Welcome to Season 13 of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, is spending this season with Markey Culver, CEO of The Women’s Bakery, a social enterprise bakery in East Africa. They’re discovering the challenges and rewards that come with creating change through baking. Sponsored by Middleby Bakery Group.

In our first episode, Markey explains how she went from a business student in St. Louis to a bakery entrepreneur in Rwanda, drastically changing lives for East African women with a simple loaf of bread.

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

Joanie Spencer: Hi Markey. Thank you so much for joining me. I’m so excited to spend the next five weeks with you.

Markey Culver: I’m delighted to be here. I feel honored, so thank you.

Spencer: Markey, you know that I very proudly consider you a friend, and I’m proud to think of myself as your friend, but, I’m also a fan.

I meant to do a little research because I have heard it said that, I think it’s like, eight percent of the world’s population actually changes the world. And you know that I’ve always believed that you are one of that small portion of people who is going to be responsible for changing the world. Much of the industry is familiar with The Women’s Bakery, but there is still a portion that doesn’t know what’s going on and what you’ve done in Africa.

So, I just want to tell this entire story from beginning to end over the next five weeks, and the first step is going all the way back to before you were in Rwanda. What were you doing before that? How did you get there?

Culver: I am from St Louis, MO, but before getting to Rwanda, I actually lived in Austin, TX. At the time I thought I wanted to be in law, but I knew that before I launched into what I thought was going to be a legal career, I wanted to do something that had a bigger purpose than I did, and to me that calling was in the Peace Corps. So, I applied to the Peace Corps, and during my interview stages, I was told that it’s a little bit more difficult to get accepted into the Peace Corps if you request where you want to go, or if you request where you don’t want to go.

So, I had that knowledge going into my final interview, but then they did ask me in the interview. They said, “Hey, is there anywhere you really don’t want to go in the Peace Corps?” Out of ignorance, and it’s true ignorance, I just said, “Yeah, I don’t really want to go to Rwanda.” And so, I’m sure the person who was interviewing me was like, “Ha, ha, ha, this chick will never make it,” and assigned me to Rwanda. So, in 2010 I left the United States for Rwanda as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Spencer: Wow. That was in 2010, so we’re looking at a 14-year history. Can you describe what was it like in Rwanda? Just agriculturally, socioeconomically, and especially someone who grew up in St. Louis, lived in Texas, like classic … you’re a middle American, upper middle class, white woman, and you end up in Rwanda. What was that experience like?

Culver: So again, I say ignorance, because if you actually google Rwanda, I think most people who are not from the African continent, or even those who are, what you know of Rwanda is the 1994 genocide. So, that’s why I say I was ignorant, because if you dig a little bit deeper, Rwanda is actually an amazing country and has an amazing story of resilience and development. So, I feel quite grateful that my trajectory went toward Rwanda.

The structure of the Peace Corps is that a country must invite the United States Peace Corps in. And there’s a specific reason. So, Rwanda in, I think it was 2006 or 2007, switched the medium of instruction in school from French to English. So, Rwanda is a former Belgian colony, and if you were lucky enough to be educated, you were educated in French.

Then in, between, I don’t remember exactly when 2007, 2008 or 2009, the president of Rwanda switched it to English. And there are probably many reasons for that, but the primary reason was Rwanda is in central East Africa, and all of the countries that border Rwanda are former British colonies, and the commercial language is English. So, Rwanda, in an effort to tap into some of that commercial success, wanted to educate their populace in English.

Rwanda asked volunteers from the United States, Peace Corps volunteers, to come over and train teachers to teach in English in Rwanda, and then to be teachers in classrooms, teaching English as a foreign language. So, that’s what I was assigned to do.

Being from the Midwest, and how I found Rwanda, I had never been to the African continent. My travel exposure was relatively limited. So honestly, I was blown away at how amazing Rwanda was, and I say that because what you read about Rwanda is often cast in more of a negative light, right, where they had this horrible genocide, and there was so much destruction, and it really set the country back several decades. While there are aspects of that that are quite true, Rwanda is remarkable in how much progress they have made, because the 1994 genocide was actually a culmination of multiple genocides. They gained their independence in 1959 and then there’s just been a series of genocides. So, I was blown away at how amazing Rwanda is, and was in 2010, and part of that was just how quickly things developed.

