Andy Kadin made his way from New Jersey to L.A. to pursue a career as a writer. But after 10 years of successful unhappiness writing for TV and advertising, something had to change. He always had quiet designs on a life in food and scrambled to take as many restaurant jobs and stages as he could, working in a pub, a sandwich shop, and several bakeries. Kadin committed to baking bread every day, giving the loaves away to friends. One such loaf made it to Dune, and so impressed owner Scott Zwiezen that he convinced Kadin to supply the restaurant with daily ciabatta. From that ciabatta, Bub and Grandma’s was born in Kadin’s home kitchen, to operating out of tiny commissary space, to now a maxed out 6,000 square foot warehouse where he and his team produce more than 2,000 loaves of bread per day, 362 days a year. You can find Bub and Grandma’s loaves in some of L.A.’s best restaurants, including Osteria Mozza, Bestia, Destroyer, Tilda, Kismet, Sqirl as well as at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, and a long list of other fine establishments. Building on demand for his hand-shaped, slow-fermented loaves, Kadin is set to open his own sandwich shop and retail space soon. The following is a conversation about reinvention, honesty, managing anxiety, building a business built to bend to happiness, and of course - bread making.
Andy Kadin made his way from New Jersey to L.A. to pursue a career as a writer. But after 10 years of successful unhappiness writing for TV and advertising, something had to change. He always had quiet designs on a life in food and scrambled to take as many restaurant jobs and stages as he could, working in a pub, a sandwich shop, and several bakeries. Kadin committed to baking bread every day, giving the loaves away to friends. One such loaf made it to Dune, and so impressed owner Scott Zwiezen that he convinced Kadin to supply the restaurant with daily ciabatta. From that ciabatta, Bub and Grandma’s was born in Kadin’s home kitchen, to operating out of tiny commissary space, to now a maxed out 6,000 square foot warehouse where he and his team produce more than 2,000 loaves of bread per day, 362 days a year.
You can find Bub and Grandma’s loaves in some of L.A.’s best restaurants, including Osteria Mozza, Bestia, Destroyer, Tilda, Kismet, Sqirl as well as at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, and a long list of other fine establishments. Building on demand for his hand-shaped, slow-fermented loaves, Kadin is set to open his own sandwich shop and retail space soon.
The following is a conversation about reinvention, honesty, managing anxiety, building a business built to bend to happiness, and of course - bread making.
LINKS:
[00:00:00] Andy: I am an extremely anxious person. That is just my life. That's always been that way. For me, the anxiety means that if things are not running well, if the bread is not good, if we're having problems with a particular product or a particular person or a particular customer or whatever, those things, can't just sit. I need to resolve them as quickly as possible, or I personally am totally fucked up and can't function properly. In a way that [00:00:30] fear of, of embarrassment or failure or hurting someone or, or making something that's less than, uh, than the, then its potential is what drives the bakery to some degree. And I have other anxious employees now running the bakery who like, you know, our, our care to the same degree. They really need everything to be humming so that they can feel good. I'm not trying to make waves or, or like, pretend like I'm some kind of leader or something like that. Cause I'm not, I'm just a guy and [00:01:00] I'm just trying to figure this shit out. Just like everybody else and life is a mystery to me. And, and you can pull that apart psychologically, you know, in a lot of different ways, maybe it's because a fear of embarrassment or maybe it's because, you know, we put too much stock in what other people think of us. And like, if we're not doing the best we can, then people aren't gonna think the best of us, but my goal for myself is just, I don't want to do anything in the world that makes me feel gross. I just don't want to do anything with my life that makes me feel like I'm going to have a regret on my death bed. [00:01:30]
[00:01:31] Jordan: Welcome to the Prix Fixe Podcast, a podcast where the new voices in the food and beverage world share their stories and journeys in their own words. The show is produced and edited by me, Jordan Haro in Los Angeles, California.
"Todos los dolores son menos con pan." "All sorrows are less with bread." Cervantes.
Since ancient [00:02:00] times, bread has been synonymous with friendship. Flip through history books or religious texts from across the globe and bread was there, but it's never losing its edge. There's so much of it and so many different kinds and it's all so delicious. You think this stuff would be easy to make, but it's not. Remember that time. You baked bread at home and it almost turned out like how you thought it might? Your friends were probably kind and said, "it's delicious," when [00:02:30] you and them both knew it was not. But hey, it's bread and you're together with friends. C'est la Vie. Now imagine changing that scenario to be baking hundreds of different kinds of loaves every day at wholesale scale for clients paying you with the expectation of receiving gourmet bread, that slots in alongside their own food preparations. While the latter scenario may seem stressful and more chaotic to some it's at least more honest. Bub and Grandma's is regarded as the [00:03:00] best wholesale bakery in Los Angeles. If you've dined out in LA, chances are you've tasted one of their sourdoughs, ciabattas, or focaccias at one of their many fine dining or fast casual clients. Six years ago, their founder, Andy Kadin left a career in advertising to bake bread. His goal: to open a sandwich shop in Los Angeles. Today, he's finally opening up that sandwich shop, but it took a detour to get there, making bread for one of the most respected American bread makers, Nancy Silverton [00:03:30] and re-inventing the gluten landscape of Southern California. You know how much we love detours here on this podcast. The following is an enlightening conversation on bread making, re-invention, scaling operational systems, building an equitable business with fair wages for employees, and ruminations on honesty.
Also with the holidays, we're going to be taking a one week hiatus, but look forward to sharing more Prix Fixe Podcast with you soon. Let's [00:04:00] listen in.
[00:04:05] Andy: My name's Andy Kadin, and I am the owner of Bub and Grandma's a wholesale bread bakery in Los Angeles. I've always been an obsessive. Everything, uh, an obsessive cook and learner of things. And, you know, try, I get very obsessed with particular projects and kind of go down roads for a while until I explore it or lose interest and then move on to something else. And it typically it's flowed like that for my entire life, until [00:04:30] this were something that I was interested in, kind of took off. Um, but it wasn't bread that I was interested in. I mean, I was interested in bread, but the reason why I started baking was because I wanted to open a sandwich shop in Los Angeles, which now we're going to do, which is great. No intention of opening a bread bakery had no idea how to bake bread when I started, which was about six months before the business began. So I. I was working at, uh, an advertising agency. I moved to LA, I lived in Boston for two years at working at an agency there and moved to [00:05:00] LA to work at another spot called 72 and Sunny. And, you know, was really excited. It was this kind of new hot shop out here and got out here and then immediately realized that I can't do that anymore. I was suppressing the knowledge that I believed advertising to be an evil trade, manipulating, and just kind of unnecessary. It's that kind of thing that happens in life all the time, where things are going really well in your career, uh, and moving in the right direction. But you're also combating, [00:05:30] you know, your subconscious telling you that you're a piece of shit. My subconscious tells me I'm a piece of shit, no matter what I'm doing, but that's just my own. That's my, that's my battle for my life. But, you know, I, I, it was, it was truthful to some degree and I basically got here, didn't know a ton of people in Los Angeles, started my job. And then within a year, just walked out one day and just bailed. Uh, it took a couple of times to catch on. I started freelancing a bit and took another full-time job for a year, but I knew that I [00:06:00] wanted to not be that kind of person that works in a corporate universe, talking about the things that they want to do with their life, for their entire life never doing any of them because they're too busy with the job that they don't like. I just didn't want to be bullshit anymore. So I said, all right, I'm going to start writing business plans. I'm going to start working at as many kitchens as