Anna Netri thanks keto, the pandemic, and her mother for Bibby’s Bakes.
Netri and her mother, Libby “Bibby” Brown, are partners in the business, which offers more than 50 gluten-free, sugarless baked items, which they sell online at bibbysbakes.com and at the Memphis Kitchen Co-Op at 7946 Fischer Steel Road in Cordova.
They introduced their frozen pizzas Wednesday, November 10th. “The crust is my invention,” Netri says. “We make cheddar biscuits and turn that into a biscuit bread. It’s really delicious and airy and crunchy, and we pile it high with toppings.”
In 15 minutes, “you’re eating something that is mind-blowing.”
Netri isn’t a fan of “healthy” food. “I don’t want it to taste healthy. When you put something from us in your mouth, it tastes like you’re eating junk. And it should.”
She didn’t cook much before the pandemic, Netri says. “I’d never call myself a cook. I always understood how flavors worked together.” Netri and Brown got on the high-fat, low-carb, gluten-free ketogenic “keto” diet before the pandemic. Before that, she says, “I would binge when nobody was looking and often it would be on crap like chips and bread. Keto was a good way of eating because it eliminated a lot of those trigger foods.”
Her mother found gluten-free recipes on the internet. “She made a lot of different kinds of breads and biscuits. They were delicious. And they were made with almonds.”
Netri was a life coach for years until the pandemic. “I was doing some re-evaluation of my life before I decided to start it up again. And I just kind of let it go with no real plans of what to do.”
She thought about her mother’s biscuits. “So, last year, I just looked at her one day and said, ‘I wonder if we could sell these biscuits?’ People on these diets don’t have anything like this and don’t know where to get them.” And, she adds, “Most gluten-free things taste like dirt.”
Netri, who has “the entrepreneurial brain,” wondered what else they could make. “I take the different recipes of things she did and develop them further to make our own unique recipes. Our biscuits went through tweaks for eight months before they finally got to be our signature biscuits.”
They began selling the biscuits on Nextdoor. “Within 10 minutes we had two people who wanted some of these biscuits.”
The business “took off.” They added cookies and other desserts, including little cakes with whipped cream in the middle and covered with ganache.
They are constantly coming up with more items. “We do stuff for breakfast. We sell sausage and biscuits, sausage and egg and cheese biscuits, which are so good. We’ve got tons of desserts, muffins, cookies. And then we do casseroles and dinners. We do a keto shepherd’s pie that’s amazing, a meatloaf, and one of the people’s favorites — my signature recipe —a Mexican chicken and rice fajita casserole.”
They also make full-size cakes and a French silk pie, which Netri describes as “melt in your mouth.”
Their cauliflower mashed potatoes would be “perfect for a Thanksgiving meal. It tastes just like mashed potatoes.”
Bibby’s Bakes was “just a cottage bakery” until Netri and Brown moved into a commercial kitchen, Memphis Kitchen Co-Op.
In addition to selling at the Memphis Kitchen Co-Op and online, Netri says. “In just a few weeks, we’re going to be in Crossroads Vendor Market in Olive Branch.”
But they don’t want to get too big, Netri says. “It’s just the two of us. We do all the work. And we just got into this thing for a little extra money.”
Working at Bibby’s Bakes does have its benefits, Netri says. “I eat way too much of our food. Nobody should eat as much almond flour as I do. But I still haven’t had sugar in over three years. I don’t miss it because my life is filled with sweet treats.”