Popular Midlands bakery Blue Flour is closing after 17 years. Here are the final days
For nearly two decades, Midlands residents have delighted in the cookies, biscuits and other treats that have come out of the ovens at Blue Flour Bakery in Irmo.
But soon those ovens will be turned off for the final time.
Blue Flour owner Teri Pringle recently announced she will close the bakery, located at 7703 St. Andrews Road in Irmo, after 17 years in business. It will be open two days next week for its finale, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday, May 11 and Friday, May 12.
Pringle said customers can begin making online cookie pre-orders for those final days at 6 p.m. Friday, May 5, at blueflour.com. There also will be a limited amount of cookies available for walk-in customers on May 11 and May 12, and they will be sold on a first come, first served basis.
While Blue Flour has made its mark on the Midlands culinary scene for the better part of two decades, Pringle said the time was simply right to retire the Irmo bakery.
“I just want to spend more time with friends and family,” she told The State. “I’ve got two girls in grad school, so this gives me more time to go travel and visit with them.”
Aside from the Irmo shop, there also once was a Blue Flour location on Main Street in Columbia. It was open from 2016 until fall 2020.
Before going into the bakery business, Pringle had a career in the hotel and hospitality industry. She worked for the Marriott corporation and the Hilton corporation, working in roles in catering and as a director of sales. She was later able to meld those business capabilities with her personal love of baking.
“I had a lot of background in marketing, branding and food and beverage,” she said. “Baking, I just did it for fun. It wasn’t something I went to school for. But, it seemed to all work out.”
Anyone who has ever had one of Blue Flour’s sweet, decadent cookies can confirm it did, indeed, work out. The cookies are, frankly, massive, with Pringle confirming that some of the cookies weighed in at nearly a half-pound each.
Customer loyalty has been a key to Blue Flour’s popularity through the years, Pringle said. She has seen generations of folks come through the Irmo shop’s doors.
“They are the ones who have made us successful,” Pringle said. “For all those years, the same people kept coming in. We have seen people who have been pregnant and their families come in and now their kids are 10, 12, 15. It’s like ‘Oh, my goodness.’ I think that’s the hardest thing to leave. It’s the customers that come in daily. It’s not so much that I’ll miss the actual baking part. It’s the seeing our customers every day.”
While it is exiting the Midlands scene, the Blue Flour name will live on in another part of the country. Pringle’s brother, Brian Florczyk, plans to use the name and offer baked goods at farmers’ markets in the Syracuse, New York, area.
Pringle admits there is a mix of feelings as she prepares to close the doors at Blue Flour.
“It’s always hard to close something you worked so hard to create,” Pringle said. “That’s the hard part of it. That, and missing the customers. But the great part, that I’m super excited about, is to enjoy some time doing what I’d like to do. As a bakery, we are working the holidays, we are working seven days a week. So it will be nice to wind down, do some projects at home. So, it’s like the whole bittersweet thing.”
