From medicine to manufacturing: OJ DeSouza Jr.’s pivot to baking

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From medicine to manufacturing: OJ DeSouza Jr.’s pivot to baking

13 Nov 2023

Joanie Spencer

Since 2008, Joanie Spencer has covered the retail and wholesale sides of the baking industry.
Serving associations such as the American Society of Baking (ASB) and BEMA, Joanie is also in demand as an industry presenter on bakery operations and trends. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from Rockhurst University and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.

When she’s not running or playing soccer, Joanie spends her time with her husband and 11-year-old son.

DALLAS — For Oscar “OJ” DeSouza Jr., a second-generation Indian American and fourth-generation baker, family is everything.

In fact, his fierce dedication to family was the gravitational force that pulled him from pursuing a career in the medical field and toward his parents’ bakery, Dallas-based Signature Baking, where DeSouza is now the company’s president.

“I had studied biomedical engineering in college and had taken the MCAT for medical school,” DeSouza recalled. “And my dad said to me, ‘Your MCAT score is good for five years. Why don’t you try working with me for a year? See if you like what we build.’ And I thought, ‘Why not?’”

His father’s motives were thinly veiled: DeSouza was there to help revitalize the business through a fresh perspective and innate business savvy. He and his father immediately began bouncing new ideas off each other and developing plans for how to grow the operation.

The father-son relationship morphed into a business partnership, and DeSouza never looked back.

“I realized it was fun to help build the company that my dad had started,” he said. “I grew up working in the bakery, putting buns into a bag two at a time. When I came back to work alongside him,

I was working with clients, building relationships and problem-solving in the bakery and for the business. Bio-medical engineering had tickled my brain in a very specific way, but in this environment, I could see the results of my work almost immediately, and that was really satisfying.”

Taking on a leadership role in any business — let alone the family business that was not the intended path — comes with a steep learning curve. DeSouza had a specific objective: learn the processes his father had put in place, and then optimize and build upon them. It’s no small task, even for someone who had set out on a highly specialized path. He pursued an additional venture, returning to school for an Executive MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Since stepping into the business, DeSouza has focused on streamlining what has been a predominantly manual operation — from ordering and inventory to the process itself — through technological advances and equipment automation.

One of his first big projects involved tapping his brother, a software developer, to digitize the ordering system that had been done with pen and paper for years. With the new custom ERP system, tasks that previously took hours are now done in about 30 minutes, and customers receive an invoice via email immediately upon order delivery.

It was the first step in unlocking Signature Baking’s growth potential.

“It helped us scale faster because we weren’t spending so much time worrying about whether we counted items for an order correctly or if the customer received their invoice,” DeSouza said. “And now, we have far less paper to chase.”

The next stage of evolution was streamlining the customer base to better accommodate natural ebbs and flows. True to its name, Signature Baking was built around custom orders, providing a range of products for any customer’s specific needs. But when certain types of clients like convention centers had stark, often extreme, differences in their order cadence depending on seasonality and other factors, it took a toll on the bakery’s production schedule.

“When certain customers were busy, we were really busy,” DeSouza said. “But when they weren’t busy, it created a lot of inconsistency in terms of production and scheduling, as well as our labor needs.”

To solve that challenge, DeSouza strategically shifted the bakery from being all things to all customers to now focusing primarily on specific items for foodservice customers.

“We’ve worked on narrowing our focus to make fewer items and more variations of specific product types,” he said. “Now, we’re concentrating on being great at things like hamburger buns and Texas toast and catering to that segment of the market.”

DeSouza discovered that narrowing the focus has actually enabled the bakery to be more innovative in its product development.

“Now, innovation looks a lot like working closely with customers to identify what they want to see,” he said. “One particular chef likes to create a new bun every month as a limited-time offer, and things like that allow us to get really creative. We get to have fun with it and make things like a jalapeno cheddar hot dog bun, which is my favorite.”

This story has been adapted from the October | Q4 2023 issue of Commercial Baking. Read the full story in the digital edition here.

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