Welcome to Season 11 of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, is spending this season with Jennifer Steiner Pool, president and creator-in-chief of Steiner’s Baking Co., about how to turn a special family recipe into a commercially viable brand. Sponsored by Puratos.

In the first episode, we meet our guest and discover how her grandfather’s hobby led her to become “creator-in-chief” for Steiner’s.

Learn more about this season here, and tune into Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple or Spotify.

Joanie Spencer: Hi, Jennifer! Thanks so much for joining me for this season of the podcast.

Jennifer Steiner Pool: Oh my god, are you kidding? Thank you for having me. We are so excited. My mom is sitting outside the door listening.

Spencer: That is awesome. So I first got to know you when one of our editors, Annie Hollon, did a cool profile on Steiner’s as an emerging brand. This is a really cool story. It’s a cool company with an incredible background, and so before we dive into everything, I want you to take me back about 30 years or so and tell me how your grandfather’s baking hobby led eventually to a proprietary gluten-free flour blend, and how that led to these amazing coffee cakes. Basically, how did it happen, and what did baking look like for you looking at your grandfather?

Steiner Pool: Sure. So happy to do that. It is a pretty amazing story. I would say 30 years ago, I never envisioned even having this conversation, let alone a company that was centered around baking. That was not my vision for my career.

My grandfather pulled us all around the table, as many families do around the holidays, etc. They love to spend time together, and food can be a central part of that story. My grandfather was a hobbyist; he raised orchids, he volunteered at the hospital on Long Island, and he loved baking and cooking. He taught classes at the hospital for baking and cooking and had cookbooks. He made an amazing apple pie, as well. We really loved it. It used to, like, just explode with apples. So that was an important part of our lives as a family. It wasn’t my mom and dad preparing these big elaborate meals; it was my grandpa. My grandma hated cooking and baking. She would clean, but she did nothing in the kitchen. It was all him. So the flavors that we experienced, and just the smell. I mean, I can remember it right now.

So what happened was, he was so passionate and loved these hobbies. He took my mom, his daughter-in-law, under his wing. She loved learning from him. They were constantly talking about baking and cooking, and she was always trying to replicate his recipes. The issue was that before anyone could even spell “celiac,” it turned out my mother had celiac, so she couldn’t enjoy any of the baked goods he was making. It was hard. It’s very hard not to cheat, and it’s super-duper hard to replicate a conventional recipe.

Now, my mom, coincidentally, is also a science teacher. She has this really cool creative tinkering. I think people often forget that scientists are very creative, right? That’s how you problem solve. She dug in very early on in her diagnosis before anyone knew what celiac was … there was most definitely nothing to buy in the marketplace. I mean, 30 years ago, nothing. She just started this journey, and would constantly be trying to figure out a way to make a pie or cake.

One of my grandfather’s most fabulous chocolate layer cakes, with this mocha filling and this buttercream icing that he would make all of us, it’s called “Betty’s birthday cake” after my grandma. My mom really wanted to be able to make that gluten-free. Now, it was impossible. I mean, we like to say that she killed many cakes in her kitchen. We have a zero-waste policy at our company, and we are really focused on using every single thing that we buy we use, so the idea that my mom went through all of this food that was, quite frankly, inedible as she was working through this process, it pains me, but we need to do the right thing now.

So it took years. It was very frustrating. When you bake a whole cake, especially a six-layer cake, and then you bite into it and it’s horrendous … you’re frustrated! I mean, imagine how frustrating that is and you don’t know if it’s good until you’re done. Right? It’s different than cooking. In cooking, as you’re moving along through, let’s say, making some sort of chicken dish, you can kind of taste the sauce. But baking is so precise, and you really don’t know the outcome until you’re finished. That’s what makes it so tricky. People forget the difference between those two things. That’s why, oftentimes, you’ll meet folks who are amazing cooks — fabulous food that they make — and they don’t like to bake. In the moment, you can’t make those adjustments.

