Welcome to the third season of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Josh Allen, award-winning artisan baker and founder of Companion Baking in St. Louis, is redefining ways to think about artisan bread production. The conversation in this episode revolves around the importance of the intention behind product development.
Listen to Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple, Spotify or Google. Hosted by Joanie Spencer, Commercial Baking editor-in-chief. Sponsored by AB Mauri North America.
Joanie Spencer: Josh, thanks for joining me again this week. I chose this week’s topic because we’ve had some interesting discussions around what it means to be artisan, so I’d like to kick this episode off by picking your brain on what terms like “artisan” and “craft” mean to you.
Josh Allen: I think in general, they both mean the same thing, which is bread or baked goods made with intention. That’s a word that you used and that’s certainly a word we use here. We don’t ever really formally or informally refer to ourselves as an artisan bakery. I sort of believe in Nancy Silverton’s approach that I heard once where she talks about how once you go to mechanization, really in any process, you’re getting away from an artisanal product that should be made by hand and baked in an oven, forged by fire. I do believe that’s true, but I also think there are plenty of instances in which even following artisanal processes doesn’t necessarily mean they’re intentional. There can be not great product produced by hand, baked in a woodfired oven. And I think there can be some terrific products produced with full mechanization and automation all the way through, depending on the intention of the baker and the bakers involved.
Spencer: I totally agree with you. I will tell you that I could make a bread by hand, and it most certainly would not be an artisan bread.
Allen: Yeah, and I think that’s absolutely the case. And I think it’s hard to bring that intention to everything that you do. That’s certainly a challenge that we have and, almost 30 years into the craft, it becomes a challenge every day and making sure that as new bakers come into the fold here that we communicate that and that even though it might be a line running, or it might be a mixer that you turn on, we’re still paying attention. We still have to pay attention to the temperature of the ingredients and the development of that dough. It’s not always set the mixer for 11 minutes and that’s the end of it. Things do change, and humidity does have an effect, and the age of the starter or the pre-ferment. We have to pay attention to all the little things and all the details. It’s great that the backbreaking part of it may be eliminated because of mechanization, but where we use our brains and where we use our instincts doesn’t change.
Spencer: Right. And you know, I was just having a conversation about how with automation, you don’t take the thinking out of it, you can’t treat a human being like a robot. There has to be a thought process that goes into bread production.
Allen: If there’s anything that we’ve seen, it’s that you need more brain power with automation as opposed to less. I think there’s an instinctual feel that comes making a loaf of bread by hand. Those that have done it sort of understand that as you knead and develop that dough in your hands, that feel of what’s happening can sort of take over. And that feel goes away when you’re mixing in a machine and running on an automated line or even semi-automated line. You really have to pay attention, and your other senses have to be heightened to ensure that we’re doing the right things.
Spencer: Yeah. And you know, I want to go back to our very first episode, something that you mentioned — and it’s also something that we talked about a little bit when I visited your bakery — is how with the right intention, something as simple as a hoagie bun could in many ways be just as beautiful as an artisan loaf from Tartine. Can you share an example of how you’ve experienced that?
Allen: Well, certainly. I guess beauty in that case would be in the eye of the beholder. But yeah, I mean, absolutely. We developed a po’boy bread for a chef in St. Louis, who actually has multiple restaurants in St. Louis, and then multiple restaurants in Tulsa, OK. His name is Kevin Nash, and he’s very good friend of ours. He’s one of only two James Beard winners that we’ve created here in St. Louis. So we’re super proud of them. And we enjoy product development with really everybody in the industry, but it’s really fun with folks who are that skilled and that meticulous and that passionate about what they do.
Kevin was creating a concept called Peacemaker and a peacemaker is essentially the poor boy that traveled south from the Northeast down to Louisiana. And he was looking to create a very specific hoagie basically, and one that he was going to handle uniquely in his restaurant and build a really amazing sandwich program with fried oysters and a lot of different things that he wanted to do on this. He had very specific intentions, to use the word we’ve been using, for that product. The development time on that was… It took a long time to get him what he wanted. And we really enjoyed it and got a kick out of it. And it was kind of a very passion project for all of us, because he had this incredible sense of how he wanted the whole experience to be for his customer. And he even changed throughout, you know, initially he was going to warm it in a convection oven so it would have kind of that shattering crust that sometimes you see in po’boy sandwiches, and then he ended up going to like an oyster butter on a flat top and it changed the texture he wanted on the outside and the inside. And look, it wasn’t easy to do, it’s still not easy to continue to replicate for him on an ongoing basis, because we know he’s paying attention. He’s the one on the line a lot of times making the sandwiches, and so that really kind of reiterated for me how important it was for us to pay attention to everything: to a great burger bun to a great hoagie to a really nice, you know, hearth baked sourdough bread. Like, it really doesn’t matter.