So, I landed in the capital city, which is Kigali, and the Peace Corps training happened just outside of that, so it felt far more developed. I don’t use that term lightly. I don’t actually like that term, but I think that when you think of the Peace Corps, and you especially think of the Peace Corps and being assigned to East Africa, if you’ve never been to the continent, you’re not quite sure what to anticipate, and I was certainly that way. It was just far more developed than I was anticipating.

That being said, when I was finally assigned to the village where I ultimately ended up for two years, it was a little bit more probably what many Westerners envision, where you’re in a rural environment. So, I served in a rural town that’s called Bushoga. It’s in the northeastern part of Rwanda. And I make a joke that our village was a village of 600: 300 cows and 300 people. So, it was more agrarian, very much so.

Most of Rwanda still is agrarian. And what I mean by that is Rwanda … Well, we’re from Missouri, so we can do this. Rwanda is about a sixth the size of Missouri but has double the population of Missouri. There are about 13 million people in Rwanda. So, it is very densely populated. I think it’s like the fifth or sixth most densely populated country in the world. So, this was a rural place, but still densely populated, and most people in this village were subsistence farmers, meaning that they grew what their family, their immediate family, needed, and then if there were surplus, they would barter. So, if you had a surplus of tomatoes, you would barter someone for beans.

What I found obviously different than where I’d come from is, while my home where I lived was made out of mudbrick and cement, I had no running water, certainly no plumbing. There was spotty electricity, but I was one of the lucky ones that did actually have spotty electricity, and I had a communal latrine that was about 30 or 40 feet from my house. So just a very different experience than I think many people grow up with, at least in the United States.

Spencer: Okay, I think our audience has caught on to … you are not a baker.

Culver: God, no. I wish I were.

Spencer: You did not set out to create a bakery in Rwanda. You don’t have any baking background at all. Just knowing you, as long as I have, I know the story. It all started when you figured out how to make bread, but it was for, initially, a self-serving reason.

Culver: Oh, yes, it was very much self-serving. Okay, so, now I feel like I can be so much more honest with people, because I can be more myself, and The Women’s Bakery is very much viable, and we’re headed in, I think, the right direction, so I can be more honest with how it started.

So, yes, one of the reasons I started baking bread, and the honest truth, was because I was embarrassed that I was eating mayonnaise with a spoon, like, I was emaciated in the Peace Corps. And I’m huge; I’m six feet tall, I’m already pretty thin, and it’s very customary in rural Rwanda to have one meal a day. And so, I, realistically, probably in the first year, tried to do the same, but I found that quite difficult. And so, I taught at a school, as I said, and then I also worked at a rural health clinic. And so, I would come home in the middle of the day and literally eat mayonnaise with a spoon, which is disgusting, so I needed a vehicle, right? I needed a vehicle on which to smear mayonnaise and shove it into my mouth.

So, the way all of this started is by accident, to be honest. I was hungry, and I was watching where this village was … there was like a thoroughfare, so connecting one larger town to another larger town, and a lot of people would bring their produce back and forth. So, there was access to produce. And when I say that I mean cabbage, onions, tomatoes, things like that.

After a year, I would come home and make myself lunch. And for me, that was a salad. I would chop up cabbage, onions and tomatoes, we had avocados, and so I’d smush up avocados, mix it with some white vinegar, and make myself a little salad, and then just slather mayonnaise all over it, because you could actually find mayonnaise everywhere. It’s shelf stable. You don’t need refrigeration — surprise! By the way, being from the Midwest, I grew up hating mayonnaise, and I had this moment in the Peace Corps, probably like, I don’t know, nine to 10 months in, where I was walking past a shelf of just dry foods, and there were tubs of mayonnaise there, and I walked past it, my body was like, “I must have the mayonnaise.” So, I bought it and went home and sat on my cement floor and ate mayonnaise with a spoon and thought, “That’s it. I can’t do this anymore. We need to change something.”

I had attended a Peace Corps conference, and one of our fellow volunteers was talking about how she was making bread in her village. And I thought, “Well, that’s cool. How do you do that?” Because bread is known … in the capital city, in Kigali, you can certainly find bread. And then in the more rural areas, bread is a known commodity. It’s just really difficult to find. So, when I found out that this gal was making bread, I asked her where she learned, and she was like, “Oh no, it’s just in the Peace Corps handbook.” We had a cookbook or a handbook with recipes from Peace Corps volunteers all over the world. One of the recipes was for bread. And I thought, “Well, what the hell. I’ll try it.” And I did.

