Welcome to Season 17 of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Spiros Assimacopoulos, president and CEO of The Good Bread Co., shares his journey through automation, expansions and more … all to share the time-honored tradition of artisan bread. Sponsored by WP Bakery Group USA.
In our second episode, Spiros shares lessons learned in the early days as The Good Bread Co. stepped into automation.
Learn more about this season here, and tune into Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple or Spotify.
Joanie Spencer: In this episode, Spiros shares lessons learned in the early days as The Good Bread Company stepped into automation. Hi Spiros, welcome back.
Spiros Assimacopoulos: Thanks. Glad to be back, Joanie.
Spencer: Last week, we had an amazing conversation just about how you went from a distribution family business with your dad to starting a bakery, and that was called, “George Anthony Baking Company,” and then, “Michigan Bread Company,” is now, “The Good Bread Company.” But it was really interesting to hear how you got started, and the bravery that you had in becoming a baker and your entrepreneurialism. So that was awesome, and I’m ready to get into those early days and those growing pains. When you started, you really didn’t have any automation, and that is definitely not the case now. But when you started the bakery, you had three people and no automation. What did the output look like in those first days? And how long did it take you to grow as far as the output, the number of people, and really, like, get it going?
Assimacopoulos: Yeah, the output was not much. I remember maybe a month or two after taking over the bakery, the head baker, if you will, at the time came in, he was really distraught. He said, we’ve got 80 presses of brioche buns to make, and I’ve got to pick my kids up at 4 o’clock. What are we going to do? That’s 240 dozen. We make that in about eight minutes now. So there’s just no comparison to the equipment that we had versus what we have now. But it’s not a straight line to go from there to where we’re at.
Spencer: Right.
Assimacopoulos: It’s interesting. You know, in thinking about the podcast, I’m trying to go back in time, and if I knew different, would I have made different decisions? How would the path change? And I think, you know, in baking, as in life, I think you have to work through the process and go step-by-step.
Spencer: Right.
Assimacopoulos: So, yeah, it took us a lot of years to understand what we were doing at that particular level. And then the business grows, and you kind of have to relearn what works. You know, what worked last month or last year doesn’t work anymore, and we’re still experiencing that now. I don’t think that’s something that’s ever going to change until you take your business to whatever the apex is for your plan.
Spencer: And building and growing a business, and specifically building a bakery, you can’t go around it, you can’t go over it, you can’t go under it. You just have to go through it, and you have to learn by doing.
Assimacopoulos: Yeah, absolutely. The tricky part about bootstrapping the business and in just developing the vision and the future as you go along is, there’s a lot of different components you need to get to that next step. You’ve got more business than you can handle? Well, you’ve got to buy more equipment. Okay, well, you need capital to buy equipment. Let’s say you can convince the bank to give you the capital. Well, now you need people to operate that equipment, now you need people to maintain the equipment. So every step forward creates – a lot of times for someone who hasn’t lived it in a prior life or prior career, earlier in their career – a new unknown constraint that you have to figure out how to work your way through.
Spencer: Right? It’s like a cycle of Catch-22 is that you have to just … again, you’ve got to go through it. It’s this cyclical thing, and you have to find that centrifuge, that pinpoint, that is the right moment where you have the capital to get the machines, to get that product out and have the people to run it.
Assimacopoulos: Yeah, absolutely. I think it gets easier as you rinse and repeat, because we learn from our mistakes and what worked and what didn’t in the past, but every time it’s just a little bit different.
Spencer: Yeah. Does your experience sort of show you truly how possible it is to grow too fast, and how growth that’s too fast could be the demise of a new business?
Assimacopoulos: Oh absolutely, I’m very growth-oriented. I mean, that’s what I thrive on as a business owner, that’s what is the most interesting to me. And it kind of, you know, gets me up in the morning. There’s been times when I should have said no. But I said yes, and we had an overnight shift. Wow, that was that was an interesting three months. We took on a big project, something we had never done before. No maintenance person at night, no supervisor, but we needed to work around the clock to make this contract happen. And yeah, did we make any money in the end? I don’t think so. We made a lot of headaches, but once again, we learned, so we learned how to better manage those types of situations moving forward.
