Entrepreneur Joanne Chang leaves career in business consulting to start successful Flour Bakery

Flour owner Joanne Chang works with her bakery crew

One-time management consultant and math major Joanne Chang has turned her dream of opening her own bakery into a successful growing business, with four very popular Flour Bakery & Café locations around Boston.

Often simply referred to as Flour by its dedicated patrons, Chang’s bakery has continued to receive rave reviews from the press and customers alike.

Top foodie magazines, from Gourmet to Food & Wine to Bon Appetit, as well as Inc. Magazine, have featured the business and its success. Chang has even ventured onto TV, appearing on Throwdown with Bobby Flay and besting the celebrity chef with her sticky buns.

Flour features breakfast pastries, breads, cakes, cookies, and tarts as well as sandwiches, soups and salads. But the bakery’s fame has risen on the power of how Chef Chang has taken the standard breakfast and lunch food and given it delightful twists and creative turns.

Visit a Flour location and it is impossible not to crave all the gorgeous treats on display, from buttery, raisin-filled brioche to silky-smooth double chocolate truffle tarts to lemon curd cakes filled with raspberry preserves. Snacking down on lunch options such as bacon and caramelized onion quiche or a grilled Portobello melt sandwich with pesto and fresh mozzarella is also going to bring you back for more.

And bringing customers back for more is exactly what Flour does, to the point of continuing to add stores as the demand rises.

The first Flour location opened in 2000 in the South End; the second location opened in the Fort Point Channel area in 2007; a third location followed in Cambridge near MIT and Central Square in 2010; and, in 2013, a fourth Flour opened in the Back Bay.

Flour is becoming a Boston staple for many foodies, and popular with morning commuters, office workers at lunch and afternoon coffee crowd.

Chang’s business success may not be much of a stretch considering she started her professional career as a management consultant at The Monitor Group in Cambridge in the early 1990s. However, one has to wonder how a Harvard graduate with a degree in applied math and economics could become such a whiz in the kitchen.

She says cooking was always a hobby and after two years of power point presentations, Excel worksheets and constant meetings in the world of management consulting, she decided to bake up an entirely new career and venture into the cooking profession.

Selling her passion for cooking — and little else in the way of food industry experience — she reached out to some of the top restaurants in Boston and got an offer for an entry-level cooking job at renowned Boston restaurant Biba with respected Chef Lydia Shire.

“I jumped at the chance to work in such a well-regarded kitchen with such a talented chef,” Chang said. “Two weeks later, I left my cubicle and was julienning scallions and making chicken stocks.”

After a year at Biba, Chang decided to pursue pastry cooking and Shire connected her with Rick Katz of Bentonwood Bakery in Newton. She then spent a year with Katz learning the tricks of the scratch-baking trade.

In 1995, she landed her first job as a pastry chef at Rialto restaurant in Cambridge. In 1997, she moved to New York City to work in the cake department of the critically acclaimed Payard Patisserie and Bistro. Returning to Boston a year later, she took a pastry chef job at Mistral where she stayed until opening Flour.

Chang’s parents are from Taiwan and raised her in Texas and Oklahoma, but she felt Boston was the perfect place to open her own bakery.

“Boston didn’t have that many bakeries at the time and I felt there was a definite need,” she said. “I was convinced that people wanted a great place to meet friends for coffee and pastry and lunch where everything was made in house and the service was warm and welcoming and everyone was enjoying themselves — guests and employees alike.”

She admits that the first year Flour was open was very difficult and she wanted to sell the bakery at times, but she credits her strong staff for helping her see the long-term potential of the business and to keep pushing forward through the tough times.

Now, with four successful Flour locations in hand, her goal is to continue steady growth and make the bakery’s food even better.

While Chang’s career about-face may not be for everyone, she feels it worked for her because she was willing to get her hands dirty at the lowest level in the kitchen to learn the cooking craft — and she was lucky enough to work with some great chefs who taught her what she knows.

“Every chef I’ve worked with has become a mentor to me. Each one offers advice when I seek it and I use the lessons I learned in each kitchen to help me at every turn,” she said.