So, to make a very long story short, I found all the ingredients that I needed, which were pretty simple. The Peace Corps, during our training, had taught us how to make what we call a Dutch oven, so over an open fire with pots and stones, and I made a loaf of bread. It was … you know, I’m not a baker, and I know your audience is bakers, but it was passable as bread. It allowed me to smear mayonnaise on it and then throw my salad on top of it. And, yeah, that’s how I started. There’s more to it, but that’s how I made the first loaf of bread.

Spencer: I think our audience of bakers will truly, deeply appreciate that this is how it started, because this is such a quintessential story of bread being a staff of life. You were hungry, and you needed to sustain yourself, and with four ingredients — flour, water, salt and yeast — you were able to sustain yourself. And then it became a catalyst for big change that we’re going to dive into.

So, I guess that’s going to be my next question … What happened next? You kind of got busted with the bread.

Culver: Yeah, right, yes. As I said, I started going home midday to make myself lunch, and the lunch was salad. And so, by that point, I was … and I’m not complimenting myself, but I was established enough … I’d been in this village for a year … I was established enough that people knew my name, they kind of knew my schedule. So, it was almost like a walk of shame, right? I had to go from my school and walk through the village, “downtown,” and walk past people, mainly men, because women typically work in the fields, and men were kind of sitting in town, and they would holler at me, and they’d say, “Hey, where are you going? We know you’re going to go home and eat lunch.”

I would at first feign like, “No, no, I’m not going to eat,” because it was very taboo. You only truly have a meal a day, which is dinner. But then after a couple of weeks, I was like, “You know what, whatever. Yes, I’m going home and to make myself salad, and it’s going to be amazing.” And so, the men in the village were like, “Awesome. Well, if you’re going home to have food, we’re coming with you” because it was very communal. And this is something I loved. And like, “Great. If you’re going to go make food, I’m joining you, and we can have a meal together.”

So, they followed me into my house. Again, no malintent. This is all like, we’re a big community. And then once they saw that I was making salad, they were horrified, because food, especially in rural Rwanda, in order for it to be called food, it has to be cooked for a lot of reasons, but primarily safety. It’s safer for food to be cooked because then you kill any bacteria or whatever is on there. And so, the men were horrified that I was eating raw food. They went home, and they told their wives, like, “Oh my gosh, can you believe this crazy white girl? She’s just making raw for lunch and eating it. Isn’t that insane?”

The women feigned horror, because these are the women I worked with in the health center, in the maternity and nutrition wards, and we’re a community, so I knew them anyway. So, the women feigned horror like, “Oh, can you believe that? That’s so insane.” Then they would come up to me and say, “Hey, by the way, could you please teach us how to do that? We want to learn how to make salad.”

I started what I call … it’s not really salad-making classes. It was more just gab time for gals. The women would come over between noon and 2 p.m., and we would make salads together. Sometimes it was a platform to teach them about nutrition — I had to teach myself, too — and just an opportunity for the women to get together. We talked about their kids’ health. So, we were doing that for, let’s say, a couple months, having salad afternoons.

Then I figured out how to make bread. That day … I don’t think I had anything in the afternoon because I couldn’t have … I guess I was finished with school, because when the women came in for their salad-making midday afternoon time, I had already baked my first loaf of bread, and it was cooling on my table. The women saw it, and they asked what it was, and when I told them it was bread, they were like, “Oh, cool, that’s great. Where did you buy it?” And I said, “Oh, no, I didn’t buy it. I actually made it.”

It was immediate. They were like, “Cool. Screw salad. We don’t care about salad anymore. We definitely want to learn how to make bread.” So, quickly our salad-making lessons became bread-making lessons, which is hilarious, again, for the professional bakers who may be listening to this, because to remind you, I had only made bread once in my life, like yeast bread. And the women were like, “Great, we’re going to do this,” and I was like, “Sure, I can totally … I totally know what I’m doing, and I’ll totally teach you.”

Spencer: That’s so you, Markey, because you’re like, “I don’t want to go to Rwanda. Oh, I’m going to Rwanda? Great. Okay. Oh, we’re going to figure this out.” There’s a pattern, and we’re going to see that pattern unfold a lot. But I have to point something out that I’m finding very interesting in this story. I can’t help but notice some significant cultural differences.