that will take me for free and just tried to learn as much as I could about the restaurant universe and what it would take to open something, because for some odd reason, and this is still the case, there really [00:06:30] aren't that many sandwich shops in Los Angeles of note. There are plenty, but none that are great and coming from New Jersey and New York, I lived for five years and grew up just outside. Sandwich shops are, you know, are all over the place, easy to stumble into. And they're all pretty serviceable. When you, when you get down to it. Where are the sandwiches? You know, we have Wax Paper and we can, we can't all, or at least on the east side, we have, you know, Wax Paper, um, who are fantastic and have been great friends of ours for a long, but we need more sandwiches. So hopefully they're coming, too, it seems like [00:07:00] there's more sandwich concepts out there in their kind of infancy phase. Uh, but are, are becoming more serious as they grow from pop-ups to something, um, you know, brick and mortar. So hopefully there's more. You know yeah, we're coming, but it'd be great to have five more places to explore. Yeah. I worked at Potato Chips Deli on the weekends in, um, near, uh, Erewhon off Beverley and I worked for a couple months at The Griffin in Atwater just tried to [00:07:30] like, get my kitchen feet. And, you know, I would go into Potato Chips every Saturday morning. And before anyone got there would print out all the receipts from the week prior so I would know what they sold, how much of, what they didn't care. They were very generous. But, um, that helped me to build out a data database of what to expect in terms of sales, breakdowns, and all that stuff. Which I built into business plans also, as part of that process was like, okay. It seems to be a reason why I don't like a lot of the sandwiches in Los [00:08:00] Angeles because the bread is bad, um, which is the chronic sort of typical affliction that around the world have is, is that you can have great ingredients in the middle, but if the bread is bad, it's just, it's moot. I just committed to baking bread just in the same way I committed to working in restaurants. So I like would basically wake up at four in the morning, bake some bread that I had mixed the day before mixed the bread mix the dough for the next day, drive to the studio. I was working, uh, on a TV show at the time, uh, writing, uh, or I was at an ad agency freelancing so that I had [00:08:30] money to live. Um, and I would just drop off the bread with all of the people I was working with. And they were really psyched and I was just experimenting with all sorts of different breads, just to try and find out what I might want to share with a particular bakery in town to have them make me something custom that hopefully they could use to wholesale as well or whatever they ended up doing with it. But that was my only intention was to try and pitch some bakeries on what they could potentially make for me that didn't actually, I never got to that stage because I was just giving away all of the bread I was making to all my friends, my freezer was full. [00:09:00] Um, and one of my friends, Jed Mayhew, who at the time was working at Dune in Atwater Village on the line, brought some of my ciabatta that I was fucking around with, to Scott, the owner and he cold called me out of the blue to just say, "Hey, do you want to make this ciabatta for us? It's better than what we're getting. And we'd love to work with someone who lives in the, in the area." And, you know, I was living in Mount Washington and Dune is 10 minutes away. So I just didn't think much about it. And I just said, "cool. Yeah, whatever." If we open the sandwich shop, maybe I'll wholesale a little, it'll be fine; instead of [00:09:30] making the bread in the morning and just, you know, bringing it to whatever studio or office I was working in, I would make it in the morning and drop it at Dune and then go to work. You know, no one told me or I never thought of that once you say "yes" to a restaurant that's open seven days a week that means you're open seven days a week. And as a person, who's making this stuff out of my house and my tiny, tiny house in my Home Depot oven that's all, you know, hacked and custom customized to make it work for a bread that gets baked out in the open, not in a cast iron, uh, combo cooker or [00:10:00] a, you know, a Le Creuset say or whatever it was, it was gnarly. Scott, the owner of dune decided to put our name, which I came up with on the phone with a lawyer trying to set up the business. Those are my two grandmas, Bub and Grandma. He just put the name on the, on the menu, on their little glass menu that they have inside. We would never ask anyone to do that. And they all seem to do it. Now, all of our accounts put our name on there and it's been like our basic marketing arm, our non-existent marketing arm. People started calling and it just [00:10:30] went crazy. So in the first six months I was mixing in my house, baking in my house to mixing in my house, baking in Town Pizza in Highland Park, which was not a good place to bake. You know, pizza ovens are extremely dry environments and you need a moist, you know, steam filled environment in order to get the proper lift on bread. But, you know, I tried to hack that together too, but that lasted for a few months and then Clark Street Bread, and it was in Grand Central Market at the time and they moved their baking operations to another facility, but their old oven and mixer were still [00:11:00] sitting there. So I rented that behind him, which was interesting. He was selling his bread retail. In front of me making my bread to go take out, to go drop off before going to a studio or office or whatever. And then I bought that oven and mixer from Zack at Clark Street, which I'm very thankful for. Uh, the timing was, is perfect. And then I moved in across the street , street from you, basically at a Fishburn Kitchens, my first 290 square foot closet that fit basically a table, a mixer and one rack and an oven. And that was it. [00:11:30] And it kept growing, at, at an absurd pace. That basically was like a three-year blackout period, trying to keep up, trying not to say "no," but realizing that I had to in order for us to not completely lose our lives. That's that takes us to the beginning of legitimacy. I would say some, some degree of legitimacy. I don't still don't feel very legit, but we're, we are so that's my own shit to deal with. But you [00:12:00] know...
So Christopher Lear, who is a friend of mine, uh, from before either of us were in food. Uh, I met him when I lived in Boston for two years. He's a musician who is a part owner of a bike shop there and friends with all my friends and played in bands with them. And we became fast buddies. When I moved to Los Angeles for that job at 72 and Sunny, Chris went to pastry school in Boston, and then two years later, moved out immediately got a job at Mozza. [00:12:30] Because he's just that way. And worked there for a little over a year with, you know, Mozza's pastry team. Was working at Tasting Kitchen in Venice, um, and then was running Tasting Kitchen's pastry department in Venice. And then, uh, the timing just worked out where he was burnt out there. And we were looking for a head baker and, and he came on and we just have been together ever since. But basically Chris had dinner with a pastry chef who was working at Mozza still, and she brought the bread that he brought her [00:13:00] in to, to the work the next day. And I think Nancy had some and was like, oh, this is way better than, you know, she sold La Brea years prior.. The quality was not what it once was. It was very mechanized and kind of lost its magic because the hands were removed from the process. And I think Nancy knew that, but it wasn't her business anymore. She didn't have direct allegiances to La Brea other than legacy. So she switched out all the bread to us, which was surreal because we were still like [00:13:30] probably seven people or something like that. But we were doing bread for the, you know, arguably top five best restaurant in Los Angeles. And it was, it's still one of the most surreal things. She's, she's also been a great help because there's very few people to talk to in the bread world. There's just. In the restaurant world, you all can have shared experiences. You have plenty to talk about. If you're trying to learn something, you can always talk to a chef who knows more than you in the wholesale bakery world there's not, [00:14:00] you know, there's maybe - in major cities - five, six wholesale bakeries, and a lot of them are gigantic and mechanized, and there's a few in every city and you can talk to them, but it's just a very limited population. It's also for Nancy. It's like she's been through everything that I've been through. She started really small and it exploded over the course of say a decade. She's felt the things that I felt. And so it's good to have, somebody you can ask those questions to, and they can kind of coach you in a direction of where to take