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 third episode, Markey explores how The Women’s Bakery has remained viable in the face of seemingly insurmountable barriers. She discusses the impacts of automation, the pandemic, supply chain disruptions and more.

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

Joanie Spencer: Hi Markey. Welcome back to week three.

Markey Culver: Hi Joanie, it’s nice to be here.

Spencer: I’m loving our conversation so far. This is such a special story to tell and it’s a long journey in a relatively short time. I think anybody who has attended a BEMA convention might be familiar with, operationally, how The Women’s Bakery has evolved, but I’m kind of excited to tell this story to our broader audience.

I’m going to start with one question that I sometimes badger you with. When we look at the timeline of The Women’s Bakery, at this point in the timeline, can we call you a baker yet?

Culver: Yes, yes, you can.

Spencer: That makes my heart happy. I’ve spent so many years hearing you say you’re not a baker, and I’m telling you: You are a baker.

Culver: Oh, wait, whoa, hold on. We are a bakery; I am not a baker.

Spencer: Darn it.

Culver: Sorry! We consider ourselves a bakery, yes, because our ladies are highly accomplished and very skilled bakers. But no, I’m not a baker. I consider myself a conductor.

Spencer: Okay, a ‘conductor.’ I like that. So, you’re the maestra; you’re the bakery maestra. I love it.

Last week we talked in depth about the lessons you learned in building the business, and those were really interesting, and some were lessons that I hadn’t been aware of, so, I really loved that. But this week, I want to dive into the lessons that you’ve learned around baking. How did you learn about the baking process and what you needed to do to support the bakery as it grew?

Culver: The reason I don’t call myself a baker is because I have never been formally trained, and while I am passionate about baking, I don’t think I would even consider myself an amateur baker. Learning the baking process was involved in many ways, mainly because of my inexperience and my lack of expertise in baking, but then I think, probably more importantly, being able to understand the local palate.

We’re in Rwanda, which is in East Africa. What does the palate want here? Then, as you and some of the listeners may know, The Women’s Bakery is a social enterprise, and yes, we build bakeries, but the bakeries are unique, not just because we train and empower women at these bakeries, but because we operate, now, commercial bakeries in more rural areas. Our expertise is servicing local communities, so predominantly rural communities, so understanding the local palate was really important for us. The trajectory that led us to where we are now with our products, which are constantly evolving … but what led us to where we are now was, “What is existing in the market? What do people like?”

I think that the only opportunity for us to do some real market research was in the capital city, which is Kigali, where, at the time when we started, there were a handful of bakeries, and the predominant product was just a simple white bread. If you said, “bread” to Rwandese people, that was what they knew; that was their only concept of bread. It was just a simple white bread. Trying to introduce products that may differ from white bread proved to be more challenging. So then, how do you become really adept at just making a simple white bread?

We had the good fortune of being connected to professional technical bakers early on and were trained in that, so we had people coming to train both me — which is hilarious — and specifically our women bakers in how to make a high quality and, I say, rich … I’m adapting my language because now our bread is very much fortified, and that’s a very real term … actual fortification in our bread. When we were first starting, I was using that word, but it was because I thought fortification was just with eggs, milk, peanut flour and how you pump this bread full of nutrients. But, as I’ve learned being in the baking industry, that’s not true fortification.

So yeah, we had professional technical bakers help us work with what raw materials were available in Rwanda or greater East Africa and create a rich white bread.

Spencer: Okay, so today, you’re referencing the bakeries. Today, November 2024, how many bakeries are there in The Women’s Bakery? How many facilities do you have?

Culver: We have three in Rwanda and one forthcoming, which is exciting.

Spencer: Okay, yes. That’s awesome. So, you truly are a commercial bakery operation now.

Culver: Yes, with a caveat. I think for many of your listeners, the commercial aspects, your lens is probably United States and European, and I think that, while we pump out a substantial amount of bread, it’s probably not at the level of commercial that many of your listeners are thinking. Our output is probably … between all three bakeries … we would probably be seen as artisanal bakeries if we were to be in the United States, because our output is probably between 30,000 and 50,000 units a day. Actually, maybe a little bit more, but I think that’s pretty small in the aspect of a commercial bakery.