One that the women are the ones who are working in the field and the men are hanging out in town. Very interesting; not something we’re used to here in the United States. And also, that eating a second meal … you felt, you said, a walk of shame. And so culturally, like in America, we are like, “I haven’t eaten in an hour. I’m starving. What am I going to do?” You know? The first time my kid said, “I’m starving,” and I said, “You are a white boy from Johnson County, KS, one thing I can guarantee is that you’ll never starve. You are not starving.”

Just that it’s a little bit shameful to have a second meal is very interesting, and then just your salad-making finger quote class with the women that transcends culture. Women get together, they find a reason to get together, and then they learn from each other, and they form a pack that is, no matter what culture you’re in, that bond that women have, really, I love. So, that’s my little aside.

Culver: No, it is, and I do want to make one quick clarification. It’s not black and white. It’s not 100 percent women work in the field and 100 percent men just sit in town. That tends to be, in many rural places, the norm. But there are plenty of men who work in the field and plenty of women who are running shops in town or sitting in town. It’s just I did find that it was more customary for women to be working in the field and for men to be sitting in town. I just don’t want to cast a negative light and say like, “Right, all Rwandan men are sitting in town.”

Spencer: I know, I get that. It’s just in this particular narrative, what I’m envisioning is just something that is so outside of my little American bubble, and it’s very interesting to hear those cultural differences, and then see where it’s all the same, and that just that human bond transcends those cultural differences.

Okay, so the women said, “Screw the salad, we’re making bread.”

Culver: Yeah, that’s accurate. That’s exactly what happened. I said, “Okay, great, no problem, ladies, I would love to make bread with you. Please come tomorrow, and we’ll do this. Instead of doing salad, we’ll do bread.” There were probably five or seven ladies who would come every day. So, the next day, I got ready, I got wheat flour and yeast in a town that was about a 20-minute motorcycle ride; those motorcycles are your taxi. So, it was about a 20-minute motorcycle ride away. I bought that stuff, and then I had water, salt and a little bit of sugar or honey. So, the women came the next day. Again, I think it was about seven women that came.

But because I am a novice and I’d only baked yeast bread once in my life, I did not time this well, right? So, they came between, what, noon and 2 p.m. There’s a saying in Rwanda that time is elastic. So, if you say noon, people will show up at 2 p.m., and that’s like, totally normal and very acceptable. So, between noon and 2 p.m., we’re kind of getting everybody together, and I have my Peace Corps cookbook out where I’m trying to follow the instructions again, specifically the kneading aspect, because I’m new to this.

We mixed this and it’s just one loaf. I didn’t have the foresight to do multiple loaves or have women bring their own pots and we would bake multiple loaves of bread. Nope, just one. So, we’re all taking turns kneading the bread, and then, you know, you have to let it rise. What should have been probably tighter on time became very spread out. If we started around 2 p.m., then by the time we finally finished kneading and letting the bread rise and knead again, let it rise and start to bake it in the Dutch oven, it’s dusk, and dusk is mealtime in the village. Mealtime is typically prepared by the women. So, the women are supposed to be at home preparing a dinner for their families, but the women weren’t. These women weren’t at home. They were with me at my house, standing outside waiting for this one loaf of bread to finish baking.

So, of course, all their kids come looking for them. This is a really small community, so everyone knew where I lived, and that this crazy person is eating mayonnaise with a spoon and making bread. What’s she doing? So, all these kids are like, “Yeah, our mom is definitely over at her house. We’re going to go.”

 We’re sitting outside of my house … and just to paint the picture, it was beautiful. Rwanda is very clean. It’s a very clean country. So, the backyard was dirt, but it was very well kept. You would sweep it because that kept insects out and snakes and rodents. So, we’re all sitting out in the dirt; the women and I are literally in a circle around my Dutch oven, waiting for this one loaf of bread to finish baking, and then all these kids come out.

 I think the typical family size in rural Rwanda is between three and six kids. So, if you have seven women, you multiply that … it’s just tons of kids. So, we have seven women, then boom, it balloons up. We’ve got all these kids. Everybody’s waiting for this one loaf of bread to finish baking, and I’m biting my nails because I think, “Oh God, I’m going to damage my reputation and the trust of these community members if this bread stinks.” If it stinks, they’d be like, “Okay, well, we’re not listening to you anymore.”