things so that it's [00:14:30] optimized and make sense. And bread is so hard. It's so hard. There's a reason why restaurants don't do it in-house because it's extremely finicky. You make one mistake. Your entire 300 pound mix of dough is garbage and there's nothing you can do and you can't restart it. You can't do anything. It's just a very system oriented production that requires incredible focus, the same thing every day. [00:15:00] And, and, you know, while still looking out for refinements to make within that process. We had graduated from that 290 square foot closet that I was in with you know, maybe two employees at that point or one employee and a driver to another in the same building that was 600 square feet. And then we had, you know, say five or six employees and three or four drivers, basically, whenever we move into a new space, that seems monumentally gigantic for us, that kicks off an explosive period of growth. Then we hit the [00:15:30] walls. Then we bang against the walls for however long until we can get out of there. And then we moved into another, another space that was 10 times the size. And now we're banging on those walls. There's great bakeries that were here. They just didn't, they weren't dumb enough to set up a wholesale bakery, which is really what it comes down to is like, I was just going with the flow and in going with the flow, kind of engineered ourselves to be a wholesale bakery, as opposed to a retail bakery, which I'm very happy for now, but going through it was just a [00:16:00] nightmare because a retail bakery, you have walls and you can only do so much. With a wholesale bakery, you've got to grow. Like the only way you become profitable is by volume is by doing more. Based on the first little snippet of the story that I told you. When I go from my house to an, a bigger oven, to my own space, to a bigger version of that space, to a space that's 10 times that size, and then we add retail to it and then we need another bakery. It just [00:16:30] doesn't ever, you need to fulfill the demand or else your business doesn't function. With a retail bakery. All right. I, I do 300 loaves a day. That's a lot for a retail bakery. When that's gone, we've we're profitable. We've done well, I know exactly how much that's going to be and where I need to get to. And that's it. And if it goes well, we'll open another one and do the same thing, you know, at that same scale again. For us, it's just like the walls just keep moving outward. And every time you want to do more, you always hit a new wall that you need to bust through. And that [00:17:00] is just the hardest, hardest thing. So same deal with the development of breads. We started with ciabatta, which is a really not normal bread to start a bakery around, especially when you're doing 26 a day and that's 26 bucks. So I'm losing money out of the gates, like crazy, not paying for myself for at least the first year and a half, and also have a full-time job that requires a lot more than full-time job. But seven day a week job sometimes, you know, we started with ciabatta and then [00:17:30] it's, you know, Scott reached out and was like, "okay, we're also doing sourdough loaves to do toasts on. Can you do those?" So you develop a sourdough and it's kind of like trying to get a feel for the market and learn what typical wholesale bakeries offer, what the main products are. You've got to have a baguette, you've got to have focaccia, you've got to have a variety of different sourdough loaves. Kismet was one of our early accounts and they wanted a barbari, which is a Persian flat bread that we developed as in a sourdough style. When I was baking at home in cast iron, I would do like four loaves per bake [00:18:00] of sourdough, and it never got to where it was supposed to be out of my house and then baking at town pizza in a basically steamless dry environment oven. It was just kinda like dusty, crappy. It was still, you know, I was still selling it and feeling good about it. But once I took my bread and moved it into a professional deck oven, steam injection oven, and saw the result of what was coming out of there, I was like, "oh shit, this is equipment-contingent, how quality your bread [00:18:30] is and how your bread responds to heat and moisture. And once I was baking in Zack's in Clark Street's oven that he, that he wasn't using behind him and like taking my bread out of there and being like, "wow, this looks just, you know, comparable to these pro bakers who I I've been admiring for all these years," took things to a crazy, other level that I was like, "oh, I am a baker!" Like, I can do this. And we started developing, you know, sesame and seeded loaves and 30% rye, which we don't do anymore. But the sesame loaf is what I [00:19:00] always return to. That is like my favorite bread that we do. That's deep sesame flavor. So there's toasted sesame inside and an untoasted on the exterior that toasts in the oven. And you get that really warm sesame depth of flavor. I'm never tired of that ever, uh, killed. It kills me, but at the same time to the barbari that we made for Kismet was so not like anything we were making, it was sort of like focaccia, but a little bit of a different process, definitely a different shape and bake. Like, you know, I started with [00:19:30] recipes just like everyone else. Started with no knead and went to 'Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast,' then Hamelman variety of Hamelman stuff, and then Tartine stuff and all sorts of trying different things to develop our own style. And as you just get into it and find your systems, that style evolves on its own, it's still the same shit that all everybody else is making, but we do it in our own way. We do it with our own opinions and it, and it kind of morphs over time. The barbari was something that there wasn't really, a lot of recipes out there at the start, there were [00:20:00] some, and some were more traditional, you know, like Persian, Armenian, um, sort of Iranian styles. And then there were some more modern bakery stuff. And we tried to kind of find a hybrid of all of that with ours. It wasn't just drafting behind existing, modern bread recipes. It was an amalgamation of a lot of different research and figuring things out. And when it was done, it was the best bread that we make. And I still kind of think it's the best bread that we make. And it's only really available at Kismet, which is, which is pretty rad. That was something that we took [00:20:30] all the information we had and kind of synthesized it into this thing that made us all really happy with the way it came out, including the customer and our Kismet, the customer and their customers. Then that was pretty revelatory. That that was pretty exciting for us. Um, and it's led to the development of a lot of new products too, that were kind of born of our own intuition, you know, of course, research and reading and, and learning about the history of all these products and recipes that, that people typically rely on for those things. But a lot of times now that we've done it a bunch, [00:21:00] you look at those recipes and you're like, this, this isn't, this doesn't make sense for our process, or it doesn't fit into our schedule or stylistically this isn't the choice that we would make. We want to do it this way. And you kind of build out a recipe on your own with your own knowledge, because you've been doing it for five years. Everything kind of organically happened. We've never done sales. I've never driven around and dropped off bread. Not, you know, I'm very anti-advertising and PR just because of my background. And I'm so happy that, that this business has grown completely organically just from word of mouth. No, [00:21:30] no press, no sales. You know, we can't do custom stuff anymore, but it, you know, when someone wanted us for something like that, it was exciting for us because it was a new, you know, we were just trying to keep the wheels on. But if someone gave us a new challenge, we could develop our skills while we were developing a new product for them. Sometimes if we're still making barbari, we also used to make pita for Kismet, but we don't do that anymore because it just didn't work in our system, like we had to give that up. It's very much, you know, we're trying to react to the market and what they need while also trying [00:22:00] to develop our portfolio of products that give people impetus to purchase it all from us. Or, you know, we don't do buns, but we're developing that. We don't do a brioche, but we're probably going to add that to. Like the typical offerings of a wholesale bakery. And we try and now that we know that that's who we are instead of just, oh, we're doing some wholesale before we open our restaurant, we need to fulfill the needs of all of our accounts all in one. So that's what we've kind of been building to. And that's been really cool to [00:22:30] do that. We're like professionals now. We're all right. I still feel like, uh, you know, like, I don't know, I don't know what I'm doing, but healthy, I think. I hope.