So this is going on for 30 years, stuff is getting thrown out left and right. Occasionally, something is somewhat edible. Also, what’s happening in the marketplace is that, over a long period of time, we start to see some products on the shelves. She’ll try anything because, at this point, there’s nothing. Things were so bad. The fact that people could put certain products in a package on a shelf and sell them and people would buy them, and you get it home and is inedible … that only fueled her fire more. Because she’s infuriated that everything tastes so bad. And she’s like, ‘We’re already suffering. If you have celiac or gluten intolerance, you’re already miserable. Now, you want me to eat all this stuff?’ And it’s horrendous.

Spencer: I mean, that is salt in the wound.

Steiner Pool: It was just insult on top of insult, and it baited her. She would come home, she’d eat something. And she’s also quite persnickety. So something that I might say was, ‘Okay, Mom, I could eat this, it seems pretty good.’ She’s just spitting it out. And you know, infuriated with it. And actually, it’s probably good for a lot of brands that social media wasn’t around then, because I’m sure she would have just been zipping off left and right for making her suffer through these trials. But it did motivate her, and we were watching her.

I think in 2010, I said, ‘She’s onto something.’ She wasn’t there, but I could see that she was getting closer. And I said to my brother, ‘We need to be ready, because I think she’s going to nail this. And I think she’s going to have a company.’ And he was like, ‘What? You’re crazy. What are you talking about? That’s never going to happen, she’ll never get it.’ And she kept saying she was never going to get it. Like, it’s not doable, never going to happen. But you know when sometimes you see someone going through a process, and you just know — it’s very hard to articulate exactly — but you can just see the confluence of passion and research are taking them to an endpoint. She was going to get there, we were going to have this birthday cake, come hell or high water!

Spencer: I’m hearing this, and these are the marks of a baker. Just a regular consumer, run-of-the-mill person whose father made an incredible cake that she can no longer have, is going to do one of two things: They’re either going to be sad and live without it, or they’re going to cheat and suffer the terrible consequences every once in a while just to have it. And what your mom, Nancy, has is love and stubbornness. These are marks of a baker.

Steiner Pool: Yes. And tenacity, right? She was not letting it go.

Spencer: And then that’s entrepreneurialism, that tenacity. Like at all costs. When you’re watching, you’re like, ‘Why hasn’t she given up?’ So I can see especially — and we’ll get into your marketing background — but when you have a marketing background, your eyes are sort of trained to see those kinds of things. So I can totally see where you are like, ‘It’s coming.’ And she’s going to do something with this because you don’t persist at that level for yourself, just to eat a piece of cake. Right?

Steiner Pool: Yeah, like who’s going to work this hard for something just so I can have a piece of cake? And so in 2010, I was at an ad agency. In an ad agency, you’re like a little family because you’re up late at night and doing all these crazy things. I went to the guys and I said, ‘I’m going to need a logo.’ They’re like, ‘Well, what is this company?’ I was like, ‘Well, I don’t really have my head around it, but it’s very New York, nostalgic diner. Just work on that for me.’ And they were great, and they did. So that’s 2010, when there is no company, there’s no product. It was just up here, up in my head.

And then in 2016, my mom served us my grandfather’s German sour cream coffee cake, and I just stopped in my tracks. I was like, ‘Mom, this is phenomenal. No one would know this is gluten-free. How did you do this?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know, I didn’t write it down.’ I almost threw the cake at her! For 30, 35 years, I’ve been watching you do this, and you’re not taking notes as you go?’ She said, ‘No, I was just like into it. I was doing it. I wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t thinking about it.’ I was like, ‘Okay, do it again.’

I couldn’t believe that she never writes any of it down. So we stand there together in the kitchen, and we go through batch after batch to try to get it exactly right. It’s baking: sifting flour in the kitchen, it’s everywhere. My father is furious; my brother is like, ‘You’re crazy.’ But I know this is something. She has to figure out what she did. And then we worked through the whole mess. And I’d say for like two or three weeks, we were sifting flour in the kitchen, which is very dangerous and not good for you; it can make you very sick. So we had wet rags all over everything, and all these bowls everywhere. And I was taking notes, and I was writing Post-It notes on everything until we could get to the right recipe for the flour.

