BamBam Bakery owner Tina Cromwell, center, with her daughter, Michela Micalizio, and her brother, Jim Fitzgerald. Both Micalizio and Fitzgerald work at the Bakery. Eloise Goldsmith / The Forecaster

Housed in a low, tan building at a busy intersection off of I-295, BamBam Bakery in Falmouth is both unmissable and unobtrusive.

In March, the allergy-friendly bake shop opened up its new location at the corner of Bucknam Road and Middle Road. Waiting in your car at the light, you have time to consider impulsively pulling into the parking lot to buy yourself a treat.

Inside, there are cookies, brownies, bread, cupcakes – the list goes on. And if you didn’t already know, it’s not immediately obvious that the bakery is entirely gluten free. Many of its products are also dairy free, and goods are labeled to note whether they have other allergens, like nuts.

“People come in here looking for bread,” said Tina Cromwell, who has owned BamBam Bakery since 2017. “We can’t make enough bread, really.”

Cromwell has always worked in restaurants, and when she learned that BamBam’s previous owner – who opened the shop in 2011 – was selling, she decided she would take the leap.

Cromwell raised some $25,000 from friends and family and took out a loan in order to purchase the turnkey operation from the old owner. She inherited the name BamBam Bakery, but came up with the current logo, an “exploding” cupcake (a cupcake with a lit wick coming out of it), herself. She said she felt confident of the bakery’s market viability when she purchased it because it had already been up and running for six years.

After she purchased the business she relied on the SCORE mentoring program, which provides free mentoring services to U.S. business owners and is funded in part by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

“I understand the hardships and the ins and outs and how a business model for a restaurant or a food establishment is very different than, like, Shaw’s,” she said. The rest was learning by doing. “I figured it out.”

But Cromwell wasn’t totally new to baking. Michela Micalizio, Cromwell’s daughter, who now works at BamBam, grew up making wedding cakes and birthday cakes with her mom. Micalizio recalled riding in the car on dirt roads, stabilizing the cakes so they didn’t fall over. “We did that a lot,” she said.

Cromwell’s son also works for the business intermittently (he’s currently in school), as does her brother, Jim Fitzgerald. The business has four full-time employees and three part time.

During COVID, the bakery underwent a transition period. Until 2020, BamBam had a space on Commercial Street in Portland, but during the pandemic their rent became too expensive and they decided to leave.

For a while Cromwell tried renting a space just to bake and doing only online orders; later she tried baking out of her own home. As a Falmouth resident, she said she kept her eye on the current store location, which previously was Ela Market and Grill. Cromwell started leasing the space late last year, but didn’t open doors until this spring.

During the pandemic, “everyone said, ‘Oh, we should share a kitchen.’ And I can’t do that because I need a gluten-free kitchen,” said Cromwell. It’s one of a number of additional considerations that a gluten-free bakery has to contend with.

“There is a crazy (price) difference of what I combine to make a flour blend to make a cinnamon roll as opposed to someone (using) all-purpose flour.”

A gluten-free bakery in the Kansas City area did a breakdown of the price of regular flour versus gluten-free flour in 2019 and found that Gold Medal All-Purpose Flour was priced at $0.15 per cup, while Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free 1-to-1 Baking Flour was priced at $0.73 price per cup.

An article in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology analyzed bread prices in 2023 and found that the average price of white bread at grocery chains was $1.70 per loaf, compared with gluten-free bread prices, which were an average of $5.70 per loaf.

In order to prevent passing off too much of those costs to customers, the business also sells less traditional bakery food that has a higher profit margin. It’s more expensive to make a gluten-free oatmeal raisin cookie as opposed to a gluten-free pizza or gluten-free sandwich, according to Cromwell. An oatmeal raisin cookie at Cromwell’s shop costs $4, and a cinnamon roll is $5.

The business has also been impacted by rising prices. Cromwell estimates that all her ingredients have increased in price 30% since inflation ticked upwards in the past few years.

Nicholas Pyle, the president of the Independent Bakers Association, a trade group that represents 200 family-owned wholesale bakeries, said that a 30% increase on inputs is “par for the course.”

Commodity prices have cooled some since the pandemic, he said, but bakers must also contend with issues like the skyrocketing price of cocoa and federal protections on domestic sugar production that mean American consumers pay more for sugar.

Additionally, consumer demand isn’t as strong as expected. “This summer was awful. It was supposed to be … great,” Cromwell said. “But we’re barely squeaking by.”

She said she’s spoken with other businesses in town, like coffee shops, who said they have also experienced this. Retail sales nationally slackened in June, but picked up again in July, according to August data from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Looking ahead, she’s feeling more optimistic about the winter months. “Thanksgiving and Christmas are usually huge for us,” and now more customers have figured out where the business is.

Some customers, like Beth Williams of Cumberland, have followed BamBam through all its locations. Williams’ 9-year-old grandson is both dairy free and gluten free, so he gets his birthday cake from BamBam every year. Because of all the allergies he deals with, the bakery is an important place for him, said Williams.

That day, she was on her way to pick him up and was stopping by to get him a treat.