There is no difference between bread being made anywhere. There are different variations in the bacteria and yeast cultures that exist in Australia and in [00:23:00] Europe versus California versus New York versus whatever. But they're all doing the exact same thing. There's a lot of myth surrounding bread making because it's so unique relative to cooking. It's a totally different process. It's more like I would say scientific method orient oriented, where, and a lot of, a lot of sort of more fine dining is organized this way, where you have a system of production that requires doing the same thing every day and that's, and then you refine it as you do the same thing over and over and [00:23:30] over and over again. And the refinement never stops. We're still, you know, we changed hydrations yesterday in terms of. Uh, a leaven existing for hundreds of years and passing down through families, that's really cool and notable because of the fact that they kept it alive for so long. But if I started, uh, a leaven with the same flour right next to that one in a week, when it's up and active would be, it would be populated with the same culture and have the same, have the exact same characteristics of the ancient one. [00:24:00] And that's cool. It's cool to pass it down, it's cool to keep it alive, but it doesn't impart, impart any deeper flavor or anything else. So there's like some bullshit to that. And like in terms of like Nancy bringing something from New York or the water not working here for making bagels, like all of that is just bullshit. It's just effort, knowledge and effort, and doing the hard work and all that stuff to try and figure out what it takes. San Francisco is not any better suited for sourdough than Los Angeles. It just had famous sourdough first. It [00:24:30] kind of built up a culture there of, like pun intended, of like, okay, this is a sourdough center of the world and people are going to come here for that. But it's, that's more marketing than it is having anything to do with particular characteristics of the air or the bacteria, the yeast cultures that are, uh, or the water or any of that stuff. It's just effort. We're kind of limited at our scale in who we can work with. Like, we were very dedicated to Grist and Toll in Pasadena, which is our local mill. But when we got to a certain volume point, they couldn't hang with [00:25:00] us without completely turning their operation inside out and kind of making it focused on us, which, you know, I wouldn't want Nan to have to deal with anyway. Um, but it just, that didn't work out so we had to work with the larger scale producer. So for all of our bread flour, we work with King Arthur who are super amazing and responsible and, and on it and give a shit. And their entire company is a co-op. So everyone who works there is part of the company, which is really fantastic. They're just good human beings running that company. And then we work with [00:25:30] Camus Country Mill, uh, up north in Washington who do all of our whole grains. So basically you have the whole wheat wheat berry, you put it in a stone mill, you grind it up and you put it in a bag that has whole grain flour. Whole wheat is that process with wheat berries, whole rye flour is that process with rye, rye berries, and that's all that we work with. So we work with bread flour, sort of medium high protein percentage bread flour, Sir Galahad from King Arthur. And then we work with varying percentages of whole grain. [00:26:00] So the whole wheat Berry ground up put in there, a lot of bakeries work with various sifted flours in Europe. They're, they're like, T-85, T-70, T-110 all these varying percentages of extraction. So basically instead of having the whole wheat berry in there, you have a percentage of the uh, main components of a wheat Berry that brand the germ and the endosperm. It keeps it simple for us. We, if we want a hundred percent, whole wheat loaf, it's just filled with a hundred percent, [00:26:30] whole grain flour. If we want a 30%, it's filled with 30%, whole grain flour, we don't work with high extraction flours because it just complicates the process and doesn't really offer us anything more in terms of control of what we produce. We could get into it. And make stuff a little more. Um, maybe if we wanted to do a high, whole grain loaf, that was a little more open or whatever, crumb wise, we could get involved with some high extraction flours, but it just muddies the waters for us conceptually. So we just stick to those two main ingredients. And those are our main [00:27:00] suppliers. We also work with Honeyville for a variety of seeds that we work with. We are buying... that's our main group. Sometimes we get some Central Milling stuff. The, our rye that we're working with right now comes from Central Milling. But yeah, mostly that's how we kind of operate things. And we do something that I would say is unique in that our bread flour is non-organic, which is for us not a big deal because we're working with King Arthur and King Arthur does things responsibility [00:27:30] responsibly, no matter what you do, there's going to be residual pesticide if you're on a farm, but as long as you're not spraying your crop with crappy pesticides it doesn't necessarily have to be organic. That's just more about optics. And a lot of times smaller farms can't even get organic certified because their runoff from the neighboring farm affects their farm. As long as we have responsibly produced bread flour, we can use the highest quality organic whole wheat berries, which canvases all organic and everything else that we use as organic. That way we can [00:28:00] afford to inject more of the health and whole grain flour is the healthiest version of, of flour you can get. So if we inject more of that, not only do we get more flavor, more longevity, better look, and the healthiest possible bread we can make, but we're also doing it where we don't have to gouge people for insane prices because we're working with non-organic bread flour. But the only reason why we can do that is because it's produced responsibly. If we were working with more of the even larger [00:28:30] producers of bread flour, it would be filled with garbage and they don't, they don't even know where they're getting their products from. You know, King Arthur has crazy responsible criteria for all of the farms they work with for all of their flours, whether it's organic or not. You know, we do a variety of different breads, but most of them fall into the category of naturally leavened. So sourdough. And then we have yeast leaven. So baguette, ciabatta, and those are made with a poolish, which is sort of like a fake sourdough. You make a mixture of flour and water with yeast, it ferments on its own and then you [00:29:00] mix that in with your final mix of flour, water, yeast, salt, all the other stuff that you put into it. So that kind of has a little bit of a fermented flavor, but as a yeasted product and that's traditional for, for baguette and ciabatta. Sourdough, there's a lot of terminology problems. Starter: starter is what you maintain and keep on your countertop and feed every day in the home baking context. And also in the, you know, uh, commercial context. When you feed that starter the day, the day before a day of your [00:29:30] production and that becomes what you add to the dough, that is your leaven. The starter is just what you keep going. No matter what, when I make the leaven, it's a separate thing than what you're keeping fed and alive over and over again every day. So we make that leaven from the starter, it becomes active. You mix it in with the dose. That is what causes the fermentation to happen. The little bugs that are living inside that were contained in your living are feasting on the sugars released when you mix flour and water, and then they basically fart carbon dioxide into the bread dough and it's trapped [00:30:00] inside by the folds. You do the gluten development, all of that fun stuff. And then when you eventually shaped the dough and put it in baskets, or just put it in the oven with all of those CO2 bubbles expand, and that is what causes the dough to rise. Same deal with the yeasted product, the dormant. Uh, bacteria and yeast cultures that are kept inside those little balls of yeast are activated with water. They come alive and start feasting and fart bubbles into the dough. It's the same process. It's just something that doesn't start from a, the [00:30:30] bugs that are in the air. It starts from bugs that are inside little, little packages. It's, it's interesting because scale is wholesale. You're doing the same process that I was doing when I was making one loaf of sourdough in my house, when you're making a thousand loaves of sourdough, you just have to deal with all of the issues of scale. We're doing the exact same process, but how do we deal with 50 pounds of leaven, as opposed to 50 grams of leaven and how you manage that involves a lot of [00:31:00] different kind of, you know, we put our brains together so many times trying to figure this out. And I think that that's why our bakery functions really well is because we aren't reliant on accepted systems. We just kind of use our brains. We have a lot of intelligent people running the bakery, and we sit down in our managers meetings, talk about all the problems and use our heads to come up with the best solution. We're not just like, how does an existing, you know, the, the typical thing to do is just as you get larger, you mechanize more and more and more, you remove staffing more and more and more, [00:31:30] and that helps to increase your profits and reduce your labor costs. But then you're making a mechanized product and the customer feels that. So, you know, for us, it's like, as we grow as things get more complicated with more of each part of the process being involved, including human beings, just have to find new systems that work to optimize that. And that's basically our job is just like finding functional systems when we encounter a problem, creating a new guard rail [00:32:00] system so that, that doesn't happen again. From a small, as something as like today, I was at the bakery and we're working on a lower profile focaccia that we use for, for our new shop and for a couple of customers that have requested it. It was sitting on the rack with the rest of the bread and got packed and sent out to an account. Like that's not a big deal. We can do it again tomorrow, but at the same time, how do we create a system so that the sample stuff that we're working on, doesn't get sent out to accounts, you know? So we have to create a new system at that smallest scale, as opposed, you know, in addition to how do we deal with [00:32:30] hundreds of pounds of leaven? When, before we were used to dealing with one tiny Cambro's worth. So it's all developing all the time and it never stops. It very much caters to my psychology, more so than cooking because cooking was what I was obsessed with. I hadn't really baked much real bread until I dedicated to doing it every day. Bread is bread is great because. If you're the type of person, if you're an obsessive person, which I am an obsessive person, I have wild, wild, inability to focus [00:33:00] until I get attached to something that I, that really hooks me. And then I dig in and I stick with it until I get to a place where I'm satisfied. Bread is made for that. And if it, it hooked me, which it did immediately, because as soon as you make something, even if you fuck up and you make a pancake and it's not good, you slice it. And you put a little piece of cheese on it and you eat it. And you're like, "Whoa, I made this. This is bread. It doesn't look like it. But it is!" Once you start making something that actually does look good and tastes good and is kind of responding [00:33:30] to the different little minor tweaks that you do, every iteration. Th through the process, you really do have scientific control over what it becomes. And a lot of the challenges, because the process is so simple and so repeatable a lot of the challenges that come up seem illogical or seem kind of disconnected from the process. And that is at once really horrifying because you never stop as a wholesale and you need to solve these problems immediately, or else you're sending out [00:34:00] inferior products to your customers that they can't use or have to compromise their products to use, which is just not, we're never going to survive if that's the case. You just, you have to dig in and scientific method your way through it. You've got to just repeat the process over and over again until with guesses in particular directions. And then you can see what the result becomes. And that's why bread is exciting for everyone working on it even when you have 40 people working on your products, now. You touch the dough the day before and you [00:34:30] see what the result of your process is the next day, every day, it's kind of like this hope that everything that you're doing is going to fall within the system. You're not going to make any mistakes and you're going to improve your craft every time so that the bread is consistently getting better, not worse. And that's what we do. We apply these systems. We teach everybody these systems and the way that we do think every day it's organized the exact same way to where people stand at particular times during the day. And as we optimize those systems of doing it over and over and over again, [00:35:00] it just gets better and easier and smarter and you know, less unnecessary motion and less, uh, unnecessary effort and all of these things that we can do to improve. And, you know, that's what the business is based on. And that's why it's exciting for people because there is no end to improvement your, your, the temperature is always changing. The humidity's always changing. Our equipment is always breaking. Like, you know, there's always something to refine and that's, what's really exciting for me. And that's [00:35:30] why it worked with my psychology. Doesn't work with everybody's psychology. We have plenty of people who dive in are really excited about bread making and then get into the system. And they're like, "I don't want to do the same thing every day." And then there's other people that it is perfect for. And they're like, "I love doing the same thing every day." "Label them in the baskets of the bread that I shaped to see how it bakes the next day and learn from that so that I can get better and better and better and become a better at my skill," and other people don't operate that way. So if people need bread, we're going to try and make more of it and try and make sure that we maintain our [00:36:00] quality. Even from when we were doing five loaves to now, we're doing 2,500 loaves a day. That's a little bit, much 2000 loads a day.