Spencer: Relative to where you started, that’s a significant amount of growth.

Culver: Yes, relatively, yeah. When I was making one loaf a day and was like, “Woohoo! We can make money!”

Spencer: Isn’t it crazy?

Culver: Yeah, it’s wild.

Spencer: You know I’m a mom, and I’m always making these mom comparisons, but my son is now 14. He’s a freshman in high school. He’s driving, going to dances, playing high school sports, and so I look at him sometimes, and he’s just doing all of these adult-grade things, and I’m like, “Dude, I used to give you a bath in the kitchen sink; you were the size of my forearm, and now I’m giving you the keys to my car.” I feel like you can identify with that and that phrase, “The days are long, but the years are short.” You’ve just come so far.

Culver: Absolutely yes, while I very much hope to be a literal mother with a literal human baby, I do feel like a figurative mother with these bakeries and with The Women’s Bakery because, yes, that’s absolutely correct; I think that analogy is perfect. It seemed so big at the time when we started, and now it’s so much bigger than we could have even imagined. It depends on where we’re starting the timeline, and I think in this podcast, listeners will see that it started kind of by accident, organically in the Peace Corps, and then we started legitimately, and it failed, and then we started it again.

So, it’s been this trial and error for now … What? Almost 15 years? Not quite, but we’re getting close. I have an almost 15-year-old not-human baby.

Spencer: Oh my gosh. We are on the same path of motherhood. I like that “not-human baby,” and that’s exactly what it is.

Culver: Right? Yes, I do want a human baby, or twins or triplets, whatever, human babies as well at some point. But right now, my not-human baby has been all consuming, sometimes in a positive way, sometimes not.

Spencer: Well, that is motherhood in a nutshell. Okay, so you provided these caveats and clarified what an American or European commercial bakery might envision versus what you are. So, let’s talk about that in terms of automation. You have been able to introduce machines. Can you describe for the audience what automation looks like for a small East African bakery operation?

Culver: Yes, so I would define us as being semi-automated right now, with the future being probably still semi-automated, but in a more robust fashion than we currently are. In our three bakeries in Rwanda, we have, I think, 50-kilogram mixers, and we have a semi-manual dough divider. It’s one that you press down, and then it shapes the dough, but it’s not pumping out dough like multiple rolls a second; there’s still some manual work. Then we have a rotary oven. The reason we’re staying somewhat semi-automated … there’s two. The first and most important right now is that our mission … as you know, we have a major and a minor key to socially and economically empower women. That’s our major key. They are the most important. The minor key is to provide communities with access to high quality and nutritious breads that are affordably priced. So then, if women’s empowerment is our primary objective, but we automate everything, then we need really high volumes, because then women can work in other ways. It could be packaging, perhaps, or it could be sales, but right now, we have women bakers. With the 35 to 40 women bakers that we have in Rwanda, we don’t want to fully automate that, because that’s still their job. I think as we expand, as our volumes grow, we will become more automated. And Pauline, who is our COO, and I are looking at that, because the possibility is there; the possibility for pretty big growth and much larger volumes exists in the near future, which is exciting. The primary reason is because we want to still maintain employment opportunities for women. And then the secondary reason is because, again, it’s sort of, it’s the volume game. So, we don’t need to automate now, until we get the volumes.

Spencer: It’s very intentional … the way you’re doing it, and that makes sense. In the large bakery operations in the US, I hear a lot about … well, workforce, I think, is a whole other animal that we could get into, but it’s a very specific workforce situation in the US. The machines are trying to fill a gap here but they’re also trying to, like you said, make life easier for bakers and provide them with other opportunities. So that does make sense, that you’re trying to figure out what those other jobs and opportunities would be for the women, because they are first and foremost. I can see where automation is serving a very different need for you relative to what it is here in the US.