Spencer: We’ll get to that in a couple weeks, too, talking about that product development with the flour, but that was the key because of her celiac diagnosis. It wasn’t just about getting a cake recipe. It was the flour recipe before she could perfect anything else. And then we’ll get into all of the other factors that then revolve around that, but again, it takes a lot to not give up to create a flour recipe.

Steiner Pool: I think she forgets some of that sometimes, how much time she really put into this.

Spencer: So she becomes this baker unintentionally, and then you follow suit. You had your instinct, and you could see it coming. Was it really like, ‘It was so good, I quit my job the next day?’ Like how did you dive into it?

Steiner Pool: First you have to know — and my family will attest to this — I do not bake or cook anything. We eat tuna fish for dinner or cottage cheese if you’re lucky, and perhaps we’ll order out. I do not like being in the kitchen. So I did quit my job the next day, and my mom was furious, seething mad. And so her way of managing me growing up was when I would do something that she didn’t agree with, she would throw up a hurdle to make it harder, which unfortunately for her meant that I was just going to work harder at whatever it was that she was in the way of. And then she did it!

I quit my job, I went online, I registered the company, and this all happened in a matter of like 30 seconds. She says to me, ‘I’m not baking anything. You’ll never be able to get the flour made.’ Those were her two things, because obviously we weren’t going to sit in the kitchen and sift flour for however long. I said, ‘Then I’ll learn how to bake.’ Then she looked at me like as absolutely crazy. She’s like, ‘What are you talking about? You don’t even make scrambled eggs.’ I was like, ‘Well, I’ll figure it out, and I’m going to find someone to make the flour.’ And within three weeks, I had found someone to make the flour.

I had a little more time to learn how to bake because we needed the flour before I had to bake anything. She said, ‘I want to see you bake something. I don’t care what it is. I just want to see you bake something because I’ve literally never seen you do anything of this kind. Cookies? No, nothing. Rice Krispies Treats? Nothing.’ So my grandpa, one of his best recipes — and I can’t wait for us to release it — is this banana bread. I love it, it’s so good. And so we sifted up the flour, and I made the banana bread. And it was so good! And she was, you could tell now, more mad because I now overcame that hurdle because clearly I could bake something.

Then I found our blender. We’ve had the same blender since those first three weeks that I found them. And they’re fabulous, fabulous partners. I love them. They’re a part of our family now. But yes, literally, I quit my job.

Spencer: Oh my god. So if I were to write a profile about you, I would open with, ‘Jennifer Steiner Pool became a baker to spite her mother.’

Steiner Pool: Yes, that’s correct. And I still hate it! It pains me when I have to bake, and obviously I don’t bake a lot now because we’re running a huge production line, so I’m physically not doing the baking. But for the first three years of the company, every single product I baked with my own hands. Thousands and thousands of coffee cakes and brownies and ginger snaps. I baked every single one. It was incredibly difficult. There were days when I was hysterically crying in the kitchen at 2 in the morning, you know, it was really hard.

Spencer: I mean, we all say baking is an art and a science. The creativity requires the science, but when people think of baking, it has this romantic connotation to it. But it’s really not. It’s messy and it’s hard and it’s frustrating, and it gets ugly but with a beautiful finished product.

Okay, so I have to ask because you launched Steiner’s with coffee cake: Steiner’s Coffee Cake of New York. What happened to Betty’s birthday cake? Did she ever nail the birthday cake?

Steiner Pool: Oh, the birthday cake is fabulous. We have the birthday cake for every birthday. It doesn’t matter where you live in the country, she will figure out a way to get your birthday cake to you. It’s our family tradition. We have looked at it, we’re not there yet, at how we could pre-bake them and package it because it is so good. It’s complicated. It’s a very complicated recipe, so we’re not there yet, because you really have to think about scale, which I know you and I are going to talk about. But it’s fabulous. The birthday cake is so good. 

