BRATTLEBORO-In the cafeteria at Brattleboro Union High School, student Connor Montgomery strongly approved of a whole-grain, sourdough roll that he had just tried with his lunch.
“I ate the entire roll; I thought it was pretty good,” he said. “I kind of want another one. The texture, and everything about it tasted really good. Before, other than sandwiches, we didn’t really get any bread. We haven’t really had any good bread until this.”
Montgomery, 16, was one of about 600 students who ate lunch at the school on April 2. For the first time, they were offered the rolls as part of a pilot program that supplies schools with locally made bread sourced from locally grown grains or flour that’s milled in Vermont.
The program is also due to launch soon at other Windham Southeast Supervisory Union schools in Putney, Dummerston, and Guilford. It also aims to expand to public schools throughout the state.
The rolls were baked by the Butter Mountain Bakery of Wilmington, a small business that has expanded “exponentially” over the last year and that is poised for more growth under the new program, said Butter Mountain’s owner, Hannah Small.
“I just doubled my space in the kitchen in the last two months to allow for the expansion for this account,” she said as students stopped by a table set up in the cafeteria to pick up some of the 1,000 rolls that she baked for the occasion.
The school district is all-in on the program, which meets its goals for sourcing more local foods while complying with federal requirements for at least a 51% whole-grain content in bread served at school meals.
“We are going to feature Hannah’s rolls regularly, and the goal is to expand to other school districts in Vermont so that she has consistent customers in the school nutrition program throughout the state,” said Kelsey Baumgarten, assistant director of the district’s nutrition program.
She said providing Butter Mountain’s rolls to students will meet a range of goals.
“Brattleboro is very much behind the local food movement, and we feel from a nutrition perspective that there’s more nutrition in it, and that it provides an educational opportunity for the students to learn where their food comes from,” she said.
“The program is a way of saying to students: ‘It’s not just a roll that we’re required to serve you; it’s a really delicious roll — look, here’s the baker,’ Baumgarten said. “It provides a story to go with the food.”
Asked whether sourdough would be popular with teenagers who have previously been served mass-produced white bread made in a distant bakery, Small said she baked a roll that wasn’t too sour while meeting the district’s nutritional requirements.
“I wanted to create a roll that wasn’t going to taste like some healthy thing but that is healthy, is giving them the nutrition that they need, and is using local grains made by a local producer,” she said.
The agreement with the district marks the latest expansion for Butter Mountain Bakery, which already serves supermarkets and cafés in Wilmington, Dover, and Townshend. The new agreement will boost the wholesale side of Small’s business, which so far generates about half of the bakery’s revenue.
Although she opens her space at 1 School Street to retail customers on Friday afternoons, Small said she first aimed not to operate a traditional eat-in bakery, because she wanted to avoid the waste that often comes with a retail operation.
Because it’s hard to predict retail demand — especially in a town with a tourist economy — she has focused instead on building up her wholesale customers, and the school district’s agreement will boost that, she said.
“With my pre-orders, I navigate what is going to sell, and I set those numbers every week based on that. The goal is that everything sells, and that has been the case for the last few years,” she said.
The expansion has been helped by Small winning Wilmington Works’ Make It on Main Street business plan competition for new businesses twice, first in 2018 and again in 2025, awarding her $10,000 and $50,000, respectively.
Most recently, she was awarded $42,000 from a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant under the Supporting Community Agriculture and Local Education Systems (SCALES) program.
The school agreement is also backed by the Vermont branch of NOFA, the Northeast Organic Farming Association, which sees it as a way of helping to increase demand for its members’ products.
“Schools are a great market opportunity for Vermont producers, and we are needing more supply of these products,” said Kayla Strom, farm-to-institution program director at NOFA Vermont.
“We are helping producers learn what a school program needs so that they can change production to meet the school market,” Strom said. “We’ve been trying to be a bridge between the school and the producers.”
At the Brattleboro school, student Shay Warner, 16, confessed that he had used half of his roll to throw at another student in the cafeteria, but he said he had enjoyed the half he had eaten.
“It was good consistency; it was fluffy and not too dry,” he said. “I liked it a lot.”
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A version of this story appeared in The Deerfield Valley News, The Commons’ sister newspaper.
This News item by Jon Hurdle originally appeared in The Deerfield Valley News and was republished in The Commons with permission.