Culver: Yes, and we … I think this is an observation Pauline made when she first came to the US and went to a BEMA conference was all of the pain points that many bakers and bakeries experienced with the labor force, because it’s the polar opposite in East Africa. Many people are looking for jobs. The unemployment rate is quite high, so to have an opportunity like this is something that people would jump at, and women are often the ones who are overlooked. That’s why I think it’s really important to make sure that, as we grow, we’re doing it with the women in mind, since they’re at the center of everything we’re doing.

Spencer: Okay, so, at the risk of going down a rabbit hole, it kind of makes me wonder. In that first week, we talked about what being hungry looked like in Rwanda versus being hungry in the US. I feel like the same applies for labor and workforce, that it’s very much an employee’s market here in the US, and people here are like, “That’s a hard job. I don’t want to do a hard job.” A hard job there in East Africa would be a gift, almost. Is that a fair assumption or assessment?

Culver: I think it depends on how we’re defining gift. So, I think that employment, gainful employment, is an opportunity that yes, for most of those jobs it would be … I don’t know if I would call it a gift, because it’s something people certainly earn, but it would be a welcome opportunity. The number of businesses to people needing jobs is imbalanced here. There are not enough businesses to give people jobs; there are far more people. So, I think the more you can create opportunities, and obviously ethical and gainful opportunity, the better it can be for many people here.

Spencer: Okay, yeah, better choice of words to say opportunity than gift. Not gift as in handout, but like, “Wow. I really want to have a job. I really want to work, and the opportunity to work in a bakery is very welcome.”

Culver: Yeah, absolutely. The reason I’m so keen on the word earn is because our women bakers, all of our team members, but our women bakers in particular, truly have earned their job and the title that comes with being a baker. That’s why I very willingly and gleefully say that I’m not a baker, because I have a very clear example of what a baker is in our women bakers, and they have worked so hard to be where they are and to earn the skills that they have now as professional bakers.

Spencer: Okay, I have to respect that. I love that, actually.

Let’s get back to machines. What are some of the challenges that you have experienced that come with introducing machines into an operation that the business model is social enterprise where profitability and capital investments look very different than a typical for-profit operation?

Culver: I was going to start by saying, “How much time do you have?” because I’m just going through the list. But I think from the lens of a social enterprise, it’s exactly what we were just talking about. When we first introduced machines, but the semi-automated machines, particularly the moulder or the dough shaper, our women bakers rejected it and it’s because they were fearful that that machine would take their job. It took a lot of intentional explaining and showing them that it’s not going to take their job, it’s actually going to make their days easier and they’ll be able to produce more.

So, from a social enterprise standpoint, it’s how you can approach it intentionally and be able to communicate effectively that there’s no threat to anyone’s job. I think the way it differs, probably, for many commercial bakeries in other places is we don’t have electricity in a lot of places here, or when there is electricity, it’s not always reliable. Our COO Pauline has 20 years of experience in the baking industry, so she knows tons. When she came into The Women’s Bakery in the middle of 2021, she walked into the original ovens that we had, which some were hand-built with tin, and then we had made one significant purchase early on with importing equipment, but it was secondhand equipment, and it just didn’t really work. It broke. We had a triple-deck oven where we had to prop the doors open with sticks because they didn’t have any springs left. Pauline saw a real need for us to upgrade our equipment and shifted us to electric equipment, so both the semi-automated but also electric equipment.

While that was really welcome and we needed it because our volumes increased, we needed greater capacity, it also presented another challenge: Electricity. So how do you do that? And then the other challenge is … Our specialty is operating in more rural areas, and it’s hard to get to. So … roads. How do you get the equipment there? If you come from a place where equipment manufacturers exist in the country where you are there’s a lead time, but it’s nothing compared to what we went through.

When we made our first really big purchase, and again, this is under Pauline’s leadership, we ordered all of our bakery equipment from a South African equipment manufacturer named McAdams International, and it took us months because we had to send it up the Indian Ocean. Rwanda is landlocked. It’s kind of central eastern Africa. So, we had to go through Tanzania, where there’s a port, and then put all of the equipment on a giant truck and bring it 36 hours interior into Rwanda. Perhaps a much simpler way to say all of this is logistics. Logistics were challenging.

Spencer: How did you overcome the electricity situation?