Spencer: Just a shameless plug for me, this podcast launches on my birthday week. So…

Steiner Pool: Where are you? I can get you a cake! We’ll figure that out. Birthdays should be celebrated, so we will figure that out.

Spencer: That would be awesome. Okay, so this is a family business. And I’m listening to your family story from watching your grandfather and how hard your mom works. I keep picturing a movie from the ’80s, and I haven’t seen it in forever, but it just makes me think of that movie Mystic Pizza. Your family sounds like the family from Mystic Pizza.

Steiner Pool: It’s that and Seinfeld. I feel like I live in a Seinfeld episode every day.

Spencer: So okay, you launch a brand, you just dive in unabashedly, and you do it with your family. So I’ve got to know, what is it like to start a company with your family, especially when it’s something that none of you, except for your grandfather, had any experience with? Who and what did you lean on through the learning curve, from a business perspective and from a baking perspective? But also, I am very curious, how did you guys not kill each other?

Steiner Pool: Well, and remember, our name is on the product also. Right? So that’s an added measure of pressure. So we do come from an entrepreneurial background. In 1926, my grandfather’s mother started a sign company, which was unheard of in 1926, for a woman to do anything like that. So I definitely have that in my DNA, this entrepreneurial spirit. I think I’m also very good at ignoring my mother. So all the kinds of hurdles and negative stuff she was throwing at me, I just filtered them out. I wasn’t even listening to her, which obviously annoyed her even more.

I think another key aspect of our ability to work together … my brother is literally my business partner, although he has what everyone likes to say, ‘a real job,’ so we’re very respectful of each other’s ‘swim lanes,’ as I like to say. My mom is R&D. She’s thinking about recipes all the time. Now, she’s tried to write things down, but she usually still does not write anything down, so I’m always chasing after her to write things down. But that is what she does.

Here’s an interesting story. So we have these ginger snaps, which you could just eat like popcorn, they’re so good. And we make them really little because one of our other pillars is responsible indulgence. We want people to enjoy great baked goods that have clean ingredients but are responsibly portioned. So our ginger snaps are tiny. I was really struggling in production to make them efficiently. Many people know ginger snaps are usually hand-rolled, and then put in a bowl of sugar and then put on a baking sheet. Well, you have to have 5,000 people rolling ginger snaps. It just wasn’t going to work. So I went to her and she really wanted them in the market, and I said, ‘Mom, then you have to figure out how to roll these ginger snaps without rolling them.’ Right? Like you got to solve that problem, because I’m not going to solve it. This is not where I excel. And we can’t make the ginger snaps one at a time. So she went to work and she figured out you can make them in a log. She just was experimenting. Make them in a log, you don’t have to have them be in a circle to bake into a circle — who knew? — so there you go. She’s really good at that.

My brother, he’s an attorney. That’s his deal. He’s got my back. He’s very good at it. He’s also an excellent taste tester. He’s not getting in the kitchen. I mean, there were two nights in the history of this company where I was so hysterical, at my wit’s end, he did come into the kitchen. But other than that, that’s what he does. And then everything else is me. So they’re all quite respectful of that.

And they’re always honest, which is really important, whether it’s the product or the marketing and communications. I need trusted feedback. One of the slippery things when you start a business, especially in food, is people who love you tend to want to just tell you it’s great. And for everyone out there listening, that’s actually not helpful. What we want as entrepreneurs is the people we love and trust to tell us the hard stuff. I’d rather hear from my family that the recipe isn’t right, or, you know, such and such is wrong, than from consumers because we didn’t catch it early because my family wouldn’t tell me and they were just trying to tell me everything’s great, and now we have a product out there that isn’t acceptable. That is a really important part of our dynamic together.

Spencer: Yeah. And it sounds like you guys are very skilled with honest feedback.

Steiner Pool: Yes. Well, we’re New Yorkers. That’s in the DNA; we tend to just blurt out what we’re thinking. We love working together. Listen, it’s your mom, right? So when I stumble, when I’m struggling with things, when the business is kind of like trying to start a lawn mower … she worries. And she’s still angry that I quit my job. But then she’ll walk in a grocery store and she’ll see the products on the shelf, and she’ll burst into tears because she just can’t believe it. And when Mondelez tapped us to be a part of their CoLab program in 2023, I think she cried through the whole 12-week program.

