Oliver's Artisan Breads: Wholesale Organic Bread Bakery

organic to go newsletter

Organic to Go is a new brand of healthy, creative foods that was launched in the fall of 2005, and continues to grow with stores throughout the West. The CEO of Organic to Go contacted Carol in the summer of 2005 to begin development of specialized, organic breads for use in Organic’s healthy sandwich products. The below article appeared in Organic to Go’s customer newsletter in March 2006.

 

 

 

text of organic to go newsletter article

Organic to Go Interview with Carol Head, CEO, Oliver’s Artisan Breads, Southern California

Although big corporate life was fulfilling in many ways and I was successful, I began looking for a way to apply the skills I had developed by striking out on my own. I went looking for a business that I felt could grow, and a quality product that I could be proud of. I came upon this business three years ago and fell in love with it. It’s turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

It’s a tough business, logistically intense. This building is open almost every minute, 365 days a year. Just to manage that is tough. A lot of people get into the bread business because they love bread, which is certainly the best reason to get into it, but often the business side is not paid enough attention to. I think our success comes by balancing the business side with the creative side.

We work creatively with our customers to develop new breads. We do the classics, the sourdoughs, etc. But we excel at quality breads that are different in style, shapes and flavors than the big boys in town: Santa Fe Chile Cheese, Coconut Curry Brioche, Potato Rosemary, Honey Wheat Muesli, Cranberry & Walnut, Cinnamon Apple, Cherry Pecan… that’s become our niche. Our best seller is our Harvest Bread, delicious and healthy. A little whole wheat, a little rye, a little honey, plus sunflower, flax, and sesame seeds, topped with oats and sunflower seeds. We bake to order, and every night we have to mix about thirty-five different doughs, and get them out the door. We supply sixteen breads that go on grocery store shelves that we supply to Whole Foods and other stores and restaurants. Then we have organic sandwich breads which we supply to Organic To Go and others.

We also do a lot of custom work. For example, we supply one of the best restaurants in Los Angeles, consistently ranked in the top three, who called and asked if we would work with them to develop a bread unlike the others in town. We spent two months together, doing fifteen different iterations until we got distinctive bread that is now their table bread.

We have about a hundred active customers, and about half of them are restaurants. We have no sales force. Our growth comes from word of mouth, from customers who want something new.

We have to do things differently than the large bread manufacturers. If they’re doing high volumes of bread with big production lines, their costs are going to be lower than ours, so we have to do things better. What we do better is quality of product and quality of service. They count equally to our customers. We don’t use preservatives, we use high quality ingredients, and we know that’s the only way we can win against the big manufacturers. On the service side of it, if you’re a restaurant, and you open at 8 am, you need your bread there by 7:30, period. That can be a challenge on a rainy day when your truck routes are all messed up, so we work hard at service. It’s the classic small business niche thing. When we screw up, we admit it. If somebody asks for credit back, we give it to them without questioning it, and over time we develop relationships with customers who learn we can be trusted. If we say we’re late because it’s rainy and we’re sorry, they know that we aren’t making up some story.

Of course, there have been disasters. We had a product for a customer which we call “the product from hell.” We had developed a product with them, a pretzel sandwich roll. A pretzel is not just a shape, it’s a flavor. There is a reason why you don’t see a lot of pretzel breads because it is truly difficult to control and often it all goes haywire. So we had a customer who we were happy to sell them a pretzel roll, but we hadn’t really talked about the size specification, the functionality of it… it had to be five point seven inches long, plus or minus three quarters of an inch, same narrow parameters on the height and on the width. We couldn’t do it within those narrow parameters with the consistency they needed. We were throwing out sixty percent of the pretzels we baked … it went on for three months, our era of pretzel hell. Horrible! I finally had to call them and give them two months notice and said we just can’t do this. They said “well, why not, we love the pretzels?” and I said because we throw away more than we send and we’re losing money -. This was early in my business ownership and I hadn’t learned that you can’t promise product consistency with a pretzel… just too hard to do. They continue as one of our largest customers and have a great relationship, but that was a difficult learning experience for us.

Everybody seems to have a bread story, a bread memory. Flour, water, salt… that’s what makes bread. Other than flavors for particular breads, that’s it. Sounds simple. Historians say that bread baking is the second oldest profession, and I believe it. Every culture has bread, and it has so many religious, spiritual connotations… “man does not live on bread alone,” it’s the “staff of life,” it’s the “symbol of Christ” – it’s really a product with a lot of emotional and spiritual ties for people, and that’s kind of neat. Smell memories are stronger than touch memories or visual memories, and people will tell me they can remember the smell from the little bread bakery three blocks away when they were six years old.

To combine business with the art of baking, to apply what I learned in corporate culture into a product that I’m proud of and have it work is deeply rewarding.