Culver: Through generous people, a very dedicated team and creativity. Generous people contributed generators, so that’s backup electricity that can keep our equipment going. A dedicated team … One of our bakeries didn’t have electricity or had very spotty electricity, and when the electricity went out, the bakers would stay and when the electricity went back on, they would hustle to get everything they needed to get done as ‘done’ as they could. Then, if the electricity went out, same thing. They were just dedicated to getting that bread out. That bakery in particular is the one that serves the highest number of children a day. I just think that that’s another testament to both our team, and also who The Women’s Bakery is, that we have such a dedicated team to serving those kids. We’re not going to miss a day of serving those kids.

Spencer: That is a very literal description of the phrase ‘Hurry up and wait.’

Culver: Yes, exactly. That’s exactly right.

Spencer: Only it’s ‘Wait and hurry up.’

Culver: Yes, exactly. And pray the electricity comes back on.

Spencer: What a commitment. I think it bears repeating that, culturally, the women are responsible for their homes. In that first episode, you described that the women were baking bread with you at your place, and the children came looking for them because they were like, “It’s dinner time and we only eat one meal a day. Why aren’t you feeding us?”

Those are the kind of people that we’re talking about, that it’s not like they don’t have anything better to do. Not that anybody who works in a bakery would ever say that. We all are humans and we have lives, but there’s a lot of pressure on these women for a host of other things; they bear a lot of responsibility in their lives. That, I think, is worth highlighting and calling out … that they’re baking where the electricity could go out at any moment, and they’re willing to stay and stick around and wait for the electricity to come back on so that they can get that product out, because they are feeding children. Part of your mission is making this food accessible to the people who need it. That’s incredible and really worth shedding light on.

Culver: Yeah, it’s a testament to them and to their ethics.

Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. I think we could all learn a lesson from that, and also think twice before we say we had a really hard day at work.

Culver: Oh, I think you can always say you’ve had a really hard day at work, but yeah, there are sometimes other challenges that when you hear them, you’re like, “Okay, good. That’s a nice reminder.”

Spencer: Yes, for sure. Perspective and everything is relative. So, what about raw materials and ingredients, like flour? Do we have time to get into that?

Culver: Yeah, we do. I’m sure all the bakers listening to this are cringing because they know what’s coming. I think it’s probably most of Africa, but especially in East Africa — and this is not an exaggerated number, I learned this number through an East African Grain Council that The Women’s Bakery is now a part of — 90% of the wheat in East Africa comes from Ukraine. So, as you can imagine, that was a challenge.

To back up to when we started, the objective was always that we could source raw materials locally, or as locally as possible. The original intent here was actually for local economic growth, that you could buy from a farmer, and you could make stuff with that farmer’s produce.

While wheat is grown in East Africa, it’s not grown in quantities that are substantial enough to support the entire region. So, there is an importation of wheat here. It’s milled, so the wheat berry would be imported to a port, and then it gets delivered to whatever destination country it’s going to. In that country there’s a giant mill. The wheat is milled here into flour, and then we buy that flour. So, yes, once we started to have enough market, enough volumes, it didn’t make sense for us to try and make our own flour. For example, when I was doing quick breads in the very beginning, it was a little bit of flour and then a lot of peanut flour, and it was to make something really hardy. Again, I’m not a baker, so it wasn’t very good. We needed to go back to wheat flour.

The raw materials have been another pretty large hurdle for The Women’s Bakery since our inception, because of a lot of factors. We just heard one with Ukraine: It was just simply getting it. You simply could not get flour, and if you could, the price was double. So that strained usbecause we’re a social enterprise where we’re intentionally capping ourselves at a price to make it affordable for people, and that means we have to make it at a cost that makes sense for the bakery, and when the wheat prices skyrocketed, we no longer could do that. It was either we burden the consumer, which would be the kids, in this case, or families, with the price increase of wheat, or we absorb it, and we chose to absorb it. Is that the most sustainable choice? It is not, but we will figure out how to work around it.

Spencer: However, I will say it’s more sustainable than the alternative.