If passion comes from us to create and help the customer tell their story, which is what we talked about initially, if that narrative is theirs and bread is gonna play a role in that narrative, then what we do every day for them is super important, because it’s not a throwaway to them. And it can’t be a throwaway to us. I think certainly with Instagram and social media, you know, the world gets caught up in these beautiful, dark crusted, blistery loaves of sourdough bread. I’m as big of a fan as anybody of those things, but in the end, I do strongly believe that making beautiful bread for a customer — and beauty is what they’re looking for, what the characteristics that are super important to them — for them to tell that story is every bit as challenging. And every bit is challenging for us to do. That’s what sort of gets us out of bed every day.
Spencer: This is one of my favorite things that I’ve learned from you and all of our conversations that we’ve been having: that it really changes how you think about, like you said, beauty in the eye of the beholder. I remember you telling me a little bit about the po’boy sandwich and how you said you took some of those hoagie rolls home with you. And it’s like, yeah, when it’s sitting on my kitchen table, okay, it’s a hoagie roll. But the fact that you can create something so award winning when it’s on that plate, and such a beautiful sandwich, even though at first glance, it looks like it’s just a roll. That is so incredible to think about the things that a baker can produce with a loaf of bread.
Allen: And to think about what a chef can do. Chef Kevin deserves all the credit for that sandwich. You know, we created for him what he wanted, we gave him the vehicle for him to tell his story, and then he is the one that makes it sing. Like I told you, I took it home and my kids are like, “What is this? This looks like a underbaked little slab of dough,” which essentially is what that po’boy kind of has that appearance of, but then when he puts it on the flattop with oyster butter and grills the inside and creates that interior texture to match up against the fried oyster, but still the soft exterior… The whole thing comes together in a way that’s really amazing. I honestly don’t take any credit for it, it’s all him and it was all with his direction. And I give Josh Galliano here, our innovation leader, huge props because he was a big part of that development and helping us figure out how to do it. That’s been really fun for us. And then it’s fun to see the restaurant get the awards and the accolades. And people talk about that sandwich, and they don’t talk about us in relation to that sandwich. And again, it’s not our story to tell, but we want to keep helping push that along and making that product available. And when that stuff happens, you create a customer for a long time. Like it’s going to be hard. I believe it would be hard for Kevin to go somewhere else and have somebody care as much about helping him tell his story as we do. We’ve been doing business with him for an awful long time and, knock on wood, if we continue to do what we’re doing right, we don’t see that changing. Because we’re invested in that with him. And that means a lot to folks.
Spencer: Yeah. And you know, that’s a great segue to the next thing I wanted to ask you. What’s the secret to truly intentional product development? Because you know, they say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So how do you effectively turn intention into practice?
Allen: We’ve built our business model around it. So for us, it works. As we talked about initially, our business is built on these relationships with our end customers and helping them tell their story. That’s what we do, that’s what we value. That’s the mission every day that we bring here. We’re really not a bakery for the most part. We do have a handful of items that sell under our brand that maybe we’re known for, or that we happen to have a good following for, but for the most part, the majority of our business comes from us helping other people tell their story and nobody really ever knows that it’s our stuff. And that’s okay. Because of that, that’s how we do product development here.
We don’t do a lot of product development where we sit in a room and say, “We think the market is ready for chocolate chip strawberry bread, and this is what it’s gonna look like and how it’s gonna be packaged. And let’s take this to market and go flood the marketplace with this particular product.” Now what we do is identify customers, mainly multi-unit operators that have enough volume, where it really makes sense for us to be talking to them, but not so big where they’re necessarily able to go to a real large manufacturer and get help. So for us, that sweet spot is like 15 to 250 units or something like that, delis, restaurants, small grocery stores. We go and develop those relationships and help them solve their problems or help them tell stories that they’re not yet able to tell. So the development is very intentional — again, to go back to that word — in that we’re looking to solve a problem, or to find a product or develop a product for them that they feel like they have a need for. It’s not pushing something into the marketplace. It’s just a different way of doing business. It’s the niche that we find ourselves in, and it’s what we love to do.