Spencer: I want to ask you about the product, the original bakery. When you started this, you focused on artisan. Is that still true as you grow, like, even as you get into automation? Are you still using biga poolish sourdough? I do remember meeting Christine, the starter. Is she still in use?
Assimacopoulos: Yep, Christine is still alive and doing well. The sourdough and the person that we named it after, they’re both doing great. Our commitment to using natural preferments in baking has not changed. And in fact, last year, we invested in a sourdough fermentation system that’s big enough for us to double the size of our business and maintain current usage levels.
Spencer: Wow.
Assimacopoulos: Something else I noticed early on when I began baking is a recognition that growing, automating, changing equipment, processes sometimes comes at a cost. It doesn’t have to and doesn’t always, but especially in food, there can be a very heavy cost, and usually the cost is the product that you’re producing today is not the product that you’re producing before.
Spencer: Right. That could be a good thing or a not so good thing.
Assimacopoulos: Yeah, the character … And I always say, not to pick on McDonald’s, but I’m pretty sure the burgers they were making in the 50’s were a very different type of food than what is being sold today. And I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but very different.
Spencer: Right.
Assimacopoulos: So I was – and remain – very committed to the integrity of how we produce the product, so that it’s good food. It tastes good, smells good. Because, usually, yeah, usually the people sell out when … “Hey, I want this business, but I’ve got to produce, you know, an extra 50% an hour to to make the price work, and I can’t do that if I don’t put dough conditioners or I don’t put certain chemicals in there.” So, yeah, that’s something we’re very committed to, and we’re continuing to invest in equipment that is aligned with that philosophy.
Spencer: Yeah. Okay, so you’re saying this, and it reminds me, remember when I chased you down the aisle at IBIE?
Assimacopoulos: Yeah.
Spencer: I was sitting at the Artisan Stage in the West Hall, and I was watching a panel. I think the name of the session was, “What is Artisan?” And so, it was smaller scale bakers talking about … They were basically having this conversation, can you use machines and still be artisan? Can you make an artisan product on machines? And one of them was emphatic that you can, if you’re aligned with your suppliers in what machines you need to help make the process a little bit more easy, to get your products to your customers in a timely fashion without sacrificing the quality. So I guess my question to you is, as an artisan bakery, how did you know that it was time to step into that process? What was that a-ha moment?
Assimacopoulos: Yeah, I don’t know if there was an a-ha moment, other than the fact that, because I had the wonderful opportunity to go tour some fantastic artisan bakeries from around the world, I knew that we could only go so far doing things by hand. It’s just the physical reality. So it wasn’t, “If…” it was, “How do we achieve that without selling our soul, in terms of the integrity of the product?” It’s a really interesting question about what is artisan, because that’s another word that I think is fashionable and it gets overused, and potentially it means different things to different people. Some people will say, “If you’re not making it by hand, it’s not artisan.”
Spencer: Right.
Assimacopoulos: I don’t necessarily believe that. In my opinion, artisan is producing bread with a traditional process,? with no chemical additives, so that it’s clean, pure food. Doing that at scale, I don’t think takes away from the craft. It’s actually a little bit more difficult, or a lot more difficult, to make it at scale than in small batches. That’s kind of how I see it.
Spencer: How did you know where to start, when you started really, like, going at scale and having to automate this or bring in dough conditioners? Because you’re self-taught, so I think your perspective is going to be very specific to you.
Assimacopoulos: Yeah. You know, almost 100% going to IBIE, and then starting to get to know people in the industry and develop contacts and have those conversations. I think the vendor world, in our industry, I think the ingredient supplier world, is filled with a lot of really wonderful, interesting characters – just great, interesting people to spend time with and be around, and also very, very supportive of the baker. So, without having that showcase to go to and make all those relationships over the span of three, four days, it would have been a lot more difficult. I would have relied upon the different salespeople making, you know, door-to-door calls to come visit me and reach out to me.
Spencer: Interesting. So I think this is a good place to talk about lessons learned and things you learned the hard way. I’ll start with saying, in your opinion, what is the key to automating artisan? And then, based on that question, how do you know that that’s the key? What did you learn the hard way to realize here’s the trick, here’s the key?
Assimacopoulos: Sure. So I think the key, from my perspective, is you either have to design the equipment around the product that you want to produce, or be willing to accept trade-offs in your product that is going to fit the automation.
Spencer: That doesn’t seem like a sustainable choice.
Assimacopoulos: Well, I think a lot of times we do it without recognizing that we’re going to have to make that choice or trade off.
Spencer: Okay.
Assimacopoulos: I’ve purchased some equipment thinking that my product’s going to turn out the same way, and it doesn’t.
Spencer: Okay.
Assimacopoulos: And then you look over at the baker who’s helping you commission the equipment. He’s like, “Well, yeah, it can’t do that.” So it takes a lot of maturity and experience, and this is where, I think, when you start to make that jump from the bench to automation, is to really understand the technology behind the equipment and understand its limitations. The tricky thing about equipment in our industry is that it’s all custom, so we don’t benefit necessarily from economies of scale and shared engineering. The good part is, if you want a custom machine, people in the baking industry would be more than happy to make a custom machine for you.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Do you have any stories that you can share about lessons that you learned as you stepped into automation and maybe what worked and what didn’t?
Assimacopoulos: Yeah, I think another big potential area of understanding in the plan is bottlenecks and constraints. A lot of times when you’re working by hand, the dough is patient. If the bread sits another five or ten minutes before you mold it by hand, well, your your hands understand how to treat the dough differently. When you’re running it through a sheeter molder at 60 loaves per minute, and the dough has got an extra 10 minutes on it, you’re going to get a different product. You’re going to have problems. That machine doesn’t know how to adjust based on the different characteristics of the dough. Also, as you grow and you start to piecemeal different automated parts into the process, it creates, almost always, a bottleneck, and you usually find out about it an hour into the process. So if your proofing capacity is now not sufficient to keep up with your divider, you’ve got problems. Every part of the process is potentially a constraint in a micro or a major stop.
Spencer: You know, this kind of makes me think of human nature and human relationships. You know a person, you know an individual, co-worker, family member, friend, you know their personality. And you know, like, Joanie is going to get hangry if she’s in a meeting until 11 o’clock, so we’ve got to make sure we end at 10:30, you know … You get to know the nuances of a human being, so when it’s person-to-person, you can kind of adjust for that. And that makes me think of how you are when you’re with the dough in a handmade process, I know exactly at the time that I’m going to need to treat it differently with my hands, because I have this much time until it changes. And when you bring machines in, the machine has to learn that. And so when you think about bringing AI or telephone automation into human relationships, when you’re calling your bank and you’re talking to a machine, that has typically been something that’s very frustrating for a human, and we’re teaching the machines how to ask better questions so that it is a more streamlined experience. Am I making a relatively decent comparison?
Assimacopoulos: I think absolutely. In my experience, as you climb the automation curve, the unforgiving-ness … Is that a word?
Spencer: We’re gonna make it a word.
Assimacopoulos: Okay, good. The automation becomes increasingly, and I would say, exponentially, more unforgiving to variations in the dough. So the science aspect of baking becomes much more critical than the art. The art is when you’re doing it by hand and you understand the dough and you make internal adjustments in your process to get a great result at the end. But when you automate, all of those inputs need to be as accurate as possible. And I’m starting to see some projects from some vendors leveraging AI and data analytics to use different types of cameras and sensors to actually understand the condition of the dough, so that the machine can learn and can make adjustments based on how the dough is making it through the line, or they’re making adjustments before that dough even gets onto the line.
Spencer: Yeah. I mean, I’ll tell you, AI scares me a little bit. Like, I don’t know … I think I’ve seen too many Terminator movies. But when we talk about product quality, especially for an artisan baked good, automation is not going to maintain that quality if we can’t have machine learning. Like, we do have to make the machines smarter to have that relationship with the dough.
Assimacopoulos: Yes, and especially as … Once again, as the bakery graduates from, you know, a shop to commercial bakery to an industrial plant, the amount of material going through the line per minute is massive.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah.
Assimacopoulos: So when everything’s running great, it’s great. When it’s not running great, you can have a really bad hour in just two, three minutes of downtime or an issue on the line. So that’s where the machine learning – the AI – hopefully is going to get ahead of that, be able to react much, much faster than a human can.
Spencer: Yeah.
Assimacopoulos: Additionally, I’ve seen some good ideation with AI, where it’s now training operators and leveraging the experience from operators from multiple bakeries to create kind of, like a standard training module and best practices. So that’s exciting to see, too.
Spencer: Okay, I have a question for you. You said the transition scale from a shop to a commercial bakery to an industrial plant … Where are you on that journey?
Assimacopoulos: We are on the beginning stages of an industrial plant.
Spencer: Okay.
Assimacopoulos: So we’re not fully automated. We have one tunnel oven in the Taylor facility, a second one scheduled to be installed next year, and then the next step is to automate proofing in between.
Spencer: So that leads me to the next question. When I was there in Taylor, I remember that operation had been reconfigured at least a couple of times. So, I want to talk about how many configurations and reconfigurations you’ve been through in the operations, and what were some of those operational milestones? I mean, first, let’s talk about Taylor, and then talk about the new bakery.
Assimacopoulos: Gosh, we’ve moved the furniture around so many times I literally can’t remember. It’s crazy how much we’ve done. Taylor facility is 61,000 square feet. We started using about 22,000 on the production floor. The other portion of the building, we rented to a casket company, which was interesting. We got bread on one side of the wall and 100 caskets standing on end on the other side of the wall. And eventually we broke that wall down, and everything moved down, and now that’s our packaging and maintenance shop. My goodness, what can I say to someone who’s getting ready to do this? Once again, ask for help. If you need three people, hire six. Because equipment is so finicky, you can unplug it, move it five feet, plug it back in, and it won’t work. Once again, this is one of those things you just … as your business grows and evolves, you figure out what we need next. How do we make this happen? Hopefully you don’t design any bottlenecks in your floor plan.
Spencer: So as you were growing the first bakery, did you have moments where you were like, “Okay, if I would have known we were going to grow in this way, or we were going to grow at this speed, I would have just configured the space this way.” That’s part one of the question. And then, if the answer is, “Yes,” did you apply those lessons to the second bakery as you configured those layouts?
Assimacopoulos: Yes, and mostly. Every bakery is different. Every layout is different. But once again, it goes back to last week. We talked about needing equipment, needing capital for equipment, needing talent to operate the equipment, and all those things kind of run in tandem. So, yeah, the bakery as it exists today … If I laid it out this way 13 years ago when we moved into the Taylor facility, it wouldn’t have been efficient. It was efficient for the output and the rate of production that we had 13 years ago. Those people would have been putting in a lot more steps if it was designed how it is today. So, it’s one of those things where, unless you have a crystal-clear vision of what you want that plant to look like, you know, it’s kind of like driving through a snowstorm. You do the best you can, peeking through the windshield and you try to stay in the lanes.
Spencer: That’s a good analogy. Yeah, I remember when I was there, it was like a really busy metropolitan city of racks, just moving. It was like organized chaos, because it was non-stop movement. And I think you had just installed the tunnel oven when I was there in ’21.
Assimacopoulos: Yeah, and the tunnel oven, I think, took us about four months to dial in and really learn how to properly leverage. The tunnel oven was a game changer for how we approached our process.
Spencer: So, a game changer … But is it safe to assume it’s a huge learning curve to bring in a tunnel oven into an artisan operation?
Assimacopoulos: Yes, the beautiful thing about introducing a tunnel oven into more of a batch bakery-type process is that it becomes the metronome for the entire plant. If you’ve got gaps in your production line, you’ve got gaps in your tunnel oven, now you’ve got flash-heat problems. If you’ve got inconsistent proof times in makeup, now you’ve got a backup in front of your tunnel oven, and you’ve got over-proofed product.
Spencer: Yeah.
Assimacopoulos: So, it forces you to become a better manufacturer and a better baker by solving all those little problems and trying to get everything as consistent as possible and kind of in concert with the next stage in the line.
Spencer: That makes sense. Okay, so then let’s talk about that learning and problem solving. Because you’re bringing in this automation, you’re growing your workforce, that requires a lot of on-the-job training that probably comes out of necessity, and that goes back to building the plane while you’re flying it, or building the plane while you’re learning how to fly it. What did that look like, and how did automation help in terms of training? Did it help, or did it require extra training?
Assimacopoulos: Yes to both. So, once again, it helps because it forces the team to be focused on smoothing out all those bumps in the process. When you’ve got a batch bakery or a hand shop, you can have micro stops. Someone can stop for a bathroom break, or this or that, and you can figure it out. When you’re automated and you’re running at a high speed, you can’t have any blips on the radar. So, number one, it forced more people on the team to understand the full spectrum of the process. In the hand shop, I’m working at the oven; when the bread’s proofed, I throw it in the oven. When it’s baked, I send it down to packaging. That’s my life. But when you’re working, and now, my oven is backed up because makeup is running too fast, now there’s recognition of an issue, there’s cooperation, collaboration, communication, all these things that need to happen throughout the shift.
Spencer: Yeah.
Assimacopoulos: So it’s a completely different environment. One person, one strong floor person is really difficult. In a smaller shop, you can have a really strong leader who’s kind of just walking in circles, dictating things. It gets a lot more difficult when when you’ve got a bigger team and just a larger scope of production.
Spencer: So you started with three, now you have 300. How many did you have when you started incorporating some of these bigger machines?
Assimacopoulos: Well, there’s 100 employees that work at our west plant in Minneapolis. So probably, my goodness … Going back to maybe even as few as 60 or 70 employees.
Spencer: Alright. I want to focus on those early days and those first growing pains. But, one thing with machines and different shifts … When you have strong opinions or really strong leaders, they’re going to make those tweaks on the machine the way they think it needs to be done. And then the next shift comes in, and they’re like, why’d we change this? It needs to go back. Was that sort of a challenge in the beginning, as the teams got used to using equipment?
Assimacopoulos: Yes, that was about the time when we started actually having meetings.
Spencer: Okay.
Assimacopoulos: Believe it or not, the bakery lasted or existed for a long time, and there really weren’t staff meetings.
Spencer: I get that.
Assimacopoulos: People would just show up, and we’d kind of do our thing. So now we meet regularly, and it’s a lot of work to run good meetings, to organize them properly, to create an environment where people feel comfortable to speak their opinion. Bakeries are notorious for … You could walk through – the owner or manager – the bakery 10 times, and no one says anything’s wrong with a piece of equipment. And then they’ll tell somebody else the next day, “Yeah, this thing hasn’t been working for two months.”
Spencer: Yeah.
Assimacopoulos: It’s tough to get people to speak, but once you get to that point … We try every day, every meeting, to reach as much detail as possible. And that’s another big directive in the plan is the details of the business are where you win and lose.
Spencer: Yeah.
Assimacopoulos
Okay, this machine’s not running well. Okay, why not? What’s not running well? Is it a noise? Did someone look at it? Yeah, so-and-so is going to look at it. Well, is there a part ordered? When’s the part coming? There’s all these different layers that really go into supporting the equipment. But it starts, once again, with the people.
Spencer: Yeah.
Assimacopoulos: The people that are on the floor know those machines intimately, and it’s really important to get them to communicate across and up the organization to keep those machines healthy.
Spencer: Well, you know, it also probably goes back to the human nature. When people are trying to develop a relationship with a machine, especially in those early days when everybody was new to using equipment, including you, and it’s like, okay, well, I guess this is how it’s supposed to be, there’s an issue of confidence with floor operators or an hourly employee who is like, “Well, who am I to say this isn’t working right? I’m just the eight-to-five guy. Spiros knows more than I do. He bought it for a reason.” Like, what kind of culture of empowerment do you have to build to make sure that people are sharing those details and speaking up and saying, “I don’t think this is running the way it should,” or, “I think it could be better.”