Culver: Yeah, going out of business. That’s true, and that’s how I felt, honestly, because what one of the important contextual pieces here is that the war in Ukraine, the invasion, came on the heels of . So, The Women’s Bakery had just withstood COVID, which was no small feat. We in the United States experienced COVID … I think for many people, the brunt of COVID was 2020 but in Rwanda, the brunt of COVID was actually 2021, so we were just coming out of that when boom, Ukraine gets invaded, and our wheat supplies evaporate.

 The reason I say that … that is one component, that’s the primary component. The secondary component was, “Okay, great. Then how do we hedge for this? When we do find wheat, and if it’s at a price that we find reasonable, we purchase it in bulk … where do we store it? We have no storage.”To give people an image of what our bakeries look like in Rwanda, we have taken homes, residential homes, and renovated them into commercial bakeries. We have used all of the space in that home, which is now a commercial bakery. Where do you store wheat?

Also, Rwanda, while it is high in elevation … we’re in the Great Rift Valley. It’s high in elevation. We are equatorial. It’s a tropical climate, which means it’s hot and humid. We had somebody suggest, “Oh, we’ll just get a shipping container and store all the flour in there.” That’s a great idea for somebody who either has massive volumes, and you can use a shipping container’s worth of flour in a week, or someone who has refrigeration, and we had neither. It’s been a learning process and trying to get creative with how we’re doing it.

Spencer: This is hitting me kind of hard. I mean, my next question was … I want to talk about the years 2020-2023, and Africa in general, the continent, was hit really, really hard. First by COVID and then the impact of Ukraine. Flour availability was just one. These are … I don’t even want to say ‘seemingly’ insurmountable. These are insurmountable challenges. Wow.

I mean honestly, Markey, how is The Women’s Bakery alive and thriving after being hit with these challenges? These are impossible odds. Paint a picture for me and describe what was happening with The Women’s Bakery during the pandemic.

Culver: I totally will, but let me first answer the ‘how’. The ‘how’ is through our community, and I define The Women’s Bakery’s community as being our team. All of those who are employed by The Women’s Bakery, our donors, so all of those who support The Women’s Bakery and our customers, all of those who purchase bread from us. Without all of that — that ecosystem of people — we definitely wouldn’t have made it.

I was physically in Rwanda in … was it March? Man, I think it was March 2020, I remember the president at the time saying, “Right, America is closed.” And I was like, “Uh oh. Oh, I better go.” So I was in Rwanda, and actually, all of the fear that everybody felt during COVID, I felt it, too, and so did our team. So, the fear, of course, is the health and safety of your family, of yourself, but then there was a tertiary fear here, which was food security, especially in Rwanda.

Rwanda is a small, land-locked country and about the size of Maryland but has a population of 14 million people. I think it’s now the fifth or sixth most densely populated country in the world, meaning you just don’t have the land mass to produce the food that a country with that population demands. So, there was a fear that there would be a food shortage. I remember leaving the country in March 2020 and, through the generosity of our donors and our community, The Women’s Bakery was able to purchase, I think, two or three months of dry food goods for our entire team and their families. So, if one woman had nine kids, we purchased enough for her nine children to have food for two to three months. I give that just as an example of … that’s how stark it looked in 2020.

Rwanda is just a marvelous country, and just so, so much more progressive than I think people really know, and because it’s still primarily an agrarian society, and you have communities that live predominantly rurally, Rwanda had to take very extreme measures to keep their population safe. When we think the US closed, we have no idea. Rwanda was completely shuttered. You were not allowed to physically go outside.

So, the picture of COVID in Rwanda was a very dark one. All businesses were forced to shutter. The Women’s Bakery applied to the government to be deemed an essential business so we could still operate and deliver food, but that was touch and go. We would be approved, and we would do that for one week, and then everything would shut down again and we would have to pause our operations. COVID was basically like starting and stopping. You’re just taking your foot on and off the gas pedal and then constantly monitoring to make sure that your team is safe.