You know, we had Sqirl pretty early. Uh, Botanica, Kismet, like, you know, some of those sort of new kind of benchmark restaurants that were opening around that time. Say five years ago, you know, Nancy came on and that was our biggest [00:36:30] account and was like a lot of bread and we created like maybe three or four new products just for them that are now part of our core products that we wholesale worked out nicely. It's always nice when you're trying to create something new that, you know, you can integrate into and offer to your other customers and it works for them too, but yeah, so we were in that 600 square foot space with sort of maybe five, six staff members. On a day, we were, you know, everyone was doing everything. We were all washing dishes. We were all sweeping and mopping the floor. We were all [00:37:00] fixing ovens. We were all doing everything. Meanwhile, I'm recognizing that we had, you know, at that point, maybe approaching 50 accounts were spilling out daily production into the hallway of the building and it was getting kind of dangerous. The space was falling apart. There was like holes in the walls. It was, it was really gnarly and definitely something to learn from where, when you feel that kind of pressure of the walls closing in, you need to get out sooner. That said, I still thought at that point that I was going to be opening a [00:37:30] restaurant that would be in a bigger space to allow us to do a little bit more wholesale, but basically cap wholesale and be done with it. So that's what I was looking for. I was looking for like 2000 square foot spaces. And these deals would come and go. And, you know, I would get really close and really excited. And we were telling everybody we were going to move and then the deal would fall through. And then this space on Fletcher and Riverside came up, I drove by and it had a, you know, for lease sign up there. I hadn't seen it on any of the websites or from brokers. So we just called them up. And it [00:38:00] was the old Sweet Lady Jane bakery, which is a sort of LA birthday cake establishment. So it was like sickeningly, sweet sugar smells in there. And, uh, but it was a bakery. It was, you know, had two rack ovens in there. So when I saw that, it kind of just changed the whole idea. I was like, "Well, retail will come next. We're going to do the wholesale bakery first, we have all this demand." You know, it was like us competing against a variety of different marijuana dispensaries, or grow houses that wanted to set up in there and the landlord didn't want to do that, but, [00:38:30] you know, they obviously had tons of money to offer. Um, and they, they chose us. So we. It took about four months to get it ready. We bought Bar Tartine's deck oven that they had when they closed and moved that in there and played it off as if it was there from before. So the health department wouldn't give a shit and they didn't. So that was good. You know, overnight moved in there, like literally, cause we can't stop. We operate seven days a week, 362 days a year. You know, when you finished production at your old bakery and moved to the new one, you've got to do it overnight. [00:39:00] So we set up everything that we possibly could. And then when production was done at our facility across the street, we're like loading ovens and mixers and all of the racks and everything that we need over to the new bakery, getting them set up, getting the electrical and plumbing, all set up. Next morning, we're operating there, which was, you know, absurd when you're trying to build out new systems and where is everything and where do we put the bread and how do we get it out the door? So that was a 6,000 square. We went from 600 to 6,000 square feet. I was worried about the rent and we rented out the downstairs cause it's a [00:39:30] two floor bakery. And I rented out the downstairs to a wine, uh, kind of wine club distributor. And they were using it for the first few months. And I remember telling Nancy where we were moving and she's like "6,000 square feet? You're going to be maxed out in within six months." And I was like, "You're crazy!" We doubled in size within the first four months, we went from like 48 accounts to a hundred accounts like incredibly quickly. And that, that was one of the most burnout times ever. Cause we were just hiring like crazy. And when you hire like crazy, you have hits, hits and misses [00:40:00] and you know, one, one miss in, in a bakery staff and the restaurant staff, it only takes one bad apple to sour the whole batch. And we had to go through all of that stuff and learn that just from going through it, which is how everything has gone within six months. It was like, sorry, tenant downstairs. You need to move. We're going to go into construction and put it in an elevator and make this a fully functioning, two floor bakery. And so that's what we did. And then that got us kind of, we moved in in 2018 and then by March of 2020, [00:40:30] we were mid in the middle of construction, putting in the elevator and doing everything necessary for that. We've set up our mixing downstairs with the bun, we now have four mixers downstairs. We receive all the flour in the back of the building, mix downstairs ferment downstairs, do folds, all of that stuff, heads upstairs and then gets shaped upstairs where all the ovens are, goes into the walk-in and comes out the next morning and bakes upstairs. So it's a much more functional flowing bakery operation. Now that uses an elevator, but we're also now hitting our capacity there. When [00:41:00] COVID happened, we're like, you know, on our way to crossing that maxed out threshold, but then, you know, hit the wall, went from that 140 accounts we were doing at when we reached January of 2020. It was finally when we were like, "Oh crap. We're like really profitable. Now we hit that threshold where we're like making good money and we're doing distributions to our investors." And then of course, two months later, it all dies down and it took this long now to get back to where we were, which we're out now, we've kind of [00:41:30] surpassed our, our sales for, for back then. That was a gnarly little run. But we had an outbreak at the bakery in June of 2020, which was gnarly and shut down for six weeks and used those six weeks to finish the bakery construction. So that we could return and have a two floor bakery separated and we would keep the downstairs crew completely separated from the upstairs crew. So we had four cohorts that would only work with each other as basically a group of five, five [00:42:00] bakers. And they would only interact with their crew. They would leave at different times. And that allowed us to kind of compartmentalize the bakery into groups that if someone tested positive, we would just remove that one group, scramble everybody up to get us through that two week incubation period, and then kind of separate things back out and get back into it. So yeah, I'm dipping into the, into the COVID realm now, but yeah, that, that closure period allowed us to, to wrap up the construction, which was taking for fucking ever as [00:42:30] construction does and returned in a much safer, more functional way for the bakery separated by the elevator, which is pretty nuts. Never ends. There's that's the thing too, is like, you know, like I was saying earlier, restaurants have walls. You know that how much you can do there, when you, when you're done with that, you're done with that. That's your maximum, you sell out. We don't ever sell out. We just make more bread. If people need more bread, we need to make more bread. And that's how we make money. When you run out of room in your bakery, you need another bakery. Like you just have to do [00:43:00] that. I need one right now, but I can't because we're focusing on building out the shop. So it's just too crazy. You know, in a way it's freeing to say no, because we never did in the beginning and it, you know, beat us into the ground, but now we need, we have no choice. We have to say no, because we need all the capacity remaining for our own account to sell it to ourselves. Think old New York coffee shop vibe, or like born of the Russ and Daughters and the Katz's and the Second Avenue Deli's and the Eisenberg's and [00:43:30] that kind of sort of lunch counter kind of experience, where it is a sit down kind of restaurant, but it's not like a full service restaurant. You order at the counter, you sit down and the food is delivered to you. So we have about 70 seats inside. It's not a gigantic restaurant, but it's good sized that we're building out a pastry kitchen there. So Christopher who I mentioned, who wasn't really a bread baker when he started working with us, um, can now get back to his pastry roots and do whatever the hell he wants, which is really exciting. So we'll have a full pastry menu every day of croissants [00:44:00] and cakes and pies and cookies and all sorts of fun, seasonal things that Chris is going to develop. And then we have our savory menu too, which is based around probably a dozen sandwiches. Um, it's not really a deli. It's kind of more of a diner vibe, but it's not a diner. It's a sandwich shop. So everyone could sit down with their sandwiches and enjoy a variety of different sides that we'll have. We're going to be roasting our own coffee as well. So we'll have freshly roasted coffee for sale, you know, beer and wine we'll also have. We're going to be open from eight to four to start. It's in Glassell park on Eagle Rock [00:44:30] Boulevard there, which is great cause it's five minutes from where I've lived for 11 years. It's five minutes from the bakery. It's, doesn't get much better than that. And then we're hoping to expand as quickly as possible into the evenings to at least a couple of days a week, probably on off nights, like Sunday, Monday. And do live jazz. Cheese boards and dips and stuff that we can do that's easy to execute in the evenings building to eventually we'll do maybe ticketed events where we're like, okay, we're doing 24 roasted chickens, we'll have potatoes and salad, it's XYZ [00:45:00] amount of money, and we're going to have live music and you can have beer and wine and have a good time. Um, but that's the kind of end goal for that. It'll also be our first dedicated retail, retail home for the bread. That's not really defined by our own culture and our own, uh, establishment. So that's very exciting too. And hoping we open before the end of this year, we have rough inspections coming up. Yeah. Very excited. Uh, and it's getting very real by the minute. So yeah.[00:45:30]
