Great Harvest Bread in Missoula

When Linda and Dave opened Missoula’s Great Harvest in July 1995, it was the seventh bakery in their family.  The opening was the culmination of a group effort involving family from both sides of the continental divide.  Dave’s family, from Billings, helped with planning. His brothers and sisters brought valuable experience to the table, having already started six Great Harvest bakeries beginning in 1980.  Linda’s roots in Missoula paid off during the build-out.  Her extended family could often be found working on the construction site.  And later, all the nieces and nephews did stints working at the bakery over the years.   

When the Missoula bakery opened, Great Harvest was already almost 20 years old.  It was invented in 1976 by two young college graduates from Connecticut, Pete and Laura Wakeman. They stumbled across an old bakery in downtown Great Falls, closed for years and gathering dust.  Having fallen in love with baking in college, they rented the building, cleaned up the old equipment, and opened the first Great Harvest with a total investment of $800.  Back then, most bread was made in factories and shipped in on a semi.  So Pete and Laura caused quite a stir in Great Falls by baking hand-kneaded bread with wheat they bought from local farmers and ground into flour.  Soon other people wanted to learn to bake Great Harvest Bread.  The Wakemans trained them and sold them the recipes, and turned them loose to start their own Great Harvest bakeries.  The only rule was – no rules!  Pete and Laura hated conformity and believed in freedom and creative innovation.  So if you visit another Great Harvest, you’ll notice right away that it’s nothing like your Missoula bakery, and that’s a good thing.
   

Our mission here is to bring you the best whole grain breads on the planet, and provide service as great as our bread.  We believe eating whole grain bread is much better for your long-term health than white bread.  And Great Harvest is by far the best whole grain bread we’ve ever tasted. It’s a lot of fun working at a small neighborhood bakery.  We love it because it’s a way of reclaiming a treasure that was lost in the modern era.  Neighborhood bakeries have been around since the dawn of civilization, and we love ours for the age-old reasons:  the smell of bread baking, simple hard work, and being a neighborhood social gathering spot.