The renowned Birdsville Bakery, known for novelty pies and its spot amongst the red dunes, has changed hands to the same family who recently purchased the Birdsville Hotel last year.
Courtney Ellis said he and his wife Talia said when they became owners of the hotel, they had no intention of also buying the bakery.
Mr Ellis is well known in the region as the co-founder of Outback Spirit — a travel company he and his brother began two decades ago and sold in the last two years.
He said the hotel and bakery would be able to operate in conjunction with each other.
"Given the bakery has been closed for a while, it dawned on us fairly quickly that it was a real sore point for the town that it was closed," he said.
"We came to the conclusion [that] it would be best for the hotel to buy the bakery and have it all run as one."
He said running isolated businesses had challenges with staff, stock, and resources but running the two businesses will have advantages — including having one manager handling both businesses.
"Having it tied up with the hotel is going to make life a lot easier," Mr Ellis said.
"Ordering, using the supply track, bringing staff in and out, sharing staff between two properties, it just — it offers a lot of flexibility."
However the timing of the purchase was less than ideal, with Coronavirus concerns recently prompting the shire mayor to turn away all visitors for the entirety of 2020.
Mr Ellis said while there was no point in opening the bakery while coronavirus travel restrictions were in place, he and his manager had been considering a soft opening for locals.
"We're trying to get a baker in there to cook some local bread … [ we don't know] whether we open the bakery, we might sell bread and fresh items through the hotel," he said.
"The plan is to have it ready… getting it all up and ready, cleaned, cleaning up the gardens, buying some new furniture, we've got a couple of really good coffee machines which are sitting there ready to go.
"We can open it now, but there really isn't much point when there's so many travel restrictions."