 Finally, the bread finishes baking, and I take it out and I try a piece. It’s good, thank God. I’m tearing off pieces of the bread and handing it to the ladies. And then the most amazing thing happened. This was my ‘Aha!’ moment. We were seated in a circle around an open fire with these pots, and all the women have this like hunk of bread, and as soon as the women try the bread that they just made, they just helped to prepare, and realize that it was good, they ripped it up and handed it to the kids behind them.

I didn’t even have time … I was taking the pots off of the open fire, and I looked up and all the bread that I had passed out to the women was now being gobbled by children. So, I looked up and there are these wide-eyed kids fisting bread, and they were so delighted, right? Of course, because it’s delicious. It’s bread. And I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is it. This is how we create a nutritious snack, essentially.”

We can’t create a meal necessarily, from bread, but we can create a really nutritious snack if we pump this bread full of nutrients. Now, again, I’m not a professional baker, so for me, the nutrients were like, “Okay, what vegetables do we have that we can incorporate?” And then peanuts were a cash crop where we were, and we already pulverized them into flour. And I thought, “Okay, perfect. I know peanuts have fat and protein, so we can put that in the bread and make it super nutritious.” And that was my idea. I thought, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do. Instead of our daily salad-making lessons, we can have bread-making time, and I’ll supply the ingredients, and the women just bring their pots, and then they can go home and bake bread, and it can be a nutritious snack for their kids.” And that was the original intent, but it morphed into something a lot more than that.

Spencer: You had a few more ‘Aha!’ moments that drove that evolution, so, let’s talk about that. I know the women started doing something else with the bread that was very enlightening for you, and this is your story. I’m not going to say it, so I want you to outline it for me.

Culver: I don’t know how many weeks … the time, honestly, is a little bit fuzzy for me, but we truly did start having pretty regular bread-making sessions with ladies at my house, and it grew. More women started showing up. At one point, I remember coming back from school in the midafternoon … I had finished school, so I came home around, I don’t know, 2 p.m., 3 p.m., 4 p.m. …  and there was a gentleman waiting outside my house with a note, and it was like, would I please accept his wife into my bread-making class? He’d walked for three hours. He was three hours away, and news had spread that far that this was happening. To me, that was already significant enough where I thought, “Okay, cool. I had five women who were interested in salads, and now it’s like, 30 women are interested in breadmaking.”

So, I was doing that, but then, after a couple of weeks, I had a group of women approach me, and they were like, “Hey, we could sell this bread at a local market,” and I was like, “Oh, do you think so?” They were like, “Yeah, we definitely think we could sell this,” and I was like, “Cool, try it,” and they did, and it worked. So, my original thought of, “Oh, this is just a way for women to make something like a protein-packed or a nutrient-packed snack at home for their kids,” turned into women identifying that there was demand for something that right now only they could supply, which was pretty fascinating.

This wasn’t me going out to the local market saying, “Hey, who wants bread?” This was women saying, “I think that this is something we can do, and we’re going to try it.” I wasn’t even with them, so that was cool. That was my second ‘Aha!’ moment, and it’s very similar to what I just said, where the women had figured out demand and we had the supply. So, that formalized the idea a little bit more, where it’s like, “Okay, well, how do we create something where the women could continue to make bread and possibly earn a little bit of money from making that bread?” And that truly was the genesis for what has become The Women’s Bakery.

Spencer: I am just smiling so big right now because I’ve heard this story so many times. I’ve told this story so many times. And, first of all, it never fails to hit me in my heart. I feel this story in my heart. But talking about it with you, knowing that it’s an audience of professional bakers who will be listening and hearing how many times already, in these few minutes that we’ve had this conversation, you say, “I’m not a professional baker. I’m not a baker.”

But what you’ve done is the core philosophy of baking and just feeding people and providing a livelihood through making bread, and that’s really impactful. For someone who never even had baking on her radar, who didn’t bake in her kitchen, who didn’t set out to do this, and never really planned to start a business … you did exactly what baking is intended to do, just out of sheer circumstance, and it’s just a really beautiful thing.

Culver: Thanks, Joanie. because I wanted to be … after a year into the Peace Corps, I was like, “Oh, okay, I want to be in finance. I want to be in business. I want to be in finance, not law.” And I thought coming back to the United States, I wanted to be a banker with an N, not a baker, so, I appreciate all of that. Even though I’m still not a baker, I feel like I’m a buttress to the social enterprise that is now The Women’s Bakery.

Spencer: Okay, so now let’s start talking about The Women’s Bakery. We’ve kind of got that origin story foundation laid out. How many women were there when it first got started, when you were baking bread and selling it?

Culver: So probably … and this is before it was formalized. My Peace Corps service was 2010 to 2012, and I started baking with this group of women right in the middle. So, 2011. It was pretty nascent; it wasn’t really a business. I certainly wouldn’t call it that, because I bought the raw materials. I bought the wheat and the yeast, and then the women would experiment with … maybe some grew peanuts, and so they would experiment with that. Some grew carrots, and they would experiment with that. I think that was more … there was nothing formal, no formal business yet.

Then in 2012, right before I was leaving, it was a group of probably about seven or eight women who were interested in having this be more formalized. And when I say formalized, I think that the original vision that these women had for what became The Women’s Bakery was a cooperative, where everything was co-owned. If they had been to a bakery, it was not what we would envision as a bakery. And so that was my word … not that I had invented the word bakery, but in thinking, “Oh, okay, great, we could centralize something like this, and you all could make bread, and we could sell it in larger volumes, and we could go to farther markets.”

That concept came about right toward the end of my Peace Corps service. I remember sitting in my yard with a group of seven or eight ladies, and God, the bakers are going to laugh when they hear this. My naivete, thinking like, “Right, okay, it’s going to cost $200 to build a bakery. That’s it. That’s all we need, and we can totally do it.” So, as I left the Peace Corps, I told the ladies, “If you raise half of this, I’ll match it. So, if you raise 100 bucks, I’ll match 100 bucks, and I’ll come back and I’ll help you build a bakery.” That is iteration one in 2012.

Spencer: Here’s a question that I want to ask you. I want to ask about some of the immediate results. It might be time hopping a little bit because I want to deep dive into the iterations and those lessons that you learned. What were the immediate results of these women having this opportunity to make their own bread, feed their families and then subsequently earn a living from it?

Culver: I think the immediate results were a bit more intangible. There were some tangible things, but from what I remember, it was just sheer excitement where it was like, “Okay, cool. We have this new thing, this new skill, and this skill has the opportunity to generate income.”

To me, the nutrient-dense part of the bread was exciting because I again, as I told you, I worked in the nutrition and maternity wards, and so every day I would see acutely malnourished kids, so I was excited by the opportunity to have bread be a vehicle for enhanced nutrition, or at least enhanced access. I’m not going to pretend that this bread could supplement a meal, but it was certainly more than what kids were getting.

I think for the women, the immediate result was excitement. I think then it turned into something more, where it was thinking about what possibilities could exist in the future. I think that the income generation aspect, like if that were immediate, I think that that’s not something that we dwelled on very much until we formally started the first bakery and that became more real.

Spencer: What I think is really cool is the autonomy that it provided these women, because it wasn’t you saying, “Okay, now you’ve made this. You know what would be really cool? You could go out and sell this.” The fact that they discovered this on their own and went out and did it, discovered this is a life skill that I can apply and do something with.

In a culture where resources are scarce, you make enough to get by, and then what you have extra, you barter to get what you don’t have. It was just very … you get yourself to the surface and stay at the surface. You go out in the field, and you work; you get one meal a day. If you’re not there to make that meal, your kids are going to come looking for you. And it was just all very … this is it. We get to the surface, and then we stay here. This was a moment where they had autonomy to see what’s possible. Like you said, it created possibilities, and they did that on their own.

Culver: I think that’s an interesting word. I’ve never really thought about it that way, and I do think you’re right. I think there was an aspect of autonomy, and perhaps that is what generated the excitement, but I don’t know. And also, bread is delicious. Who doesn’t like bread, right? So, yes, the excitement, from an existential standpoint, was probably driven by the sense of autonomy, but then there’s also a very simple piece, which is like, “Wow, bread is delicious. I’m going to eat it.”

Spencer: When you’re used to eating cooked carrots and cooked potatoes, and you get a chance to have delicious bread …

Culver: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Spencer: Okay, so I have a question. I don’t know if it might be just a little bit too deep for this episode. Maybe I’ll ask it now and then I’ll ask it in the last episode, too, because I bet your answer in the beginning is going to be different than your answer at the end, because this is going to be a very chronological conversation.