I grew up in developing relationships in the food business. I’ve enjoyed that all the way through. So for me, it’s a lot more fun to work with a chef or work with a culinary director of a large group and say, “Okay, what problems can we solve? What do you need? What’s coming in the pipeline? What’s the what’s in menu development? What can we do to help you tell that story?” And that’s what we’re developing against, which is different than us taking a shot at where we think the market is going or what the next trend is. So then the product development becomes intentional in that. And then we have to say, “Okay, what is the final application?” You know, that tells us what kind of oven system we use, is it a convection oven or hearth oven? What kind of divider do we use? How do we mix that? Does it have a pre-ferment? Does it have a sourdough starter or a levain? Is it nothing because the flavor development is less forward and less acidic? All the different things that we’re going to talk to them about, before we ever even turn on a mixer to show them a product, we want to go through that exercise with them to truly understand what the need is. And we can kind of go through that whole thing. We’re very transparent in the process of saying, “This is the kind of price point we could hit or couldn’t hit.”
In some of these instances when we go through these exercises, you know, it turns out that we’re just not the right answer. Maybe they’re too price conscious or too price forward. And we’re never going to be the cheapest person, we’re never going to be able to produce the product the least expensively, but again, the conversation is where a lot of this kind of stuff flushes out. And again, the intention of it is to go through it so that we get a full understanding and then way down the line, we’ll start putting some products together and show them some stuff. We save a lot of time and energy for ourselves and candidly for them, as well, the more conversations we can have before we start tasting bread.
Spencer: It seems like the relationship is a critical part of the intention, like you can’t be intentional without understanding what the relationship is between you and your customer. Right?
Allen: Absolutely. And it’s not easy to compete on that. That’s our point of difference, though, right? Like, we want to do that. That’s what gets us excited. There are plenty of manufacturers that use broker networks across the country. So you may never speak to the manufacturer, you may never talk to the baker, you’re talking to a network of brokers who are making products available or salespeople via broadline distributors who, you know, are selling things out of a book and they happen to be selling bread, but they don’t have an intimate knowledge or a passion. So they can tell you, “Here’s the 12 stock SKU that we have in the freezer, but if you need something special or you want something developed, that’s not something that we can do. You can pick from one of these items and see if one of these things works for you.” So our point of difference is the eagerness — not only the ability, but the eagerness — to want to sit down with the customer and try to figure that out. It’s a longer process. It doesn’t necessarily yield a speedy sale because we have to go through that whole development process with almost every customer. But again, it solidifies that. It sets an anchor differently than we would set if we’re just another SKU on somebody’s stock list. It really does. It develops a relationship and it’s hard to compete with a relationship
Spencer: Honestly, I would argue that artisan bread relies just as much on the relationship and why you’re creating that bread as it does what type of oven that it goes into. Because, again, I could make bread in my kitchen, not in an industrial oven, and it would not be artisan. Like you can throw those ingredients together and make a loaf of bread. And just because it’s not mechanized, doesn’t mean that it’s not artisan, or…?
Allen: I agree. And you know, we’re not so naive as to think that everybody cares, right? We’ve talked to plenty of customers who are like, “Hey, how much is that hamburger bun?” And we turn things off a lot because we recognize that, you know, not everybody is Chef Kevin Nash and who’s passionate about creating this incredible sandwich. But we’re just trying to seek those people out. There’s enough of those people that we can keep ourselves busy. And we don’t try to compete on the commodity side of things because we’re just not that good. We’re not that efficient, we can’t buy in a big enough scale to keep our ingredient cost down, you know, we’re never going to compete on the commodity side of hamburger buns or dinner rolls or even really nice baguettes, because there are there are operations that are set to produce those at scale, that really great quality stuff a lot less expensively than we’re able to do it. But we’re always looking, we’re always on the hunt, for the customers that are interested in telling a story. They’re the fun ones that we go find. And I will say that nine times out of 10, they’re like blown away that there’s a manufacturer that carries that same passion. They really enjoy the process as well, because they didn’t necessarily know that they could find that kind of vendor support that would be interested in even helping them do that.
