Innoship Clients Stories: How Innoship helped Grain Trip, a “different” bakery that takes you on a journey around the world, to sell internationally

Grain Trip has recently become a client of the Innoship platform. For this reason, we invited Valentina Ion, one of the two business partners, to tell us more about their story, the reasoning for which they chose us as a partner, and how Innoship helped them to sell internationally.

Why Grain Trip? What is the story behind the brand?

The idea came naturally, I have long been passionate about bread and pastry made with sourdough. I studied this field for many years, and over time, this idea of a bakery based on sourdough flourished.

From the moment we started thinking about opening a bakery, we knew we wanted to have a ”different” bakery… otherwise, we knew we wanted to have our own identity and not just copy other successful models, because we thought this was the shortest way to failure.

Being passionate about this field, I`ve read over time many books, articles, which explored unlimited possibilities when we talk about bread. Because bread is one of the oldest treats consumed by man, practically any country has at least one or two specialties of bread or pastry. So, we thought that rather than limiting ourselves to the specifics of a country, it would be more interesting to walk around the world, telling stories from France, Italy, Spain, but also from Uzbekistan, Yemen, Denmark, or Brazil.

We are seeing more and more public openness to the new, including bread. If you did not eat the same food every day, why would you eat the same bread every day?

What is the Homebakers project about?

It all started one day during this spring in the quarantine, when we felt exhausted by everything that was happening. We created a Facebook post, and we invited those who wanted to learn growing sourdough from scratch and then made their own bread. So, if we were to close our bakery for a while because of the COVID-19 situation, people could still make their own bread.

We expected a few people to join us, maybe a few dozen, but by the next day, that post had gone viral, had hundreds of shares, and thousands of people responded positively to our invitation. Today the Facebook community has over 5,000 members, who generate an impressive volume of content, make bread, and always try to improve their products.

Homebakers was a project we had been thinking about for many years, even before we thought about opening the bakery. Being a home baker myself, I dreamed of a place where I could find both relevant information and quality ingredients to use in making bread. Because in Romania I couldn’t find the most suitable flour, I usually came back from all the holidays in France and Italy with my luggage full of ingredients.

We started working on the Homebakers platform immediately after we formed the Facebook group, realizing that a web platform is much more suitable to share the content with our customers.

Why did you choose to use the Innoship platform for delivery management?

A great wish we had was to be able to deliver both in Romania and in Europe because we discovered that the members of our community are from all over the world.

Innoship seems to us a very good option because we can integrate the services of several couriers on the same platform. So, Innoship helps us to select automatically the best transport option, either in Romania or abroad.

Moreover, the specificity of our business consists of the fact that the packages we send are of low value and weigh a lot, which is very problematic because this is very expensive.

How does the delivery process go before Innoship?

The process, before Innoship, involved the manual introduction of AWBs, calling the courier, tracking the package, and so on. Now everything is much simpler, Innoship being integrated with the eCommerce platform, orders are exported every day, and Innoship uses its magic algorithm to select the best courier, which is automatically notified that it has to pick up a package from us.

Finally, what are the three aspects of the Innoship platform that you recommend to online store owners?

If I had to choose only three aspects that I would recommend further to online store owners, I would mention: