'Born of Necessity'

Love of baking turns into income, ambition

Credit: Journal photo by David Rolfe

Cary Clifford (left) makes sandwiches with Mandy Hockensmith at Clifford’s business, Camino Bakery, which is in the lower level of The Werehouse in Winston-Salem.

By: By Michael Hastings | JOURNAL FOOD EDITOR
Published: February 11, 2009

Less than two years ago, Cary Clifford was a stay-at-home mom with no professional cooking experience.

Now she owns her own bakery and has five part-time employees.

Clifford owns Camino Bakery, a wholesale business at 211 E. Third St., in the lower level of The Werehouse in Winston-Salem.

Her newfound profession is the product of a lifelong love of cooking and being in the right place at the right time.

Clifford and her husband, Jonathan Milner, are friends with David Franklin and John Bryan, the owners of Krankies Coffee, which is also in The Werehouse, and with its manager, Mitchell Britt.

When Britt was organizing a small farmers market outside of Krankies in 2007, he asked Clifford to make some prepared foods for it. "And I've been running ever since to keep up," she said.

The positive reaction to Clifford's baked goods prompted Britt to ask her if she could provide baked goods for Krankies. "Mitchell was the one who encouraged me to start baking," Clifford said.

"The Werehouse has tried to be an incubator of microbusinesses," Britt said. "Cary's food is really good. We can hardly keep it on the shelf. And if we need more focaccia or something, she can bring it upstairs right out of the oven."

Clifford eventually renovated some unused space underneath Krankies and officially opened Camino Bakery last February. Camino now supplies not only Krankies but also Confluence Coffee on Peters Creek Parkway near the Davidson County line, a coffee kiosk at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and others.

"We bake lots of cookies," Clifford said. "That's our big thing."

The cookies are big, too -- about 5 inches in diameter.

Camino sells prewrapped vegetarian sandwiches, muffins, scones, cakes, pies and sweet breads. "People get mad if we don't have our pumpkin bread," Clifford said.

Clifford, a native of Winston-Salem, graduated from Reynolds High School, where Milner's mother taught her English -- and introduced her to her future husband.

Milner teaches civics to high-school students at UNC School of the Arts. Clifford was on that path, too, after getting a bachelor's degree in history from Rice University in Texas. She and Milner married about a year later in 1996, on her 23rd birthday.

Clifford taught school for one year, then worked as a Spanish interpreter until she had their first child, Owen, in 2003. She did some more interpreting before the birth of their second child, Errol, in 2006.

Errol was born with a heart defect that required two operations by the time he was 5 months old.

Eventually, Clifford and Milner learned that Errol has a chromosomal defect that manifests itself in different ways. Errol is mentally disabled, and he may not learn to walk and talk. Still, Errol is a joy to be around, Clifford said. "He's all smiles and laughs. He's a total character."

Even with health insurance, Clifford and Milner have piled up thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses. And Errol's care continues to cost more than for a typical child.

So in a way, Clifford said, Errol has a lot to do with her newfound profession. She needed a job to help pay off medical bills.

Errol now goes to school at the Children's Center for the Physically Disabled, and Clifford and Milner have support from friends and both sets of parents, Fred and Dean Clifford and Joe and Lucy Milner. Still, Clifford needed a job that allowed her flexibility to help take care of Errol.

The bakery business, then, was "born of necessity," Milner said.

Still, the founding of Camino Bakery surprised both Clifford and Milner.

"I've always loved to cook. I learned to bake bread when I was a little kid," Clifford said. "But I never, ever, thought I'd be doing this."

"We would have friends over to dinner," Milner said, "and we would always joke that Cary could always start a restaurant or a bakery -- and then it happened."

But, Milner said, "It wouldn't have happened if not for the need for the money and the guys at Krankies saying, ‘Why don't you bake some stuff for us?'"

Clifford said that the bakery grosses about $8,000 a month and makes a small profit. It hasn't been enough to help Clifford pay off medical bills, but she said that it has kept the family from going further into debt.

Clifford is now making plans to expand. She is scouting locations near downtown for a retail bakery.

Her father, Fred Clifford, who comes in to wash dishes from time to time, said he doesn't know how his daughter does it. "I think she must be struggling under the sheer weight of it all. But she's a tough young lady," he said.

His daughter, though, doesn't seem to have trouble keeping a positive outlook.

"A lot of people would think my life is crazy," she said. "But I love it."

■ Michael Hastings can be reached at 727-7394 or at mhastings@wsjournal.com.