Spencer: Yeah. And I mean, I have to say that I haven’t talked to a lot of bakers that have this perspective that you do. So I do agree that it’s such an intriguing point of differentiation for your bakery.
Allen: Yeah. We got to go find those people. We got to continue to get the word out. These kinds of podcast opportunities for me help us tell our story, which is that we’re interested in helping others tell their story. But yeah, I don’t think there’s many of us. I think that it becomes a unique sales process when you do it. Because in most instances, and you set that first meeting up, most people are expecting you to open a bag and throw your loaves out on the table and say, “Here’s all the features and benefits of the things that we do and what we make.” And we take it completely differently, right? Like we walk into that room and we say, “What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? What’s the story that you want to tell? What’s missing from what you’re doing? What’s not working?”
How can I show you something to fix a problem if I don’t know what your problem is? So we have to go through that exercise first. Some people aren’t interested in that, they get turned off by that, but other people are really intrigued by that. It’s opened up some doors for us that’s allowed us to continue to grow the business. And hopefully, we’ll continue to do so in the future.
Spencer: Man, I would love to be a fly on the wall when you have that initial conversation, when they’re just expecting you to sort of list the menu of your products. Then you launch into a conversation about, “Let’s talk about your problems and your pain points and how we can help you solve that.” I’d love to see the reactions from your customers.
Allen: You know, we have a couple of salespeople that travel quite a bit and do a lot of work on the phone. In lot of their experiences, I mean, they do the same thing. And they do it better than I do it. Certainly you get a few hang ups, and you get a few folks that aren’t interested in that. Again, like I said, just tell me how much your bread costs are, tell me what you got. But we recognize that those aren’t the customers that we’re going to keep in the long term. Those aren’t the relationships that we want to spend a whole heck of a lot of energy trying to build. But once we get there, and once we can get folks to sit down and open up about that, it’s really kind of amazing, actually. Some of the things that we learn are unique, some things have nothing to do with the product and have everything to do with logistics or distribution or a willingness to try things that are different, or “Hey, could you put it in this size of box for me? Because we’ve invested in all of these reaching coolers that are this size and our other manufacturer’s box doesn’t fit, and you know, they’re not willing to change the size of the box.” Sometimes that’s to do with the bread right? Like sometimes their problems are, “This baker only works through this distributor but I’m getting ready to change and go to this distributor. Are you open to that?”
In a culture of “yes,” most of the time we say yes and figure out whether that’s a good decision later, but we’re going through that exercise with them. But most people don’t ask that. They don’t ask what’s not working. Most people just want to show their features and their benefits. And it’s easy because we’re proud of what we do, so you do have that tendency to want to go there with a bag of bread and show folks, “This is our beautiful brioche bun. And this is our French baguette. And here’s all this great stuff that we’re making.” But in the end, they could be sitting there with a problem that has nothing to do with anything sitting on the table. And now you’re starting to waste their time, and now they’re fidgeting and trying to get out of a meeting. When you turn it around and you just say, “Look, I don’t have anything today, but let’s have a conversation about what’s not working and what you want. And then I’ll come back with hopefully what it is you’re looking for,” it slows it down a little bit. It’s not an easy process to go through. But it’s definitely worth it in the end.
Spencer: But you know, if you think about artisan bread from just a production standpoint, it’s a slow process. And so I feel like you are looking at the entire relationship through the eyes of an artisan: That you want to take your time to get to know them and find out what those problems are to create something really meaningful, and then come back and show them not. Here’s the beautiful bread that I made. But here’s the beautiful bread that I made for you.
Allen: Oh, absolutely. Early on, when we started the holistic approach, it was about, “What’s my display going to look like at the farmers market or in this small grocery store?” The intention was I going to make it look nice at that point. And then let’s work backwards from there on what kind of oven, what time does that come out of the oven, and how do I set my schedule. Now we’re starting to recognize — it’s taken a long time — that it’s the plate inside of a restaurant. And for us now, because we go through frozen distribution, we have to think about it all the way through: How’s it going to get packaged? How does it get palletized? What’s the logistics of getting it from St. Louis to somewhere in Pennsylvania? Or Denver, CO? And how do we get it all the way there and onto the plate to the customer so that they can tell their story? We got to think about all those steps in that process.
