BRONXVILLE, NY — Greyston is hosting a special screening of Zen Brownie, a documentary about the baking company’s history, on Jan. 25 at 6 p.m. in The Picture House Regional Film Center.
Zen Brownie, narrated by Jeff Bridges and written and directed by Alison Bartlett, covers the origin story of the B Corp company and includes a look into the Humanistic Model Management as seen through the bakery’s open-hiring practices.
The documentary also features Greyston leaders such as Joe Kenner, president; April Platts, director of R&D and quality assurance; and Sharma Dwarka, director of manufacturing.
For Kenner, the documentary presents an opportunity to share more about the company’s roots and practices than just the brownie bites people may know.
“You might know open hiring, but you may not know we have a foundation that also works with individuals with barriers to employment,” Kenner said. “You might know about the brownies, but you may not know about open hiring. We wanted to introduce the full story of Greyston to the public and get that out there because at the end of the day, our goal is to get people with barriers to employment into the workforce, get them off the sidelines.”
Michael Pirson, a professor of social enterprise and global sustainability at Fordham University and a producer for Zen Brownie, had an established connection with Greyston, as the bakery is one of the organizations used as an example of change-making and social innovation.
The film’s inception began with the lack of material available to teach humanistic management. In the process of conceptualizing what would become Zen Brownie, Pirson introduced Bartlett to Kenner.
Following a tour of the Yonkers, NY, facility, Bartlett did further research on Greyston’s origin story. On the recommendation from Kenner to look into a book written by Bernie Glassman, Greyston’s late founder, Bartlett unlocked another piece of the bakery’s puzzle to include in the film.
Bartlett also included insights from Eve Marko, Glassman’s wife and a member of the Zen Peacemakers Order. The film team also went to Vermont to interview Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, co-founders of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, whose products feature Greyston baked goods.
“We were already in production making this great little piece about a New York bakery, and I strongly suggested to all involved, ‘Please, we also need to get this part of it,’” Bartlett said. “Merging the two stories, this New York City bakery that does open hiring — many of the employees have come out of incarceration and had these unbelievably incredible stories of love, life, redemption, city aggression — but the whole place was founded by the Zen community of Buddhist monks. I was like, ‘We need to stop, and we need to go back and merge the two.”
Kenner hopes that in addition to showing the history of the bakery, commercial bakers can see the benefits to open hiring, which he also covered at BakingTECH 2023.
“We all have entry-level jobs where someone can learn the job on the job that could be open hiring jobs or more inclusive and doesn’t have to be exactly the way Greyston does it,” Kenner said. “How can we bring in those folks on the sidelines to support our needs? How can we customize that approach to our industries where it’s win-win-win: the win for the employee who gets the job, the win for the employer that gets a good employee and the win for society? That’s what I hope to get out of this from the baking industry standpoint, that they all see the win-win-win for inclusive hiring.”
The film has earned recognitions such as Special Mention at the Impact Docs Awards. As an educational tool, the film moved Pirson’s MBA students to see that open hiring practices are possible in a real-world environment.
Tickets for the screening are $20 each. Following the film, there will be a panel discussion including Kenner, Bartlett, Pirson and Marko.