At another time I can get into how we did that, but we were very intentional, and we were very comprehensive with both communication and measures to keep our team safe, and I’m very happy to report that we did successfully. Our whole team stayed safe. We were one of the few organizations that I saw that, even while operations were totally paused or closed, no person on our team, no baker, especially, lost their salary. So, even though they weren’t working, we still paid our team, and that’s why I say that this was thanks to our community. If we didn’t have dedicated people who believed in The Women’s Bakery, we definitely wouldn’t have been able to do that.

So, that was COVID. Then we start to … and that was two years for us in Rwanda. And then, as I said, we started to emerge from that. Schools reopened, and then that’s when our volume really took off. The demand just skyrocketed. Because babies have been out of school for a year and a half, by that point, they were behind. So, kids are finally going to school; the schools are wanting bread; parents are ready to start helping. If they can’t pay full for bread, they can pay something for it, and The Women’s Bakery would subsidize part of that. Then our volumes grew at the start of 2021…

Spencer: And then Ukraine.

Culver: And then, yeah, Ukraine.

Spencer: Talk about a one-two punch.

Culver: Yeah, no kidding.

Spencer: Well, I have to say, when you say, “Thanks to the generosity of donors …” I can’t have that conversation without calling out the efforts of BEMA and all of the fundraisers that they did. I remember the 2020 convention we had to do remotely, and they did a remote, virtual fundraiser, and the BEMA members stepping up for a few chairman’s dinners, following them in the convention, went back to in person and having sort of an impromptu donation auction. Just everyone raising their hands and stepping up and contributing, some donated equipment. Just like, “How can we help?” And logistically, I know it’s just hard to physically donate things, but I do feel like the BEMA members … it was really neat to be able to see that firsthand and how they helped support The Women’s Bakery. So, I definitely want to give them a shout out for that.

Culver: I’m glad you did, and I appreciate that, because that is 100% correct. BEMA, through and through, has supported The Women’s Bakery and kept us afloat and … just such a strong foundation of dedicated donors who believe in what we’re doing, who believe in the women. The way I like to phrase how it felt for The Women’s Bakery during that time, and the way the community of supporters helped us is that The Women’s Bakery, because of the community support, primarily BEMA and these donors, enabled The Women’s Bakery to throw our arms out like a protective parent and keep our whole team safe while still being able to feed these babies.

Spencer: I think I kind of gave the name of this episode an AKA: The Kindness of Strangers and Friends. And I think just BEMA members who didn’t know you personally or were otherwise unfamiliar with The Women’s Bakery heard the story and really just stepped up and kind of threw their hat in the ring to help in any way that they could.

 That was that was really joyful to see the baking industry come together in order to enable The Women’s Bakery to stay afloat, because, again, it’s just insurmountable to go through the pandemic from that position and then get hit with the war and not be able to get the wheat, and then have to absorb those extra costs so as not to impact the children and families you’re trying to feed.

Culver: Precisely, yes.

Spencer: Amazing.

Culver: I’m inspired by the kindness of all people, strangers, people I know, because it really did … ‘Empowered.’ I think that’s a much better word. It empowered The Women’s Bakery to remain resilient, and that’s how I like to define The Women’s Bakery, is that we are adaptive and resilient, but we certainly couldn’t do it alone.

Spencer: I want to ask you a question. It’s not a personal question, but I want your personal perspective, because you’re speaking on behalf of The Women’s Bakery, basically, but I want to know … it’s something that I noticed. We had so many executive Zooms and panels and things during the pandemic to really get the perspective from what baking companies were going through and what they were doing. And I noticed that all of these executives and CEOs were all talking about their people and how their people felt, and how their people were doing, and what they were doing to help their people. And I would always chime in. I mean, I’m always the one, “I have a question!” And then I’m going to make everyone uncomfortable with my questions. But I was like, “What about you?” And no one would answer.

It took me until 2022, and I interviewed Joe Kenner — who is the president and CEO of Grayston Bakery, which is a certified B Corp in New York that pioneered open hiring — and his bakery was a hot spot, like a known hot spot in New York, and just hearing him talk about it, and it was after the fact again, it was, I think, 2022 and I said, “Were you okay?” And he was like, “No, I wasn’t okay. And I would have to talk myself down just to be able to get to sleep, and then I would wake up and have to give myself a pep talk.”