During this time, I’m curious about your mindset because you weren’t a baker, and you’re teaching baking. You started teaching people after you made one loaf of bread. What did you learn about the craft of baking, and then what did you learn about yourself during the unfolding of this?

Culver: I have so much respect for bakers, so I will start there, because I love that you called it a craft. I do think it’s a craft and an art. What I learned very quickly about baking is that I know so little. I learned two things. One, I know so little, so I wanted to read a lot more about baking, and then I got overwhelmed reading more about baking, because I thought, “Good God, how does one actually figure out how to do this?”  That was one aspect, which is humility; being humbled by how much can go into bread.

But then there was another level for me, and I think that this can only happen when someone is a novice. I was like, “Cool. It’s so malleable, like we can do so much, and it will still sort of turn out.” Because I’m not a professional baker, right? If it tastes good, then therefore it is good. It may not have the right crumb, it might not rise enough … I don’t know, I know that now.

But I was really excited about what one could do with dough and what the end result could be. That again, is circling back to my thoughts of these kids. We’ve got tons of peanuts, we’ve got bean paste, we’ve got carrots, we’ve got beets. There’s a way for us to pack this bread full of stuff, and as long as it still tastes good, people will enjoy it and kids will eat it. Maybe women will sell it. Maybe it’ll stink, and we’ll try again.

So, I think what I learned about bread was that I was excited it could be such a malleable vehicle, from my perspective, for so much good. One aspect, women who had the autonomy, they can make bread, maybe they sell it and earn some money, but then, especially what you could put into bread to make it nutrient dense for kids. So, that’s what I learned about bread. I know a lot more now.

Then what I learned about myself … I think what I learned … Again, I know I made a joke about this before, but this is real. “Oh, okay, this may not be the answer, but it is an answer.” If the women know their culture, they know their community, they know their market … what I know is I have a different perspective, so they have that perspective, and I could bring a different perspective and be a buttress to help catapult it to the next level.  What I learned about myself was, what could I be good at and where could I be useful in something like this?

Spencer: I love that. So, I think that is a great segue for my last question, Markey, and that is, you know, you learn these things about the craft, about yourself and your role in all of this. So, at what point did you realize, or did it become, a viable business?

Culver: I think that I knew … if you’ve ever had, this nagging idea that you just can’t get rid of it, it won’t go away no matter how radical or how silly or whatever it is, it just won’t go away … That was for me, pretty much, on day one, just what I described with all those kids eating bread, where I was like, “Aha! Oh my gosh, this is how we do it. This is it.” And then once the women sold the bread, I was like, “Oh, this is so much better than I could have imagined.”

I think that the thought of this becoming a viable business happened pretty early on for me, it just took a lot of work to actually get there and a lot of failure.  What I found most inspiring when I was starting, and still do, is actually hearing people’s honest stories of failure and what you do after that.

Spencer: Yeah, failure is good. It truly is, and any successful entrepreneur will say they believe in failure.

Culver: I’m still scared of it, so I think that’s true, and I still fear it. So, it’s like one of those double-edged swords.

Spencer: It’s not about the fear, it’s about what you do with the fear that counts.

Culver: Yeah. So, for me, my thought with failure, and someone else said this, these are not my words, but, as long as you’re falling forward … when you get back up, you’re one step closer to where you want to go.

Spencer: Oh, I love that. I love that. Okay, this is a good place to stop.  Next week, we are going to talk about some of those lessons that you learned as The Women’s Bakery started taking off and evolved into a few different things and the lessons that you learned from those changes. It’s going to be a great conversation, and this entire month is just going to be amazing.

After that, we’re going to talk about the production and sort of the operational side of how the bread is made.  Then we’re going to talk about The Women’s Bakery’s One Bread Program, which is amazing, because the change has had such a ripple effect, and it’s bigger than probably you ever could have imagined that it would be. And then in our last week, we’ll talk about the future and what your vision is for the life and health of The Women’s Bakery.

But for now, I’m going to say goodbye and thank you. I’m just loving this. We’re off to a great start, and it’s an honor to share this story with our audience.

Culver: Thanks, Joanie, it’s great to be here. So, thank you for still being interested in all of this.

Spencer: Always.