I was not settled on Los Angeles when the bakery started. Like I was maybe thinking about leaving, I didn't know. I didn't feel figured out here. And the bakery has kind of figured it out for me. And I met my wife and like, we're grounded here. That's not to say that we're always happy here because we're not. And I don't think, like, I just try to be as honest as I can about everything, you know, like we're opening a brick [00:46:00] and mortar business and I should be saying like, "I'm in love with Los Angeles. I love you. Like, come on down." Like, but I'm not always in love with Los Angeles. I love elements of it. I don't want to like, enjoy driving everywhere. And it makes me an anxious person even more anxious to do so. You know, I've been here for 11 years. I've never lived anywhere other than New Jersey for that long. And, uh, there's a reason for that. If I was that unhappy, I would have left and I'm not unhappy. I'm fucking blessed. You know, whatever that means. [00:46:30] This, it's an absurd that this business exists, that it does and provides for as many people as it does. And I'm, I'm now able to go back to the thing that I wanted to do in the beginning, making that bread that I wanted to make for myself. It probably wouldn't be able to, you know, as many times as my friends who still live in New York are like, you know, we need our wholesale bread bakery in New York. There was like, I don't, I don't really want to do that. This has been crazy. I don't, I don't need to, you know, deal with New York insanity. Like, I have no designs of taking [00:47:00] over the bread world. It's like, we're going to do another bakery. And that might be it, you know, like maybe we'll do a diner or a pizza place down the road, like that are kind of tangential. My goal for myself is to create a functional life for me and my family. Like, and LA is providing that for us, not even with its developed really nicely. I love my life now. Like, I'm so happy that this happened and it, it, it feels like it happened to me, even though I was part of it really, you [00:47:30] know, dug out a nice niche and it feels like people respect to what we do, which is amazing. I'm sure when I get face to face with some customers that may feeling may change, cause there's assholes everywhere. But most if 99% of the people who return to Bub and Grandma's are like the best people that we could possibly have, and we know them through the farmer's market and that's it. And having this access point, I can, will only solidify why we're here and why we stay here and why, why I will be here and raise [00:48:00] my kid here. And you know, like it's a, it's a great place to be, but it's very much a place that you kind of make your own. It feels like in New York, I hate to have the standard LA conversation of New York versus LA again, but you know, New York, you, sure you have your own life and everything, but you are very much defined by New York. In LA, the majority of the people who live here are not people that I want to hang out with, if I'm being honest. It's, it's a culture that is [00:48:30] commercial. And self-focused. At the same time, I've met all of the best people that I've ever encountered in my life here. And because of the expanse and sprawl of this place, you can make the landscape, whatever you want it to be. You can kind of engineer your own environment and, uh, depending on where you live, um, depending on where you work, what universe you work in, if you're not happy in your world, like shooting commercials or shooting TV shows just wasn't [00:49:00] fulfilling for me, which is kind of what this town is based on, I managed to create an entire different life for myself in this town. And I'm endlessly thankful for that because the town gave birth to Bub and Grandma's. I kind of responded to their response to some degree in all of the people that I work with kind of drafted behind our, you know, where we were moving organically. And I owe that to Los Angeles. I owe that to this place, but at the same time, there's [00:49:30] parts of New York that I hated too. And I left there just like, you know, I think that a lot of people put stock in like this, like "my town's the best or this town's better or whatever," and it's all bullshit. It's just like, whatever you make of where you live. I would love to live in New York right now. Like I'm sure I would love to live in Charleston. I would love to live in Paris. I would love to live in all sorts of places and I'll try to go do as much as I can to consume all of that. But. LA is pretty fucking great for me and [00:50:00] my partner and like our life and it has provided so much for us that, you know, I, I'm not always happy here, but I'm mostly happy here, you know, and I'm glad that our, the business was born here because it's doing, it's doing well and seems to have an, uh, a fantastic group of people who support us. You know, it's nuts, it's nuts.[00:50:30]
I wasn't like a deep bread enthusiast before I started making it myself. And honestly, when I started making it myself, it changed. I couldn't eat bread any more from anywhere else. Not because mine was better just because I had so much and I had to like keep refining the process. Cause that's how I get about things. So doing it every day was just like I got, I got hooked into the process, the process of making bread itself. I also got into learning about the universe of bread baking and who the, you know, the pillars were [00:51:00] in the development of bread in the United States and Europe and whatever. And, you know, Tartine was by far the one that was most exciting specifically because Chad's story was, uh, very much about him trying to engineer a lifestyle for himself that made him happy and that involved, surfing, and he needed to build the bread schedule around his surfing schedule. And I found that to be, especially where I was at seven years ago, really exciting that someone was doing something differently than [00:51:30] is traditional in order to facilitate happiness in their life. Not the other way around where they'd have to amend their happiness, the happy things in their life, to the business that makes them have a, have the money to go surfing. But it's the other way around where it's like, okay, the business can bend. And when the business bends to your, to what makes you happy in life, then the products are better because you are not fitting your life around your business. You're fitting your business around your life. And if you're a happy [00:52:00] person who is around other happy people, then there's a much higher chance that they're going to do a better job continuing the tradition of whatever product you're making. It's just logical. It just made logical sense to me. So when not only was I excited about the bread, which I have enjoyed from that, my brother used to live in San Francisco and spent plenty of time there from Tartine, which is w you know, was the best, or, you know, some might say is the best. Um, I might argue with that. It was about the lifestyle. It was about engineering, happiness for myself, [00:52:30] and then by proxy, everyone else who touches the business, like, and if we can create a happy lifestyle, then we can create a happy product that people taste the excitement from like, when you eat a piece of bread, that's made by somebody who really gives a shit about it, it's going to invariably be better than someone who doesn't give a shit about it. If we can create people who give a shit and have happy lives and are stable, our products are going to be better. And that was something very much learned from, from the first Tartine Bread led to the way that we kind of built our [00:53:00] bakery. We don't have a choice as a wholesaler about when we can make our stuff. We don't do dark drops or like send the bread out for delivery at two in the morning. And we see our first delivery room leaves the bakery at 6:30 AM, which is extremely late in the wholesale realm, but that's the way that we do it. And if you want our quality products, I'm not going to push the bakers to start their work day at 11:00 PM the night before so that you can get your bread three hours earlier than you really need it. You can bend to us a little bit so that you get that quality product and our bakers are happy and are not [00:53:30] burnout. So that all kind of tied together. It's like, how can you engineer a happy lifestyle for everyone who touches this product from from me to our managers, to our bakers, to our porters, to our drivers, and then down at that is felt at the, the, who is ever buying our bread. And then that is hopefully felt by ever whoever is eating our bread. Um, and the same will hold for our retail place. We've got to create an environment where everyone is happy to be there, working there and making the sandwiches and making the pastry. And if they [00:54:00] are, they stick around, they put that happiness and focus into the bread and pastry and sandwiches and food that we serve. And everyone tastes that and experiences it. It's not a strategy. It's just a way of living. You know, it's not like on a PowerPoint presentation where it's like happiness of our, it just sort of trickles down from my own need for happiness for myself. I'm not going to sacrifice anything anymore to engineer that for me, and as part of engineering, that for me, everyone who I interact [00:54:30] with has to feel that way as well about their own life. So it's a lot of pressure, but