So, I’m going to ask you, like you, Markey Culver, personally, it’s a dumb question to ask if you were okay. How did you get through it?

Culver: Yeah, I definitely was not okay. I was so worried. I mean, you’re worried about, again, as I said, I was worried about my family, I was worried about my own safety, but then I was just so worried about our team, and what would happen, how we would get our team, if a woman got sick, how would we get her help? It was all of these ‘what ifs’ that everybody went through. And I think that yes, of course, one of the ‘what ifs’ is, “What if we don’t survive?” or, “How the heck are we going to survive?”

So, what energized me, and what kept all of us going during this time, was just realizing that we’re in this together and what can we do in the moment right now for one another? How could we encourage you? Rwandans truly, especially in Kigali, they physically couldn’t go outside, many of them. So, it’s like, “Okay, how can we find resources for them if they’re stuck inside their homes?” Because for many people in the US, you could go out and take a walk, right? So, then what other resources existed? How can we share those resources?

So no, I was not fine, and I also don’t give up easily. There would be days that were pretty tough, but I wouldn’t wallow. You have to get up and go, because you’ve got more than just you to think about.

Spencer: Did you ever say, “It’s just too hard? It would be easier on everybody if we just stopped and did something else.”

Culver: Yeah, how many times? But no, honestly during COVID, the real honesty was, no, actually. I was so focused on keeping the team healthy and getting us through this, that no, the hard part, the thinking, “Gosh, this is so hard. Are we going to make it? Would it be easier not to?” … that thought started to flirt with me during the war in Ukraine. We were only spending money; we weren’t making any money. I had made, what felt like, promises to donors, saying, “Our bakeries are going to be profitable!” which now I’ve learned, and I won’t ever say that, at least not so definitively like I did when we started.

But I really believe, and I know we will get there. And I really believe that that’s our model as a social enterprise, that we can have a charitable mission through an enterprise machine, like a model, and that enterprise must be self-sustaining. But the horizon for that … we just need to be more … I think the word I’ve used with myself and with our team is more patient and realistic with ourselves with what that means.

Spencer: I don’t know many people that wouldn’t have given up.

Culver: So, here’s the thing: You do actually, because I think if you had an entire team depending on you and their families depending on you, you’re not going to give up, and they’re not going to give up. I’m not trying to make it sound like doomsday, but when the stakes are that high and it’s real lives, you’re going to persevere. You will push through.

Spencer: Yeah, I mean, that’s true. I guess what I’m having a hard time envisioning is just being in that situation. It’s beyond what my mind can comprehend. And so, I’m thinking here are my boundaries, and what I’m capable of overcoming, and that was beyond those boundaries. But I think you’re right. I should take that back. I think we as human beings, if we’re put in that situation, we rise to the occasion.

Culver: I agree, actually, and I have great faith in humanity for that. I saw it firsthand. So yeah, you do rise to the occasion, and we had people do that for us, and we did that for our team.

Spencer: Especially bakers. This is a good reminder of not just humanity, but the humanity of bakers, and what they do this for is feeding people, and that’s whether they have machines and naive consumers assume that machines are taking jobs, or that big food companies put profits over people … At the end of the day, I would go so far as to say it’s not true. It’s just not true. Bakers bake because they want to feed people, and it’s, you know, one of the oldest foods.

Culver: Yeah, it’s a sign that you’re feeding a lot of people, enough that you need machines.

Spencer: Yes, and that’s truly the mission. And you know, I’ve told a lot of people over the years when I hire them, “You’ll just never grocery shop the same again. You’ll never really eat with the same mindset ever again” because when you see what’s going on behind the scenes, and you get to know the people who are making the food, you see it differently, because you know what goes into it, and you kind of learn the heart and soul of that.

So, I know we were supposed to be talking about operations, and I took this in a weird turn and got a little bit sentimental.

Culver: It’s still operational. I mean, all of this has to do with operations.

