Baker's notes

On Monday and Wednesday last week I hosted accomplished bakery owners for short visits to the bakery. Our oven was the primary reason for both visits, and the visits only reinforced my feeling that buying this oven was a good decision, since having guests such as this both increases my knowledge of baking, and gives me a new perspective of what bakery ownership is about.
On Monday morning the owner of a successful bakery and café in Providence RI called Seven Stars, stopped in with his head baker for a couple hours on their way to Montreal. My connection to Seven Stars goes back to 2002, when one of our first interns, Caroline moved up from Providence and her job at Seven Stars to work here. I had only heard stories about the bakery and had never set foot in the place until 2006 when they hosted a baker’s gathering in late October of that year. It was at that event that I first got to see the Llopis oven, and my conversation with Jim, the owner, has been ongoing ever since. Jim graciously came and coached me through my first bake in the new oven back in August, and has offered advice on all sorts of issues since then.
Wednesday evening brought a first time visitor to the bakery. About two weeks ago I received a call from someone I had never met, but whose name sounded familiar. On the phone he introduced himself and said he knew Michel, the man who owns TMB equipment which sells the Llopis ovens. Glenn said that he lives in Hardwick MA and would like to swing through some time and see the operation. After extending an invitation, I sat thinking about his name and felt sure that I had read it somewhere in a baking book. Flipping though the pages of a coffee table type bread book, there was Glenn standing in his bakery in California. Reading the profile of the bakery, I learned that he employed over 200 workers, and among his many achievements was being one of the three members of the 1996 world cup of baking team USA. I would be lying if I did not acknowledge that I felt a bit self conscious about the less professional aspects of the bakery compared to the kind of operations these two come from, but they both had only nice things to say, and if they had any judgment about how things are done around here, they hid it well.
One of the more interesting discussions for me was hearing about the daily operations of these two much larger bakeries. In Jims case, Seven Stars is mostly a retail bakery and café, open seven days a week all year, with a full line of breads and pastries. They have a sparkling new production facility and two retail outlets. The production floor is active in some way twenty four hours a day. On busy days they’ll produce thousands of loaves of bread and pastries. Orchestrating the smooth operation of such a business is no small feat, but Jim seems to have put together a capable staff, and his business is thriving. One interesting side note was that coffee makes up full third of their sales. In fact Jim only half sarcastically said that they could probably phase out bread completely and be just as profitable.
Glenn has sold his bakery in California and now works for a large wholesale bakery in New Haven. The numbers he ran through describing the operation he now manages were really staggering. Forty thousand pounds of flour in one production cycle (18 hours), a conveyer oven that is over 50 feet long, mixers that hold up to five hundred pounds of dough. It was all quite amazing to hear, and yet he was just as comfortable talking about our miniscule operation, and actually offered to come and bake for me if I ever needed the help.
My thoughts since these two visits last week have mostly been about how insignificant my bakery is when it comes to the business of feeding people. It hasn’t been a negative line of thought, just a good reality check. Don’t get me wrong, I’m so grateful that an operation such as this can still succeed, and that many of the small food businesses I support can also succeed, but when it comes to feeding the masses, the reality is that all of us “little guys” are pretty much irrelevant. From the vegetable grower planting a quarter acre of this and a half acre of that, to the small dairy or chicken farm, to the two person bakery, while we can hope that our products are valuable to our small group of customers, our fraction of the overall food economy is incredibly tiny. I don’t know which type of business, the micro, or the industrial will have an easier time adjusting to the changes in the economy that seem to be rolling our way, but one thing is for sure, it would take many thousands of small operations to produce anywhere near the output of our large scale industrial food system. The New Haven bakery Glenn manages makes our total annual bread production in one busy night. (110,000 pounds of dough) Operations of that size and larger dot the country by the hundreds, and while between ten and fifteen percent of that production goes to waste, the rest is sold and consumed by all of us. At it’s best the movement to support local, small scale producers is inspiring and hopeful, but when I think about it with this new perspective in mind, it all seems a little quaint and naïve. But don’t stop ordering just because we’re irrelevant, we still need and appreciate all the support we can get! Have a good week. noah