it's, it's the only way to be. It's the only way I can be and be functional. Otherwise I'm back where I was in advertising, where I'm like, you know, depressed about my life and just dealing with that with crazy weird physical symptoms and all sorts of shit. That's not tenable. It was just more about owning my own life. Advertising involved a lot of egos at the same time. Also some of the very best people I've ever met in my life, who are some of my best friends [00:55:00] still and who are also investors in the sandwich shop now, which is great. Um, but at the same time, they deal with these people. They know they're not going to deny what I'm saying. It's like, there's a lot of egos at the top. And those egos don't really give a fuck whether you're what you, you know, your plans were for the weekend. They're just going to have you come in and sit there for four hours, waiting them to get out of a meeting so you can present them the work. And they didn't even re register to them that you were just sitting there for four hours. If it was something that I really cared about, I would give them every hour of the day. I didn't. I didn't give a shit. And I F [00:55:30] and even beyond not giving a shit, I thought it was bad for the world. And it was manipulative people's emotions and it like lied or skirted the truth about the products which got cheaper and more like a ch more cheaply made and more expensive every year. My goal for myself is just, I don't want to do anything in the world that makes me feel gross. I just don't want to do anything with my life. That makes me feel like I'm going to have a regret on my deathbed. I want to [00:56:00] leave everyone who, you know, touches Bub and Grandma's better than when they first came to us. That's the only way that I can feel good. That's the only way that I can sleep. And there's only so much I can do because the industry that I happened to fall into is fucked. You know, raw materials are too expensive. No one wants to pay what the actual value of food is. The people who lose are the employees. Invariably. It needs to change, but I, we have to work within the system for the time being. Intelligent [00:56:30] investors who understand that what the reality is of the food world and how until we pay them back. And I have more flexibility with where the profits are, are funneled off to, you know, our employees are not making what they sh are not making the amount of money that they should relative to the intensity and difficulty of their work. And no one in the corporate world, not no one, but a high percentage of people who work in the corporate world are completely unaware of the reality of physical labor, that everyone should have [00:57:00] mandatory, uh, in their employment history, because then they'll understand what the reality of being on your feet for eight hours a day, sweaty physical labor in a, in a 90 degree kitchen with no relief. And then, uh, you know, if you're at a retail establishment, someone comes up and complains about something and tells you you're, you're a shit person. This is the reality for a group of people that I think a lot of people in the corporate world just kind of don't think about and it's gross to me. And I just have to put all of my efforts into making sure that these [00:57:30] people who have chosen to work with me on this project, that their lives are, have to be, have to be improved by working with us. And if they're not, then we're not doing something right as aided by doing something that I deep in my brain knew that I didn't want to be doing, you do a lot of gymnastics to try and convince yourself that this is, this is just the, the world as it is, you know? And I'm so tired of that, excuse from people it's like, well, I do this thing that I hate, or that is evil or whatever, [00:58:00] because this is just the way the world is. Get used to it. And it's like, "no, I'm not participating in this, this, this isn't the way the world should be. And I am not going to participate in something anymore that I view as reprehensible." Just because it exists, doesn't mean it's right. There's plenty of people doing garbage things in the world and they get away with it for their entire lives and make millions of dollars off of it. It's still garbage just because they're able to do it. You know, convincing myself, and I'm still doing this every day that I'm not a fraud is like, you know, a chronic [00:58:30] issue. I did something for a long time that I knew wasn't right for me. And that kind of fortified that thought in the back of my head, that I am a piece of shit who's lying to not only myself, but to other people. So when I transitioned out of that and moved into something that turned out to be really earnest and kind of basic, very base. Bread making is very pure. Simple process. Nobody can really [00:59:00] say that there's an evilness to bread baking. It's like, I still wrestled with the fact that, oh, I'm growing really fast and we're making more and more bread and we're becoming a business. And in becoming a business, I was like, there, there was this irrational part of me that was like, "Oh, you're selling something. So you're a fraud. Like you should just be giving this," like I have those thoughts. I have the thoughts that like the fact that we're a business, that charges for this thing that we're making is, is evil to some degree. And obviously that's [00:59:30] irrational, but it's still a thought that I have just because charging a completely reasonable markup on this product that we make so that we can make money and pay our staff and, and hopefully grow the business and repair our equipment that breaks every other day and do all the things that we need to do. But there's that part of me that's like, that is evil. I think that that's mostly not helpful, but it also is partially helpful because it just makes sure that I'm watching out for myself and checking myself and making sure that every decision that we make is [01:00:00] beneficial not only to the bakers and our suppliers and our customers and our managers and all that stuff, but also to the community at large. And, you know, that's, our, our end goal is to, is to be a B-Corp and try and make sure that we're contributing to the neighborhood, our customers and our employees. That's really hard to do in a wholesale universe because you just don't have the margins. If we were a retail bakery, that would be a lot easier because we can be more profitable but, um, you know, hopefully after [01:00:30] we opened the sandwich shop and potentially roll up all the businesses together and open a second, a second wholesale bakery, that would be something that we would look at. I'm, I'm making the same stuff that Nancy was making and Nancy and Chad Robertson's making the same stuff that Nancy was making, and we're all making, you know, like we're all making the same shit that's been, you know, made for the last 5,000 years. And it's the same process. I think what it really comes down to are the other things like. Um, how much you care about the consistency of your product, [01:01:00] how much you care about the wellbeing of your employees, how much you care about the wellbeing of your customers. And that's the kind of stuff that differentiates you as a, as a baker, as a bakery from other places that have existed in, in Los Angeles for years, and I'm not, and this is my mental mental illness to a degree is like, I am an extremely anxious person. That is just my life. It's always been that way for me. The anxiety means that if things are [01:01:30] not running well, if the bread is not good, if we're having problems with a particular product or a particular person or a particular customer, or whatever, those things, can't just sit, I need to resolve them as quickly as possible, or I personally am totally fucked up and can't function properly. Um, so in a way that fear of embarrassment or failure or hurting someone or, or making something that's less than the, than the, then its potential [01:02:00] is what drives the bakery to some degree. And I have other anxious employees now running the bakery who like, you know, our, our care to the same degree, you know, they, they really need everything to be humming so that they can feel good. Um, and if it's not humming, they're not the type of person to ghost on the problem, which in, in my hiring and working with younger employees and younger customers and lot of stuff that seems to be the trend as aided by [01:02:30] our little, uh, you know, window that we look through every day on our phones and computers makes it a lot easier to when there's conflict or when there's a difficult situation to just kind of back away from it and ignore it. And it'll eventually fade away from your mind and you won't worry about it. As opposed to digging in, finding the solution, working on a problem so that everybody's happy. And, and then you can move forward having learned something, having grown, having made the product better. And I think [01:03:00] to some degree, Nancy is that way with her, you know, Nancy doesn't need to be in any of our restaurants. She doesn't need to be there, but she, every time, you know, I happened to drop by Mozza to drop something off or do whatever Nancy's there, like tasting everything and working on stuff and asking questions and is like, you know, I'm sure. That that's born of her anxiety. I am sure that that's born of her own need for the things that she's created to be well-managed. And that's not to say that her managers aren't doing a [01:03:30] good job because they are, everything is so fine tuned in those places, but it's just a need for people to, to feel comfortable with what they've created and make sure that it's running in the way that they want it to forever, because things change all the time. And I doubt Nancy will ever not be in her restaurants and being at the openings and setting things up and like, you know, was opening in London and it has to be there to make sure that they're doing everything to her standards. And