covid and Brexit.
But with the summer fast approaching it will reopen next month in a bid to benefit from bigger footfall.
Douglas said: “I’ll be honest, we miss being part of the Muir of Ord community. It’s the village we live in. We love being here and hated closing the cafe but we had to do it.
“The idea is we open and see how it goes.
“The response to the news has been incredibly positive.
“On a purely social side we are looking forward to seeing these people who have been our customers for so long.”
The couple have decided the cafe will open for three days a week on a Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Since last summer the premises have been used for classes, development teaching and offices.
Douglas said: “I’ll be blunt, there’s hard maths that took place with this one.
“In a small village of 3,500 in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis you don’t want to be open if you aren’t going to have custom.
“It just wasn’t really feasible to do that over winter but as we are approaching Easter there’s a feeling there’s more people around and more people wanting to get out and leave their houses.
“I think the footfall is always much better, not counting the tourists, in the summer months.
“I’ll be honest, there’s an element of wait and see.”
Bad Girl Bakery became the first tenant of Inverness’s Victorian Food Market in October 2022, where it has 16 members of staff. But like most small businesses, especially in hospitality, it is facing the effects of several issues.
Douglas said: “Like everyone else it is really, really tough just now.
“You are getting hit at both ends. The cost of ingredients, the cost of staff, the lack of availability of staff and energy bills.
“Everything is going up and of course it’s happening for everyone. The people on the other side of the counter have less and less money to spend.
“You are competing with other treats and people are having to make harder choices about what they spend their money on.
“It is that difficult thing you are in the middle and you can’t justify putting up your prices in line with all your costs because people can’t cope with that.
“Energy costs are massive and we get absolutely hammered with VAT. Staffing is really difficult because there’s tens of thousands of people missing from the market. “There’s also Brexit. “Everyone in the hospitality sector has the same stories.”