Blog: Dulcedo Patisserie Eddington

Eddington’s latest retailer, the much loved Cambridge Patisserie, Dulcedo, opened its doors this month.

Dulcedo Eddington serves freshly baked breads, fresh coffee, chocolates, pastries, lunch options and regular pizza nights. Four years ago we started up on Hills Road, we just wanted to get on the map and found a site that we could use to develop all our products. We don’t have a retail background so we were learning constantly for the first year.

When we were on Hills Road we had four bakeries within 100 yards of us, so selling bread was not an option because we didn’t want to compete with those products. We always had the idea of moving to a larger site, expanding and adding the bakery aspect to the business. Eddington is great, with the community and there are no bakeries in the immediate surrounding areas, so this was a great chance for us to push our business forward.

Since opening we have had a really, really amazing response. Everyone’s been really impressed and we’ve had really great feedback. We have been super busy and sold out pretty much every day on pastries, so we’re gauging what the demand is at the moment. The Eddington community are really engaged on social media and involved which has been a really pleasant surprise. We want to get a closer relationship with our customers, as we have always had a strong loyal customer base.

In terms of a working environment it’s great to work in a nice open kitchen, we’ve got more staff than we had before which is what we want to do. I want train up a lot of young chefs, I enjoy teaching people. It is great for us to be in a place that’s busy enough for us to bring on people and bring them through into the industry.

We took the site during the COVID-19 pandemic because we had noticed that bakeries are thriving at the moment because they can still operate as a delivery or takeaway service. We think that even if we have another full lockdown we will still be able to offer breads and different options to people. For now we are working hard to keep the store safe; we only let a few customers in the shop at a time and we only have seating outside. Until things change and it is safe to do so, we are not looking at including inside seating.

In the future there are other parts of the business we would like to expand, such as chocolate workshops, ice-creams in summer and long-term we have still got our eyes on a bigger place in Eddington for a restaurant. The idea would be for sit-down menus in the evening with different themes, as we didn’t want to be tied to just doing one type of food.

If customers have ideas we want to hear them – we are really open and have a really good bunch of chefs here so we are happy to move with the community’s demand, whatever that may be.

Dulcedo Eddington’s opening hours are Monday-Saturday 7:30am – 4:30pm and Sunday 9am – 2pm.

• Dulcedo Instagram