Blue Spruce General Store finds recipe for success in Davenport

What do you get when you take a hands-on guy with an appetite for bread, a pandemic, an army of friends addicted to a good loaf and mix in a leader and staff eager to embrace a culinary challenge? For Brandon Carleton that turned out to be a perfect recipe for his successful new restaurant, bakery and micro grocer in downtown Davenport. Indeed, his growing Blue Spruce General Store, located at 217 E. Second St. —  which turned six months old last month — is so successful it’s already stretching the limits of its current home.  So much so that Mr. Carleton is looking ahead to one-day opening a second bakery in downtown Rock Island that will both serve customers as a traditional storefront bakery and feed more Quad Cities restaurants hungry for Blue Spruce’s wholesale products. For now, however, there already is much to do and to celebrate at Blue Spruce Davenport, which boasts a growing number of fans who are making their way to the renovated business located in the former home of Cookies and Dreams. And right now, that’s where Mr. Carleton told the QCBJ he is putting his attention. 

Like Blue Spruce’s focus on locally grown and sourced products, the business itself has grown organically from the start. It began as a way to fill a need for unique baked goods like the ones Mr. Carleton said he used to be forced to search out at places like the Iowa City Pioneer Coop’s Made From Scratch Deli and Bakery.   “I used to travel for work, pre-pandemic,” Mr. Carleton said. In those days, he was busy helping start a new business called inquirED and among his duties was to visit schools and record teachers in classrooms to create videos that promote inquiry-based learning methods. During his wide travels he made it a habit to seek out really good bread where he could find it. “And I would come back to the Quad Cities and I would not have the good bread,” he said. One day, he said he decided it was silly to keep traveling to find what he and his friends craved so he decided to learn how to make bread himself. The process took a long time, but was helped along when COVID-19 forced him to begin working from home.  Eventually he was baking four to six loaves a week for friends. “I would hand them out and they would text me the same day and say ‘It’s already gone, when can I get another loaf?’” Mr. Carleton recalled. “I realized I might have a business on my hands,” he said. His home-based subscription bread service eventually grew to the point where he was making 120-150 loaves out of his home. The subscription service – through which the bread was paid for once a month in advance for weekly delivery – proved to be the perfect business model for his startup because he could be certain of his monthly income. As his subscriber list grew, Mr. Carleton realized he needed more space than his home kitchen and more oven than his tiny 1950s model home oven. It was operating nearly all day long. He also was seeking a way to serve a lucrative wholesale market but he couldn’t do that by law out of his home kitchen.