With that holistic approach, it’s not trying to force a round peg into a square hole. We’ve got to think about it from the beginning and work backwards from there. How do you want that to come into you? What’s that look like? Does pack size make a difference to you? We’ve got to ask all those questions so that when we come back with an answer, we’ve got it all answered. Sometimes you can solve a problem on the product and then you realize, wait a minute, I can’t get it to you because that product isn’t gonna fit in the box. We’ve had conversations with folks who say they need a 24-inch baguette, and being naive or ignorant or whatever term as we go through this exercise, then we realized that a pallet is 48 inches and a box has to be 25 inches if we want to hold the 24-inch baguette, so it’s not gonna fit on the pallet. Like I can’t ship your 24-inch baguettes. So had we thought about that, you know, maybe we would have made them a 12-inch baguette instead or ask if there’s a different size. Can we think about what you’re serving? Is there a way to do this differently so that that it’s going to fit in the case, which is going to maximize the cube on the truck? We got to think about it all the way through.
We’ve made enough mistakes in that “yes” culture of ours to start learning to ask more questions. And to me, knowledge for us just allows us to ask better questions. Every time we learn something, it means we have a new question we get to ask. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we know more about anything.
Spencer: I love it. So I just can’t help but wonder, Josh, when we look at the state of the baking industry and where we go from here… How do you think innovation could change in our industry? If every baker — no matter what they made, even if it’s just those high speed hamburger buns — how could innovation change if they went about their product development with this kind of mindset: the mindset of artisan?
Allen: Well, I think specialization is certainly happening. I think we’re starting to see, as the food industry evolves, differentiation becomes the biggest thing. Like there are so many great places selling chicken tenders, or so many great burger places, or whatever it is that you’re seeing. I mean, take the chicken sandwich phenomenon that’s going on across the country. Whatever it is, the way they’re going to differentiate themselves is via all of those ingredients. I think bakers have to start thinking about that all the way through. I recognize there are limitations on equipment and speed and price and everything has to be part of it, but as we talked about at the beginning, as long as the intention is right, those are the constraints that you have to work around. I do believe because constraints bring greater creativity as opposed to less creativity, because you sort of know the box that you’re dealing in and then you can start to get creative within that.
But I think, just as we talked about, it’s just intention. So any baker can put a strong intention to take care of the customer into their process and developing those relationships. It may not be something that’s particularly important in the larger scale or commercial sense, and obviously we are not very big, so somebody much larger than us could sort of smile and smirk and say, “That’s great for the little guy in St. Louis to do that.” And that’s cool. That’s where we’re gonna find our growth vehicle for us in doing that. But we intend — at whatever size we get, and we won’t put a limitation on that because we don’t know — but that this is how we’re going to continue to grow the business because it’s what we have a passion for. We have a passion for making a great product, but we have a passion for making a great product for somebody. And finding those somebodies is the harder part than it is making the great product.
Spencer: I love this insight, Josh. It’s just so different, and it’s really refreshing. Thank you so much. Those are all my questions for this episode. I’m really looking forward to next week because we’re going to take this a step further and invite a special guest into this conversation. You mentioned him earlier today, and that’s Josh Galliano, your head of innovation. There’s a really unique relationship there because he was actually a customer at one point, right?
Allen: He was a customer and he was a multi-time nominated James Beard chef. He’s just a tremendous culinary talent and a great guy that was always posting bread pictures on his Instagram account. I mean, the guy would work all hours of the night, he’d go home and make bread for his family. I just reached out to him one day and I said, “Maybe it’s time we stop just posting pictures on Instagram, and you come in here and you start making bread.” It was a good time for him to make a change. He’s got a young, beautiful family, and they live outside of St. Louis on a farm. I hope and I think it’s been a really great fit for him. He brings such a wonderful perspective to the conversations that we can have with our customers because he understands what their challenges are, much better than I do. He can talk the talk and he can walk the walk. And he can go into the kitchens with them and really kind of see what they need and what they’re looking for. And he has such a such a wonderful demeanor, but also just a great perspective and so much knowledge. So yeah, he has been a great asset for us.
Spencer: I cannot wait to have a conversation with both of you because I feel like you alluded to this. He’s sort of the key to putting all of this intention that you have into practice. And I think you guys are great team and I’m excited to invite him into the conversation next week.
Allen: I look forward to it!
Spencer: All right, Josh. Thanks again, and I will talk to you next week.
