Pinon Kitchen needed to move its sourdough bread and pastry sales indoors and found several coffee shops happy to oblige

Tim Harty, The Business Times

The late-summer end of the farmers market season brought some uncertainty as Caitlin Loncarich looked ahead to the first autumn for her De Beque-based microbakery, Pinon Kitchen.

She needed to take her sourdough breads and assorted baked goods inside, and she’s found a few takers that will keep the ovens in her kitchen busy.

In late September, Kiln Coffee Bar, 326 Main St. in downtown Grand Junction, decided to get its pastries from Pinon Kitchen.

In mid-October, Colorado Legacy Coffee started stocking a shelving unit next to its counter with a variety of Pinon Kitchen offerings.

And Loncarich also got The Coffee Shack in Parachute on board to sell her baked goods.

Landing the account with Kiln Coffee Bar was “perfect timing, exiting out of the markets,” she said. “And when those slowed down, I was able to just kind of keep going. And so it’s been enough where I have to be very good on prep and planning ahead, because it is just me (doing the baking).

“So, I have a couple wholesale accounts, which is just perfect for what I’m doing. … I don’t really want to get too much more, because I always want great quality goods that I do. And I’m not sure if I’m quite ready yet to hire somebody else as well.”

Getting Colorado Legacy to carry her baked goods made sense, as Loncarich worked for Colorado Legacy owner Roni Welsh when she owned Aspen Street Coffee in Fruita. Loncarich was a junior at Fruita Monument High School when she started there, but even then Welsh saw Loncarich’s passion for baking.

Welsh said she tried some of Pinon Kitchen’s baked goods this summer at a farmers market, “and it was amazing. … She’s a fabulous, fabulous baker.”

Welsh has been stocking a variety of items, such as sourdough sandwich bread, classic sourdough bread, sourdough blueberry English muffins, sourdough chocolate croissants and apple butter cruffins.

“It’s been awesome,” Welsh said, adding, “Every week we had to bump the order up.”

By the third order, Colorado Legacy’s item count had doubled. Welsh said she gets the baked goods on Friday, and the first two weeks they sold out before Monday. Keep in mind Colorado Legacy isn’t open on Sunday.

Loncarich is thankful for Welsh’s business, saying, “After markets season, it’s like, ‘Well, where do I go?’ And Roni reached out to me and just thought that that would be a perfect combination, and I’m so glad, because it works out very well.”

She’s also thankful for Welsh’s example.

“She is just a phenomenal businesswoman in general,” Loncarich said. “I’ve always just thought that she is just very straightforward, which is how I run my business. And yeah, I did learn a lot when I was younger, which was great.”

The appetite for cooking arrived early for Loncarich. She said her family ran Ocotillo Outfitters, and her mom cooked for camp, so Loncarich grew up cooking.

After high school she went into the two-year culinary program at Western Colorado Community College. From there, Loncarich did a lot of learning through experience and taking classes that interest her.

“Wherever I travel, I just love immersing myself in their culture, really learning just foundational things in that culture,” she said. “I would go on retreats, baking retreats, cooking retreats, and any kind of classes that I can pick up. A really great organization – it’s a magazine, Bake From Scratch – they do retreats all around the world. I’ve gone on three of theirs.”

Loncarich also took cake-decorating classes at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. 

She said of her piecemeal approach, “They are like little, great snippets where I can really hone in on my craft and pick up little things that I’m missing or will help my process in general. And I really love just learning other ways of doing it, because there’s many different ways of doing something, and whatever works best for that person is just fascinating to me.”

While Loncarich’s education is never-ending, she’s at a point where the student has become the master, or at least enough of an expert that she wants to teach baking classes.

After a major renovation of her De Beque home in May, she has an open, well-equipped, 550-square-foot kitchen to do it.

First came a commitment. After owning and/or operating other non-baking businesses for years, Loncarich thought about how she had “always dabbled in the baking and doing weddings and cakes.”

She realized baking was what she wanted to do, and it was time to go beyond dabbling.

“I said, ‘If I’m going to start my own business, I’m going to get serious about it.’ So, we finished the kitchen here. … and then this is where I will have classes.”

She said during a Nov. 5 interview she had just set up her sourdough workshop classes, which would be her first, to teach this month and in December.

In addition to what she chooses to teach, she might take requests, such as one made by a person who doesn’t like sourdough and wondered if Loncarich would teach other bread classes.

Whatever she teaches, the class sizes will be “very small.”

“It would be like six to seven people and very one-on-one, a little more intimate,” she said. “They will learn more when they’re literally in here doing it themselves and watching me, and then I can help them, critique and really work on their craft.”

Thank You, Palisade Farmers Market

Caitlin Loncarich registered Pinon Kitchen Co. LLC with the state in early October 2024, but calling that the start of her business is a stretch.

“No, that was just me kind of getting all of my ducks in a row,” she said.

She called Jan. 1, 2025, the official start date, but even then she was working on building up the business, doing a major kitchen renovation in May.

She finally felt like she was running a business when the farmers markets arrived.

“I got accepted into the Palisade Farmers Market, and so that’s when it really just took off,” Loncarich said. “I became very busy, a lot busier than I thought I would be, just doing breads and pastries and baked goods for the Palisade Farmers Market.”

First, There Was Baking Kate

Before she formed Pinon Kitchen Co., Loncarich operated a small business called Baking Kate.

She said she would come back to Colorado after working seasonally in Alaska, “and I’d always do maybe eight to 10 weddings a year or little custom cakes. And that I just was able to do out of my home under the cottage-food law.”

She said she did the cake baking for 10 to 12 years, and she baked some pies for the Feedlot Restaurant and Strayhorn Grill in Fruita.

“So, a little of this and that all over in the valley,” Loncarich said, “and then I outgrew Baking Kate, and then that’s when I created Pinon Kitchen, when I was more serious about it and didn’t have a regular full-time job.”

Business Is Businesses

When Loncarich said “a regular full-time job,” she was referring to a number of different businesses she owned and operated. One was a woodworking business with her ex-husband and father-in-law.

“It was a great business we started back in 2010, and it was in a completely different field,” she said. “We traveled all over the country. It was specializing in a recoil-reducing system for competition trap and skeet shooters.”

The work was nothing like baking, but the principles for running a business carried over and proved invaluable.

“That really helped me hone in on how to run a business,” she said. “I didn’t quite ever finish my four-year degree, because I was already running businesses, and I figured this is the best way to learn.”

She added, “A really big thing is the clients and the customers and building a relationship with them. I am a people person. I love talking to different people and just learning from others, everyone. 

And so that really helped just running a business in general.”

Future Hubby Does His Part

Loncarich is sole owner of Pinon Kitchen, but she said her fiance, Mike Melton, has found a niche, which she appreciates.

“My brother called (Melton) the product-placement manager with Pinon Kitchen, because he was very strategic on where to place stuff and keeping it stocked and packaging and how it looked, because that’s an important part of selling, having great packaging,” she said.

Loncarich thinks if Pinon Kitchen keeps growing, Melton might quit his day job and go all-in on her business.

“I do think if I get big enough and I grow accordingly, he would be 100 percent happy working with me,” she said. “I definitely couldn’t have survived this last summer, with the amount I was baking for Palisade Farmer’s Market, without him helping me.”