So he rented a kitchen in a vacant bar in downtown Moline at 425 15th St. After operating in that space for about a year, he said, business was so good that he outgrew the kitchen. In addition, the bar had no retail space and customers couldn’t walk in and place an order, so he started looking at other vacant buildings.  Enter Jack Cullen, the Quad Cities Chamber’s Downtown Rock Island director, who connected with Mr. Carleton in January of 2022. He told the QCBJ: “Brandon contacted me looking for potential locations in downtown Rock Island for Blue Spruce Bakery, and I connected him with property owners in the 300 block of 20th Street, who are renovating multiple buildings and seeking prospective tenants.” He added: “A gym and a photography studio have opened there within the last 16 months and Blue Spruce Bakery would be a great addition to this pocket of downtown. Their brand, products and customer base would also complement nearby businesses and amenities like Rozz-Tox, Ragged Records and the proposed dog park.” Mr. Carleton initially opted for the vacant Rock Island building which once housed Augie’s Tap, and later the Lucky Shamrock. Once he began digging into the project, however, he said he realized it was a major buildout and would take too much work in the short term. He needed a space immediately, and that’s when the downtown Davenport location “landed in my lap,” Mr. Carleton said. That kitchen was turnkey so he was able to move into it immediately to continue operating his subscription bread service and serving wholesale customers. In fact, he said, he moved into the kitchen within a day.  The rest of the building renovations, which included new shelves, counters, floors and display space, took a little longer. Materials also weren’t cheap and Mr. Carleton quickly discovered that the new business was “burning through cash.” He added: “That’s where the city came in.” The City of Davenport offers a small business loan program that provides $30,000-$100,000 for qualified local businesses. In all, Mr. Carleton received $90,000 from the program at a critical time because with his new kitchen fired up, his vision for Blue Spruce began to grow into today’s General Store, which is so named because it's really three businesses under one roof, he said.  In addition to the deli and artisanal bakery, Mr. Carleton operates the boutique grocery store with products that are hard to find in the Quad Cities. Regularly, Blue Spruce works to keep those sought-after items in stock on shelves built by Mr. Carleton and his brother-in-law Marcus Anderson. The deli is open for lunch and dinner and Blue Spruce makes things fresh in its onsite bakery every day including pastries, sourdough bread and traditional, handmade European-style croissants that are difficult – if not impossible – to find in the Quad Cities. Those and other baked goods fill the small display space on the new butcher block counter in full view of customers as they first walk in the door. Mr. Carleton and his bakers also relish a baking challenge; frequently working to master complex recipes. Take, for example, Blue Spruce’s Swiss Meringue Buttercream cake, which he described as “very labor intensive, very expensive to make, and requires a very skilled baker.” Then there's the bakery’s flagship Country Brown Bread. It features flour made out of stone-ground wheat grown two hours south of the Quad Cities on a farm in Ashkum, Illinois, and processed in the farm’s own Janie’s Mill.  “It’s great to be able to shake hands with Harold (Wilken) who’s the owner and he’s also the delivery driver,” Mr. Carleton said. “So we shake hands with the guy who plants and harvests the wheat. He comes in here and we give him bread and he gives us flour.” Blue Spruce also smokes its own meats and Mr. Carleton provides a number of vegan and gluten-free menu items and baked goods. In addition, he believes his micro-grocery boasts the widest variety of tinned fish in the Quad Cities. Also coming soon are fresh herbs and vegetables, including tomatoes and cucumbers, that will be grown in Blue Spruce’s own rooftop garden in downtown Davenport for products made and sold at the business. During the QCBJ’s recent interview, dozens of pots filled with potting soil from the Davenport compost facility stood ready for planting when the weather was right. The restaurant also is maintaining its own compost piles to feed the rooftop crop. If all goes well, Blue Spruce soon will be the only downtown restaurant that has its own garden to pull produce from, he said. Mr. Carleton is accomplishing all that with a staff of 15-20 experienced workers who are mainly full-time – and at $16 an hour to start are well-paid for this type of business. The higher wage is by design to attract more experienced employees. Even so, Mr. Carleton said, he also has employees who took a pay cut to work at Blue Spruce. Despite the workload, Mr. Carleton has had little turnover – crediting it, in part, to the four-day workweek he maintains. Everyone gets four days on and three days off.  His focus on more dedicated and long-term employees has paid off. As of presstime, he had just hired two new workers including a second third-shift baker and created a new afternoon baker slot. With the addition, Blue Spruce ovens work around the clock with a brief time off between around 4-5 a.m. What’s coming next for Blue Spruce and Mr. Carleton? Perhaps someday the business will keep bees to make its own honey and then there’s the Rock Island bakery location. “I’m taking my time on it. It’s very different from this building,” Mr. Carleton said of the Rock Island versus Davenport location. “This building was turnkey and Rock Island is just a shell of a building.” Most importantly, Rock Island also lacked the ready-to-use commercial-grade kitchen in the Davenport Blue Spruce location that allowed Mr. Carleton to serve his wholesale and subscription customers without interruption. That also ensured revenue would continue to come while the rest of the Blue Spruce buildout was ongoing. The former Rock Island bar also is in a “really old” building, Mr. Carleton said and will need significant upgrading. “It’s going to be awhile.”   But his long-term plan continues to be to one day do the bulk of his company’s wholesale baking in downtown Rock Island – thus freeing up oven time in Davenport – while also serving storefront customers fresh baked products including bagels, lattes, espresso and more. The vision is to have something like the Davenport location “but have it three times the size and offer more products,” he said. Whenever he’s ready, “the City of Rock Island would happily welcome that development,’ said Miles Brainard, Rock Island’s director of community and economic development.

At A Glance: Blue Spruce General Store

• Location – 217 E. Second St., Davenport.
• Hours – Monday-Friday: 6 a.m.-7 p.m., Saturday-Sunday: 7 a.m.-7 p.m.
• Baked goods include – Daily bread specials and the Quad-Cities only handmade croissants and baguettes (every morning at 10:30 a.m). The lineup also features a wide variety of sweets that can include melon curd, lemon curd, tarts, Swiss Meringue Buttercream Cake and more.
• Light breakfast items can include baguettes, breakfast burritos, biscuits and gravy and hot and iced coffee.
• Lunch and dinner are served from 10:30 a.m.-7 p.m. and features Blue Spruce bakery goods and its own smoked meats.
• Find out more at www.bluesprucegeneralstore.com. 

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