Assimacopoulos: Yeah, it’s critical. Especially in our industry, we’ve got a lot of employees who aren’t native English speakers, and a lot of employees who … This is an entry level job, so they’re not maybe used to being heard or being empowered. So we’ll talk about culture, I’m sure, several times. But to me, culture is everything in the business.
Spencer: Agreed.
Assimacopoulos: There’s no silver bullet. It’s got to be repetitive, over-communicating, making people feel trust in the people they work with and the people they report to. You know, we’re kind of getting deeper into human nature and other things, but this saying, that the bakery floor is a microcosm of the world … So when people don’t trust each other, usually bad things happen or the right things don’t happen, unfortunately.
Spencer: That’s a good point and a good way to describe it. You know, I have to just share an observation. If relationships were foundational in the why and how you started the business, then I think a focus on culture is a natural byproduct of that.
Assimacopoulos: Yeah, and when I first started baking, you know, I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and I wasn’t negotiating with my father what time we were going to start or finish. I was happy if he bought me lunch, which usually occurred about three hours later than I would have liked, so that was a shift for me. Something else that I found is a really good tool, is sharing goals with the team and including them in the metrics of our performance. Most hard-working people want to add value. They want to feel that they’re winning in their job, and when you share those numbers, I find that intrinsically, due to natural competition, they’re going to say, “Hey, this machine’s not working good. We’re not going to hit our numbers, because this PLC or this VFD is popping on us every 10 minutes, and we’re having to shut the line down.” So that was another learning over the years, kind of like a structural strategy, to help people feel empowered and that they have some control over how their day is going.
Spencer: Yeah, I totally agree. I think you and I have something in common there. We’re from the same generation, and I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and, “Because I said so,” was a solid reason, and it was an argument ender. It was just because that’s the way it is, that’s what I said, and you’re just going to do it. And also that wasn’t a question, like, “Can you take out the trash?” That’s not a question.
Assimacopoulos: Right.
Spencer: And it’s just … we live in a different time. When people have access to information, they expect more context and more background. And so … You know, we are an entrepreneurial company over here, and we just celebrated our five-year anniversary, and that’s one thing that I really learned. Like, when you tell people, “No, we can’t do that,” or, “We’re not going to go in that way,” they just think you’re saying no because we want to be fun haters, or because we don’t want to get creative or something. And I learned when we have our monthly staff meeting, I have the partners share sort of a business update every time, and then a little mini TED Talk on, like, Business 101, and here’s what this means, and here’s what this means, so that they understand when we say we can’t do that or we want to go in this direction, they understand because there’s a business impact.
Assimacopoulos: Yeah.
Spencer: I learned that pretty quickly that you can’t just say, “No,” or you can’t just say, “We’re doing it this way.” There has to be context provided, especially when you’re a smaller business, so that they understand the impact of their input.
Assimacopoulos: Sure. And you know, from time to time when we’ve gone through growth spurts, that would be a complaint that I would hear intermittently. Well, “Hey, before, you used to be out here every day. I used to know what was going on, and now I see you once a week, and I’ve got this supervisor, and I’m kind of out in the cold.” So yeah, it’s incredibly important and powerful. And once again, it requires a lot of attention and consistency. And yeah, when we stray away from that, I we find out real quick.
Spencer: And there comes a point where you go from having time to do certain things to making time to do certain things, and they can’t just go away. That’s probably a big one, just as a business leader in a small business, as you’re growing it, I think it’s a really hard lesson to learn, and something that you just have to put in the effort to hang on to.
Assimacopoulos: Yeah, and I think it’s especially difficult if you don’t have a clear vision of where you want to end up.
Spencer: For sure. I mean, that’s step one.
Assimacopoulos: And I don’t pretend that I have it crystal clear for myself yet, but it makes a big difference if you know where you’re going.
