- Our final story takes us to Oxford, where before sunrise, the ovens at Strong Arm Bakery are already blazing.

What began as a backyard bread business has grown into a community hub and a regional favorite known not only for its fresh pastries and hearty breads, but also for its beloved porch drop deliveries that bring homemade comfort straight to customers' doors.

[lively music] - Strong Arm Baking is a small bakery.

We're also a meal delivery service delivering all around the Triangle area, but also just serving our community in Oxford with fresh bread and pastries.

[light guitar music] The reason why we exist here is to serve our community.

So we're doing breakfast and lunch and occasionally popup dinners.

But what we offer most is just like the experience of coming in and feeling really welcome and comfortable.

And you can come in and stay all day and just make it your own house.

[light guitar music] We make biscuits in the morning.

We also have our croissants that we're rolling, hand rolled every day.

A lot of our menu is based around sandwiches.

We offer a blue plate special, which rotates.

We're baking the bread every day.

You know, we have these mountains of beautiful, fresh bread that's just flour, water, and salt coming out, and we're really trying to highlight that.

We also just have like a team of bread bakers that are just so talented and they're paying so much attention to, like, every second of the process.

When you're trying to work with wild yeast, being able to produce such consistent bread that's so beautiful and delicious is just so impressive to me, and our team does it every single day.

[light guitar music] For the most part, it's simple food.

We're not reinventing the wheel.

But there's a lot of care and effort to make it the best that it could possibly be.

And I think people realize that and it keeps them ordering every week, because at the end of the day, it is food that you wanna eat and it feels good.

Strong Arm started in 2014.

It was my husband and I's side hustle.

We just started by building a wood-fired oven in our backyard, and we just really wanted kind of like a creative outlet.

Around the end of 2019, we were gearing up to make this move into the building in Oxford, and we had... Kind our staff were picking up, we were really busy, and then COVID happened.

We always said we were like a jet plane ready to take off, but we didn't have the rest of the runway built.

So we were ready for action and pushing so hard, and then at that same time, everything shut down.

- Julia came up with the idea to do porch drop and have people go online and order things and we would just drop it on their porch.

And so she called me and she said, "Mom, I need you to do deliveries for Strong Arm."

And I said, "Okay, no problem," you know, not really knowing what I was getting into.

- Yay!

Oh, thank you so much.

- [Sarah] How are you this morning?

- [Customer] I'm good.

I'm good.

I'm good.

I'm good.

- Yes, yes, yes.

- Yummy, yummy.

- What we're aiming to do is bring you food that you would wanna cook for yourself if you had the time, with ingredients that you would wanna purchase for yourself if you had the time and the ability to go out to the farmer's market and shop what's absolutely best.

- Out of our cooler, we need spaghetti, banana pudding, bok choy, ramen salad, and broccoli bisque.

It is food that we loved, you know, when my my daughters were growing up.

And just to know that those same foods are being served around people's table today is a pretty delightful thing for all of us.

- We don't have to cook tonight.

- I know.

I said to Emily, "We know what they're having for supper for the next few nights, don't we?"

- Yeah, it's nice.

- Yeah.

- I could spend all my time in my weed gardens.

- Yeah, yeah.

Yep.

It's a treat to have it come to you, isn't it?

- It's wonderful, yeah.

- All right.

We're off.

- Okay.

Have a great day.

- Thank you.

Bye-bye.

- Bye.

- The people that live here are so unbelievably supportive of their small businesses.

That's what's allowed us to survive, absolutely, is people just coming in the door every day, and not just for a loaf of bread, they come in the door because they wanna see us survive.

And that's what it takes, is, like, a community commitment to help the businesses that you want to see open, and we have that in Oxford.

[light guitar music] - Strong Arm Baking Company is at 117 Main Street in Oxford, and they're open Monday through Saturday.

For more information, give them a call at 919-339-4350 or go online to strongarmbaking.com.