Interview with Bollo's Owner Ranae Gillie

The smell of fresh coffee hits you as soon as you walk in the doors of Bollo’s Bakery and Coffee Shop.  The warm aroma intensifies as you take a seat and realize that those enticing looking treats that you saw when you first walked in are made from scratch in the back.   

Owner and baker, Ranae Gillie, wouldn’t have it any other way.  Gillie and her husband have spent over 25 years in the restaurant business in Blacksburg due to the great success of Gillies Restaurant.  As the first restaurant to serve organic coffee in Blacksburg in the 1980s, Gillie’s has continued to please customers with their home-made and vegan-friendly foods.  Gillie’s was recently recognized as the best breakfast in the New River Valley by the Roanoke Times.

Gillie’s branched out in 1994 to open Bollo’s Bakery and has succeeded in carrying on the made-from-scratch tradition that continues today.  Argued as having some of the best brownies and organic coffee in town, Bollo’s is a step away from your average coffee chain.  What follows is a selection of questions and answers with Bollo’s owner, Ranae Gillie.

Q:  When did you start baking, and did you always know that opening a bakery was what you wanted to do?
Gillie:  “I’ve been baking since I was eleven years old, taught by my mother.  In my generation and where I grew up, we had home economics; that’s where we learned to bake and do all the things before getting married.  But, I’ve always baked and when we started Gillie’s we did our own baking, and we’ve always made from scratch since.  It’s something that I find relaxing and fun.  Now when you have to bake for the orders sometimes its not as fun because you feel as if you have to get them done, but I still feel it is rewarding to pull something out of the oven that you know you made from scratch, from raw ingredients and not out of the box- you know what’s in it.”

Q:  Where have all the recipes come from?
Gillie: “It’s a hodge-podge.  Some are family, some we discovered on our own, and sometimes they are mistakes.  One time I was doing too many things at once, making three different sets of cookies, and I forgot, and ended up mixing them all together.  I think it turned out to be an almond peanut-butter-crunch cream cookie, which turned out great and everyone kept asking, ‘When are you going to make those again?’ and I said, “Well I don’t know, you know, I can’t remember what went in it!”

Q:  What would you say your best sellers are?
Gillie: “Our best sellers are our oat fudge bars and our pumpkin chocolate-chip muffins.  And those are both something that just kind of came up.”

Q: After opening Gilies in 1974, what was the progression to opening Bollo’s?
Gillie:  “My husband started Gillie’s in 1974 from scratch. It started out as a nice little restaurant where we always made soup, salad, and bread, and everything was always made from scratch and was always vegetarian.  It evolved from an ice cream store to a full-blown vegetarian restaurant.  During that whole time period, we also did everything in between: we made bread, we made pastries, (and) we had some organic coffee back in the 1980s when nobody drank organic coffee. We were busting in our seems at Gillie’s; it was hard to do everything, so when the space became available in 1994, I opened Bollo’s.”

Q: How do you respond to one review of Bollo’s that describes it as “authentic” and the “heart of Blacksburg”?
Gillie: “Really? Maybe because we’re the oldest! Well, I’m flattered! I don’t know if they associate Gillie’s and Bollo’s as a place where people can come and be themselves, and I’m sure you can do that at other places, but it seems that we attract a different type of person… I’ve always strived to make others feel comfortable.”

Q:  Do feel like your customers appreciate the organic products you offer?
Gillie: “I think my vegan customers really appreciate that I run vegan items. I don’t think the customers care if it’s all organic or not, I think they care if it’s vegan or not.  Yes, we use organic tofu and organic soy milk, but I don’t think they care that not all the time flour and the baking powder and the eggs are organic.” 

Q: Are you yourself a vegan?
Gillie: “No, I really like dairy. I don’t care about the egg, but I do like dairy.”

Q:  How do you feel your organic coffee selection compares to competitive chains like Starbucks?
Gillie:  “I don’t go into Starbucks, I don’t go into any of the other coffee shops, so I’m not sure with an unbiased point of view as to how I feel. I will say this, that I discovered equal exchange before any body else did among the coffee shops here.  Equal exchange, which is my first care trade organic coffee, I found them in 1985 at a food show and I started using them as my gourmet coffee at Gille’s. And now I see that just about everyone has cases of equal exchange.”

Q: How long ago did you first establish wireless and do you feel that it was necessary to bring more customers in?
Gillie: “Well, I think we just did that within the last year.  It took a lot of convincing on my employee’s part.  I guess I lack behind everyone else on the wireless being from the generation that I’m from. I always say I didn’t even have calculators growing up, so wireless to me is so different.  I didn’t feel as if we needed it to draw people in, but I do it more as a service for the customer. Now I see that we have more laptops than we used to.”

Q:  What would you say your average customer ratio is?
Gillies: “I would say depending on the day. In the morning, mostly students come in on their way to class. I’d say 35 percent are students, 40 percent up to the age of 35, and then maybe 25 percent older people.  Surprisingly, we do get a lot of older people, especially on Saturdays, coming in for bread and coffee. But, I must say the majority of my cliental are students.”

Q: Do you use Gilie’s restaurant to advertise for Bollo’s and vice versa?
Gillie: “What I do is I have a joint advertisement, and again, my forte is not advertising. I do not do the ads that well, but I know that we usually have a square, one-half for Gillie’s and one-half is for Bollo’s, so that people can see that we are joint at the hip.”

Q: Beyond the dollar coupon books, are other coupons available to promote business?
Gillie: “At Newman Library, there are free Bollo’s coffee coupons.  We usually grab people as freshmen or sophomores and they will be very loyal customers and then they leave because they are done with graduate school or they get jobs.  We actually just went through a big flux, so we are trying to get the new freshmen’s attention.” 

Q: The Bollo’s website is very simple. Would you every think to expand and put the menu online?
Gillies:  “I know I have an ad for Gilies on www.biglicku.com and I know that I have a woman that’s a graduate student at Radford that’s working on my website. We put together the website a long time ago, but I don’t really know how to do any of that, the idiot that I am. But anyway, it’s always a work in progress.”

Q:  Have you looked into radio or television advertisement?
Gillies: “I did television once… I’ve done radio several times. In fact, I have a radio ad type thing on WUVT and, believe it or not, I actually have a radio ad for Bollo’s on ESPN.  This guy came in and just kind of talked us into it.  It actually turned out not bad, and I was all ready to hate it! I was very surprised.  I had to ask myself, ‘Am I throwing money into the air on people that will never come in?’ But, I did get a call from a person in Hillsborough, N.C. to make a vegan cake for a women’s grandchild.  So, gradually after 15 years, it’s coming around.”

Q: What’s a typical day like being the owner of a bakery?
Gillie:  “Well, there is no such thing as a typical day because you never know what’s going to happen and what’s going to break.  An easy day would be to come into work having everyone arrived on time where nothing has broken and you have your restaurant filled with customers.  But, that doesn’t always happen. There are always people that are late and you never know if your refrigerator is going to break or if your oven is going to quit working in middle of baking -all of these things have happened- but we’ve been here long time, we have a good crew, a pretty tight group, that know their jobs and do it well. But, there are always room for improvements and now its just competing with the rest of the world.”

Q: Is there anything else we should know about Bollo’s?
Gillie: “Well, I do know that I offer organic coffee not every day, but just about every day, where as the other places do not… I think that our customers special. You can sell something even if, for example, you forgot to put sugar in your scones.  I mean, I think the customers are forgiving because you can tell them you screwed up, but they know that you made that from scratch and it wasn’t delivered and you didn’t open up a plastic tub and scoop it out at baked it.  I know our customers appreciate that…”