Spencer: We really talked about it from the human perspective and the emotional grit that it takes to overcome this, but from an operational standpoint, strictly operational … When you look at those years, 2020 to 2023 … How has The Women’s Bakery gotten to the other side of that? And how has working with machines, getting help from donors … How did that help get you to the other side? And how has it impacted the viability of the bakery today, November 2024?

Culver: It did get us to the other side, so I’ll just start there. We made it through all of that stuff, thank goodness. Now, I think there are many reasons which we just talked about but then I think one of the important reasons, too, was just the demand that grew in Rwanda. It grew — I use this word, and I think it’s appropriate — organically. And I say that because we don’t actually have a dedicated sales or marketing team in Rwanda, that’s something … to Pauline’s … that is something that she would love. You just have to, you know, parse it out. What can we afford this year, and what can we do? But the demand grew after COVID, and it grew primarily in schools, so that launched The Women’s Bakery into the phase that we’re currently in, and I think it will be our stepping stone for where we will be.

There is a caveat there, and it’s an important one, but it’s not necessarily a defining one. So, when I say demand, I mean people wanting bread. It doesn’t necessarily mean people can buy bread. So, Rwanda, after COVID … the economy got hammered, right? Then boom, Ukraine hits. The economy gets hammered again, then inflation skyrockets. So, families are hurting. Rwanda is already one of the poorest countries in the world. So, people, families, kids needed bread, wanted bread, and many couldn’t afford it. That’s when we saw our One Bread Project, which is our fortified snack program at schools, elementary schools in Rwanda, just skyrocket.

The reason it skyrocketed again was not because of our marketing, necessarily. It was because the schools that we were serving during and immediately after COVID, the word spread, and so more parents started to come to either their principals or to The Women’s Bakery. We got more and more requests from more schools to have fortified bread served daily to that school. And we believed that it was both our ethical duty, but also our mission. It correlated nicely with our mission, that we do this, that we grow this program.

I will say, though, that I had no idea how much it would grow, because I think that our numbers in … I know that when we started this program … and when I say we, I mean this was really driven by a group of women at one bakery who saw that their kids were hungry at school, they made food, could we figure this out? Yes, we can. So, we started serving that bread at schools, and it was for free. Then, when it ballooned, what we tried to figure out was, “How do we scale this in a way where it’s either like a pay scale, ‘This is our price, but if you pay some part of this price … we can do that.’” Or how do we work schools into a contract where maybe you’re receiving free bread for the first school year, but then for the next school year, you’re paying 25% of the price of bread, the next year you’re paying 50%, etc.

So, we do have that, and I think that between word getting out about kids being fed at school, which is already kind of a growing ‘trend’ in much of East Africa, and Rwanda being among them. So, we’re getting out about kids getting bread at school, and then knowing that it could be a stair-stepped approach to paying for the bread was really attractive for a lot of schools and a lot of families. So, our numbers went from … In 2019 when we launched the program, we were serving roughly four 400 kids a day. And now, in November 2024 we’re serving over 24,000 kids a day. With the same number of babies. And this is why machines do help. Same number of women, actually, now more women, but we wouldn’t have been able to meet that volume had it not been for, yes, the generosity of donors and the magnificence of machinery.

Spencer: “Magnificence of machinery.” How have I never written that as a headline? Oh, my God, you just did my job better than me, so you could do everything! Markey, that is a perfect segue. I think it’s a perfect punctuation point for this conversation, and a perfect segue to next week, where we are going to dive into the One Bread Program.

If we look at this, we’ve been doing this sort of chronologically. So, next week, we are going to talk about what is happening with One Bread and how you have you started with a mission to empower women, and now you have this huge mission to feed children in school, and this is going to create a huge ripple effect. I really want to talk about what you’re producing for the One Bread Program, and how it evolved, and how you went from 400 to 24,000. We’re going to spend time with that next week and talk about how you got there. For this week, what a great conversation once again.

Culver: Yay.

Spencer: I love this, and I just always love talking to you.

Culver: Yes, likewise.

Spencer: Thank you for taking time while you’re in Rwanda to have this conversation with me, and I will talk to you next week.

Culver: Sounds good.