Blue Duck Bakery Has Risen Steadily as a Successful Business Over the Years, Just Like Its Signature Breads

Learning how to make a delicious loaf of fresh-baked bread is a process of trial and error, involving a good deal of persistence and faith.

Launching a business requires those same characteristics.

It’s a lesson that Nancy and Keith Kouris learned a long time ago.

The husband and wife duo are the owners of the Blue Duck Bakery Cafe, which they founded in Southampton nearly 25 years ago.

Building a business from scratch was not an easy or smooth process for them, but they kept at it and their dedication has paid off. After outgrowing their original location on Hampton Road in Southampton Village, Nancy and Keith expanded to their current location in Southold. They also added another smaller shop on Main Street in Greenport 10 years ago.

The pair say they were at the leading edge of introducing artisan bread to the area and admitted that it took time to catch on at first. Once people gained a taste and appreciation for the kind of hearty and crusty breads they were producing, the business took off. They went from making between 300 and 400 loaves daily — all by hand — in the early days, to making close to 800 per day, and expanding even more from there.

“At one point, we were making two or three thousand on a weekday and four or five thousand on a weekend,” Nancy said in an interview in September. “The product is all natural, with great ingredients, no chemicals or preservatives.”

Creating a natural product on such a large scale is what sets Blue Duck apart, Nancy added. The bakery also churns out plenty of other goods — scones, muffins, cakes and more that are popular items in their cafe storefronts — and also makes close to 2,000 pies during the summer months, selling them at local farm stands and markets.

Keith worked hard over the years building up Blue Duck’s wholesale arm, selling to markets and grocery stores from Montauk to Manhattan.

“We’re strong on the East End, but we have big accounts in Brooklyn and other areas that we deliver to every day,” Nancy said. “And plenty of restaurants and markets throughout Long Island.”

Keith jokes that getting into the bakery business was a bit of an “accident.”

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he worked delivering Italian bread for the franchise company Bellacicco. He said he’d always wanted to go into business, and that company offered a way to get his feet wet. After a few years, Keith and Nancy decided to pursue something “more brick and mortar,” as he put it, and they purchased an existing bakery in middle island that specialized in Scottish and Irish goods.

It was a learning experience, the couple said, but it wasn’t meant to last. After the lease ran out in roughly three and a half years, they moved on again, opening a new business, the Highland Bake Shop, in Lindenhurst. There, they made everything from haggis to meat pies and became even more accustomed to the bakery industry. Mother Nature played a role in what would be their next pivot.

“Hurricane Gloria wiped us out,” Keith said, referring to the Category 3 hurricane that hit Long Island in 1985.

After that, Keith got a job working for the King Kullen grocery chain, hired to revamp the baking program. He said he was lucky to get the job, which helped set him and Nancy up for eventual success with Blue Duck.

“I worked under some really great professional bakers,” he said, pointing out that many of the talented, old school Italian, German and Jewish bakers who had worked at private shops were lured to the grocer because it offered time off during holidays, no overnight shifts, and also had better equipment. Over time, as the grocery chain began to cut costs by relying more on frozen items and less on from-scratch baking, Keith decided it was time for a change again. He and Nancy took several business courses at Hofstra University, and wrote a business plan for a bakery they had spotted for sale in Southampton. Around the same time he also earned his certification from the French Culinary Institute’s International Bread Baking Program.

Keith said the Hofstra teacher encouraged them, but the head of the business program did not have much faith that they’d get off the ground.

“He said it was really unlikely that we’d get accepted for a loan,” Keith said.

They proved him wrong, getting approved for the loan and opening Blue Duck at the Hampton Road location on Columbus Day weekend of 1999. Then came another obstacle — three days after opening, a fire broke out in the store. It set them back, but only for about a month.

The rest was then history.

“The town supported us a lot,” Nancy said. “Even though people thought the bread was strange at first, that it was too crunchy. But eventually we started getting calls from restaurants.”

Nancy and Keith were making sourdough breads from sourdough starters long before it became a fad during the early days of the pandemic.

Staying true to their brand has been a key to their success, as has their commitment to the community. Nancy serves as the president of the Greenport Business Improvement District and had previously served on the Hampton Bays Chamber of Commerce. They’ve been committed to hiring local people and have even employed developmentally challenged individuals as well.

While the Blue Duck brand is now ubiquitous across the East End, the move from the South Fork to the North Fork was a necessary one in 2008, Nancy and Keith said.

“We were making so many breads and pies, and the Southampton location was too small,” Nancy said.

When they heard about a building on Main Road in Southold, with nearly 4,000 square feet of space to work with, they made an offer. The two-story building, located across from Mullen Motors, has 400 square feet of retail space up front, and 2,500 square feet of space for the baking and shipping operation.

Ten years ago, they added the Greenport location, in prime foot traffic territory, across the street from the popular carousel. They do baking there as well and also sell not only their wide array of baked goods but also soups and sandwiches.

With more than 40 years of experience baking and running a business, Nancy and Keith have learned a lot, and have plenty of advice and wisdom when it comes to not only running a successful business but mastering the art of baking, which has a reputation for being intimidatingly challenging. They have some advice.

“There’s no such thing as bad bread,” Keith says. “If you did it by hand, it’s still going to be fine. Don’t worry about your first or second results. Just enjoy the process. That’s what counts.”

It’s an important message, and a timely one too, as even the most novice or beginner bakers find an urge to get their hands floury in the kitchen once the weather turns colder. It’s a busy time of year for Blue Duck as well, with plenty of orders for autumn-inspired goods rolling in.

And of course, they deliver.

“On the North Fork, pumpkin is everything,” Nancy said. Blue Duck feeds that demand — literally — but does not fall into the trap of oversaturating the already maxed out demand for pumpkin spice everything. They do make pumpkin bread, scones and muffins, but also offer a pumpkin levain, or pumpkin sourdough bread, made with pumpkin puree but without the spicy overkill.

“The pumpkin levain is a sourdough, so it has a more earthy taste,” Nancy said. “It’s not meant to be pumpkin spice.”

The bakery also churns out plenty of pumpkin pies in the fall, along with other autumn staples such as coconut custard pies and chocolate pecan pies.

Another popular offering is the Blue Duck sauerkraut rye, another sourdough bread.

“We put the sauerkraut into it, and it’s a dark rye bread,” Nancy said. “It disintegrates into the bread. We make it year round, but push it more in the colder weather. It’s great for Oktoberfest.”