And that was such an awesome experience for her, and we did that together. I think another poignant moment for me that I would share is watching my mom at 70. So when I quit my job and we started this company, she just was turning 70, like 10 days later. I don’t think she thought she could have something like this. First of all, she comes from a generation where women were just starting to make their mark, paving the way for my generation. But I think sometimes she’s just like, ‘I can’t believe this is real, that I’ve gotten to have this experience after I’ve been a teacher, retired, raised my children. Like, I have grandchildren. And now I have a company.’ It’s very interesting to watch her in that regard. So when we did this program with Mondelez, together — and we were together all the time, people thought it was adorable — we almost killed each other, but we didn’t. But she was doing things that, for me professionally, I did all the time: brainstorming sessions, meeting with advertising agencies and all these things. For her, it was totally new. And I thought that was pretty cool for her to have that. I feel like that’s the biggest gift, aside from making her flour a reality, is this opportunity to do this thing that, in her wildest dreams, she would never imagine doing.

Spencer: That is just so special to me from a personal perspective, because I have this little company that I helped start and we have a female-dominated staff. The only males in our company are the founders, and I’m so proud of that. It’s really cool watching the next generation come in and building a company of really empowered women. Then to hear you talk about your mom who did come from a generation where, if you worked out of the home, you became a teacher and you raised your children. And food is love and you fed your family and you raised your family, and you got your joy from seeing the things that your children did or picking up the skills that you taught them. To hear you describe her experience of this business success and achieving something she never imagined, and doing it at age 70, is just like girl power at its finest. There truly are no boundaries if you’re willing to be brave and have that grit and that tenacity.

Steiner Pool: It’s a huge risk, right? She’s risk averse. My brother is also risk averse. They’re extremely conservative in that regard. And I’m pushing her so far outside of her comfort zone, and it’s been great for her. I think you’re right, that it doesn’t matter how old you are. If there’s something that you want to achieve, and it could be anything — writing a book, starting a crazy baking company, whatever it is — there is no ‘I’m too old for that.’ And she would say that sometimes. I would give her such a hard time. She’s like, ‘Oh, my back hurts, I can’t stand in the kitchen anymore today.’ I’m just like, ‘Get a stool and sit here and roll those ginger snaps.’ And you know, you have to like, sometimes push her over her own psyche, her own assumption that she can’t do it because now she’s 76. I’m constantly beating her back on that constantly taking that away from her and telling her that you’re here, of course you can do this. There’s no issue. Chop chop, wake up! Let’s go.

Spencer: I love it. This has been amazing, and just really educational and entertaining, to hear the story of your family and how a hobby turned into a science project that turned into a brand. It’s incredible. And there are far-reaching impacts for what you and your mom have done, born out of what your grandfather loved to do. This episode is just sort of a taste of that. We are really going to go on a journey over the next five weeks.

One thing that’s also very interesting about your story is that you weren’t, like, baking in the kitchen for five years and selling at bake sales; you jumped into manufacturing pretty quickly. So we’re going to talk about your lessons that you’ve learned and where you are, and your best practices in scaling up and growing that consumer and customer base. We’re going to talk about product development challenges that come with gluten-free; I think you have a unique perspective, and I’m excited to hear about that. We’re going to talk about what I’ve been seeing, what I call an evolution of marketing for a gluten-free product. And then we’re going to finish off with looking at portfolio expansion, because you started this company when your mom perfected the coffee cake, but like you said, there’s ginger snaps and there’s the birthday cake and there’s so much more. This growth is rapid, but it’s done in a really smart way, so I am so honored and excited to take this journey with you this month of May.

That’s all I have for you for this week, Jennifer, and it was awesome. It was so much fun! Next week, I’m excited to talk about how you scaled up.

Steiner Pool: I’m looking forward to it. It’s my pleasure.