educating everyone as to what those standard standards are. And, you know, I don't know one, 1 millionth as much as Nancy does, but I [01:04:00] have that element in me as well in that I, that isn't just like the food. That's about the wellbeing of all of my staff and making sure that everybody's happy and that we're working towards health care for everyone, and that we're working towards profit sharing for everyone. And we align in that, in that universe. Like everything has to be fine tuned forever, you know? Yeah. We've been in business for almost six years, six years there'll be March or something like that. I think it's six or seven. It's just not been anywhere near possible to offer health care until now. [01:04:30] Just not possible. Especially in this modern age. I, I, you know, see. A lot of Instagrammy comments and things like that, about how the hiring problems that restaurants have, have to do with the, you know, the pay and benefits and all of that stuff. But even as an owner that does everything that they can to ensure that everyone's taken care of. It's not possible. It's just not possible with the food system being as fucked up as it is. Raw [01:05:00] materials being as expensive as they are and how cheap everyone wants everything to be in food, when it really should be so much more expensive, people are complaining about leaving tips, complaining about the prices of things, but this is the, this is the world. If you want your staff to make a higher a wage, the wage that they deserve for waking up at two in the morning and coming to work and living on an alternative lifestyle for being a baker. You have to charge a price for your product that no one will pay for. That's the only way that works if you're just doing it that way. Or in the wholesale realm, [01:05:30] you've got to sell a shit ton of bread. You've got to get to a volume that makes you a percentage of profit that you can afford to spend $8,000 a month paying for everybody's healthcare. And we're getting there, but there's, there's more to the story than just like pay your staff more. I understand why people react that way because of the corporate nature, you know, where a CEO is making $6 million a year, uh, at, uh, whatever Walmart-y kind of company. And there, there are people on the ground are making minimum wage [01:06:00] with no tips. And, and how has that, how has that person at the top comfortable with that relationship? Are they really working that hard? I bet they've never worked hard in a day, a day in their life. But at the level of small business, it's extremely difficult to pay people what they deserve. You can get there once you've paid off your investors, which we have and have to, you know, are endlessly thankful for, and we've got to pay them back and we're working on that. You can be a generous, good, a business owner and still not have the ability to offer health care or pay [01:06:30] your staff what they deserve, because otherwise then the business doesn't do anything like it, doesn't, it loses money and then you have no business to pay anybody. So it's a very complicated situation and I totally understand people's reactions in that way. You, you have to be accountable to a lot of different things. You know, if your goal is to take care of your employees over time, it requires a lot more than just like cranking up their rate of pay. You can't, you can't just do that. A lot of times, meanwhile, we do [01:07:00] pay on par higher than the average bakery job, but we still can't afford to offer health care yet. It's just not, and it's not for any reason of like all the managers taking money off the top, we all have conservative salaries and it just is what it is. So we're almost there, but it just takes a lot more effort than just like, you know, pay your staff more. It's like it doesn't work like that. It's complicated, especially because plenty of, plenty of owners took advantage of, of their staff during, during these fucked up times. And there's so many gross experiences we [01:07:30] had over this last couple of years, you know, especially as a wholesaler, we, you know, we go as the industry goes. So it was just gnarly to see how some owners take care of their staff, take care of their customers. Gross. I'm not trying to make waves or like, pretend like I'm some kind of leader or something like that. Cause I'm not, I'm just a guy and I'm just trying to figure this shit out, just like everybody else and life is a mystery to me. And it's the same thing for our, you know, management staff. We're just like people who really care about [01:08:00] doing the best we can possibly do. And when things don't go, right, we feel it acutely and need to, um, change directions to try and figure out how to make that not happen again so we don't feel that anymore. And you can pull that apart psychologically, you know, in a lot of different ways, maybe it's because of fear of embarrassment or maybe it's because, you know, we put too much stock in what other people think of us. And like, if we're not doing the best we can, then people aren't going to think the best of us, but that's kind of a harsh way to look at it. But at the [01:08:30] same time, you know, we, I don't eat at fine dining restaurants very often if at all. We have some that we, Patricia and I, my, my partner and I go to, but I take much more pleasure in, in the smaller, more local places that, that LA has a lot of. Tons of places to explore and, and tons of neighborhoods to explore and cuisines to explore. The places that use our stuff, like do amazing things with it. I've just been so lucky to go to the, those places that serve our stuff and just, it's [01:09:00] absurd to be associated with the talent at, at these places. It's, it's nuts. It feels like a, like a joke to some degree. Us? Like really at this place? And, and it works. Everything they do, it works. I mean, I eat our bread daily and at the same time you go and see what some people do with us, with our bread and it's like, "oh my God, you guys are amazing." Chefs are amazing. Like that's stuff that people do in the culinary realm. Like we were lucky enough to go eat at Hayato a couple of years ago [01:09:30] and just like, oh my God, it's just doing miraculous things that I'll, you know, I don't... I know my bread. I don't know anything else. And like, for me to claim that I do is a lie. That's all that we know. We know how to do our stuff, and we know how to develop new things in the way that we like to develop new things. But like seeing how people make much more ingredient, dense things that are so insane in the knowledge that those people possess is just so far beyond my capacity of understanding. [01:10:00] Like I, I get how they do it, but I, it, it's incredible like, and we're so lucky to be a part of that. It's nuts. Spencer Bezaire is a friend of mine at Eszett, uh, in Silver Lake. Do you know that place? It's great. He was formerly at L and E and then ran the kitchen at Highland Park Brewery for awhile. Uh he's he's just a fantastic, fantastic chef. He won Star Chefs this year. He does this mushroom dip sandwich on our baguette is just like fucking nuts. Everything he does there is great. But yeah, I mean, it's absurd that we're also making [01:10:30] the pizza dough for Pizzeria Mozza, that blows my mind every time. It's absurd to me that we're doing anything! That any of this exists. That we're making bread for anyone, because this was like, was just born of an interest in something, you know, one of my crazy obsessions that I decided to just, if I, if I really wanted to learn about bread, I needed to do it every day. And that was the realization very early on in bread when I was making, you know, bread, pancakes and garbage stuff was coming out of my oven. I was like, wow, this is bread, but it's really [01:11:00] bad. It really doesn't look like bread or feel like bread, or it does taste like bread. But that's the only thing that indicates that it's bread. It's absurd. It's absurd that we exist. It's absurd that this has become my life and it's such luck. You know, it just feels like I unintentionally rode a wave. Like I just was like paddling around kind of checking out some coves and looking at, looking down through the water at some cool fish. And then all of a sudden I looked up and I'm like, "oh, I'm on this [01:11:30] wave. I've never even surfed before, but we got to figure out how to surf now, or else I'm going to fucking die!" This is a good analogy. I never used that one before, but yeah, like we, we had to go, like we had to roll with what was happening. It never stopped. Like the wave is still, hasn't crashed yet. We've almost fallen many times, but we're still just riding it out seam, seeing how best we can do this and try and get high marks from the judges who are our customers, you know, every time, no matter how [01:12:00] treacherous the wave is. And over the last couple of years it's been, it's been monstrous. We're not trying to arrive anywhere. We're just trying to stay afloat. Stay up, stay standing. There's been a lot of scary hanging onto the edge of the board moments, but we're still here. So that's, that's all we could ask for after the last couple of years.
[01:12:25] Jordan: Thank you for listening everyone. For links and resources about everything discussed today, please [01:12:30] visit the show notes in the episode, if you want to support the podcast, the most effective way to do so would be to hit the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other platform that you're listening in from. Sharing the show with your friends on social media is always appreciated.
Shout out to Shawn Myers for creating the original music and to Jason Cryer for creating the graphics. The show is produced by me, Jordan Haro with help from Homecourt [01:13:00] Pictures. You can always reach out to me at Jordan H-A-R-0 on Instagram and Twitter. Follow the show @prixfixpod on Instagram or email us at prixfixepodcast@gmail.com.
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