MILWAUKEE — If Matt and Katie Wessel knew then what they know now, Milwaukee Pretzel Co. might never have been on the map.
When the concept of this Milwaukee-based pretzel brand was conceived, the Wessels — Matt, president and COO, and Katie, CEO — hoped they could start a business that would involve around 500 pretzels a day.
But they didn’t anticipate how the predominantly Germanic Milwaukee market would receive the pretzels … or how it would lead them down a path of automated innovation. Sometimes, a big dream and a little blind faith can take entrepreneurs a long way.
“If someone would have shown us 10 years ago what we have today and said, ‘This is what you’re working toward,’ we probably would have been too scared to jump in,” Matt said. “What we have today — and the path we’re headed down — far exceeds what we thought we’d be doing.”
The Wessels never actually planned to manufacture pretzels. They originally sought a co-manufacturer to produce the Bavarian-style delicacy they fell in love with while living in Munich.
However, the complicated process involving a caustic bath — what gives the product its signature color and flavor — was not appealing to a typical bakery operator. So, the Wessels forged ahead, making them by hand.
Within two years, Milwaukee Pretzel had not only gained notoriety in its hometown, but it had also caught the attention of broad-line distributors with clients in Chicago and Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Soon, the business was in a growth cycle between expanding clientele and a hiring boom to keep up with demand.
“If someone would have shown us 10 years ago what we have today and said, ‘This is what you’re working toward,’ we probably would have been too scared to jump in. What we have today — and the path we’re headed down — far exceeds what we thought we’d be doing.” — Matt Wessel | president and COO | Milwaukee Pretzel Co.
“When you’re building a business, you see yourself going in one direction, but sometimes you go a little off the path, and you discover that’s the direction you were meant to go,” Katie said. “You obviously need to have expertise and knowledge to steer things in the right direction, but at the end of the day, a lot of our growth was fueled by demand.”
After building an operation that consisted of little more than rolling, cutting and twisting pretzels by hand, the brand and workforce grew in tandem. And while growth changed the game for the business, it also meant a steeper learning curve.
“When you’re training people while also producing large volumes by hand, you end up with a lot of rejects,” Katie said. “It takes a lot of time and investment to teach someone how to roll a pretzel because it’s not a skill that people inherently have.”
The early days of entrepreneurship can look more like a constant stream of small, immediate decisions. But as a business grows, those decisions can often get bigger, cost more, have a longer-lasting impact and require a more strategic view.
Those kinds of decisions are how the company has successfully executed its slow, managed growth.
The move to automation was calculated, but it also came out of need. One foundational aspect of Milwaukee Pretzel is the customer-first mentality that Katie established when she started the company. So, as the operation grew into a need to automate, she prioritized educating her team on the specificities of each customer’s product.
“I’ve worked with our production teams to help them understand the customer and the process,” Katie said. “If I tell them something has to be done a certain way, there’s a reason. I help them connect the dots by saying, ‘These pretzels have to be done this way — or in this shape — because the customer is doing something specific with them.’ That has become the basis for everything we do.”
Katie’s integrity ensured that when it was time to scale the pretzels wouldn’t change. That proved to be one of the hardest challenges when the complicated nature of the process limited their immediate resources.
“I still say that the biggest accomplishment of my professional life is, hands down, scaling a Bavarian pretzel,” Katie said. “It’s hard to do, and there aren’t a lot of people in the country who have done it.”
While automation can make things faster, easier or perhaps even cheaper, none of those were motivating factors for Milwaukee Pretzel. Baking is a combination of art and science, but when scaling a product like this, precision is everything.
This story has been adapted from the August | Q3 2023 issue of Commercial Baking. Read the full story in the digital edition here. See the full issue here.