Spencer: It really does. And I say it’s step one, but sometimes step one will happen three years in, or five years in, or 10 years in, when you realize, when you hit those growing pains, and you’re like, “Okay, hold on, I have to stop and think about, where do I want to be? What is the end game? How big do I want to grow?” Because that’s what’s going to drive some of the day-to-day decisions, right?
Assimacopoulos: Sure. Or, if something happens in the industry, and you have to pivot.
Spencer: Right.
Assimacopoulos: Maybe it’s an opportunity.
Spencer: Yeah, right, yeah. And we’re going to get into a couple of those things, I think in a week or two. Okay, I just have a couple more questions for this week. We talk about relationships a lot, and we just did in those internal relationships. But I’m curious, again, as you started to grow the business and get into automation, how relationships played a role in the vendors that you chose for those early investments in automation.
Assimacopoulos: Yeah, you know relationships, relationship building is another you know … I think it’s something we hear a lot about nowadays. It’s used a lot, but the power and the importance of relationships, once again, is critical. All of the decisions – the equipment decisions I made, especially earlier on starting the bakery – were based on the relationship I had with representatives from those companies, and almost always directly proportional to how much time they were willing to spend with me. I mean, some of these guys must have been on the phone with me thinking, like, “I don’t know what this guy thinks he’s doing. He has no idea what’s going on.” I really didn’t. I learned from these guys, which is kind of, you know, interesting. But yeah, there’s a lot of people that, once again, I owe a big debt of gratitude that they spent the time to share with me their experience and their approach to helping me. The second part of that is, we’re in an industry where all the equipment is custom. It’s not the auto industry where you’ve got, you know, 1,000 times the resources to test equipment and design and do all that. You’re going to have problems with your equipment, it’s going to happen. What matters is, what is your relationship with that vendor, with that company, and how are they willing to support you through the good and bad days and keeping your equipment in good running condition? If you don’t have a good relationship, it’s really tough to be as successful as you could be. You know, just as we’re talking about communicating with your employees, you have to have that same level of mutual respect and openness with your vendors.
Spencer: Yeah. Do you place an emphasis at all on, like, how a vendor interacts with the ones on the floor who are using the equipment? As far as like troubleshooting, training, like, do you recognize any differences in certain vendors that do that better than others?
Assimacopoulos: I would say all the vendors that I’ve used in the last 15 years have been fantastic with people on the floor. A lot of those guys that are coming to provide support either worked in a bakery or, you know, they get it. So that’s, I think, another fantastic testament to the people in and adjacent and around our industry, that they’re good people. They want to help.
Spencer: Nice.
Assimacopoulos: And I’ll tell you, the people on the line really love when we bring in outside people from the vendors, from the equipment companies, to provide training.
Spencer: I bet it’s like a mini education course for them to be able to learn about the machines from the people who designed and built the machines.
Assimacopoulos: Absolutely.
Spencer: Okay. I was gonna save this question for last, but we kind of got into it already in the middle of this episode. But, after 15 years, how do you view automation as an artisan baker? Like, is it a necessary evil? Is it necessary?
Assimacopoulos: Well, I think once again, it goes back to what you want to achieve with your product.
Spencer: Okay.
Assimacopoulos: If your goal is to provide fantastic product to 20 different farm markets every week, and that’s winning for you, you probably don’t need a ton of automation, you need some. If you want to become a national supplier of great quality, clean-label products, you’re not going to be able to do it on the bench, you just can’t. So, I know that’s kind of a generic answer, but really it’s what level of automation and what degree of automation fits to support the baker’s vision. That’s the best way to go about it.
Spencer: That’s fair. Okay, Spiros, that is everything for this week. Next week, we’re going to look beyond Michigan and talk about that acquisition and how it sort of changed the company, changed the operation and how you integrate two operations, and then talk about the rebrand. So that’s going to be a good conversation for next week, but this week, thanks so much for yet another incredible conversation.
Assimacopoulos: Thank you, Joanie. Take care.
Spencer: You too.
