Welcome to Season 13 of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, is spending this season with Markey Culver, CEO of The Women’s Bakery, a social enterprise bakery in East Africa. They’re discovering the challenges and rewards that come with creating change through baking. Sponsored by Middleby Bakery Group.

In our fifth and final episode, Markey explores the exciting developments that are on the horizon for The Women’s Bakery.

Learn more about this season here, and tune into Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple or Spotify.

Joanie Spencer: Markey, it’s our last week together. I could talk to you about The Women’s Bakery forever. First of all, thank you for spending this time with me. It’s been really cool to take it piece by piece and talk about the entire journey, what you have built and how your vision is coming to fruition. I just want to start out by saying thank you for all that you’ve done, and thank you for spending these five weeks with me.

Markey Culver: Gosh, Joanie, well, thank you. It’s really nice to be with you, and I’m flattered that people want to hear something like this. So, thank you.

Spencer: Absolutely. Okay, so the first thing I want to do … we’re going to talk about the future of The Women’s Bakery. But I want to just start by sort of recapping the business model. You went into it very deeply in the second week, but just as a kicking off point, let’s talk about from that first failed bakery to what the business model is today.

Culver: Okay, so the business model today … and this is the social enterprise component; this is where the social meets the enterprise. The enterprise is a bakery, and the bakery is mission centric. The social part, which is to socially and economically empower women, and then the bread products that we make are high quality, and most are fortified, so nutritious, and most are affordable. We’re making them accessible to communities in East Africa, because accessibility is synonymous with affordability in East Africa. The way we drive our social mission — which is women’s empowerment and also the major and the minor key, major key being the women’s empowerment, minor key being feeding babies, essentially — is through the bakery. The enterprise component being the bakery.

Spencer: Okay, remind me how many bakeries you have now.

Culver: We have three in Rwanda right now, and one on the horizon.

Spencer: All right. The next thing I want to talk about is the One Bread program. This is a big part of your present, I think. Remind me what percentage of the business is the One Bread Program.

Culver: We’re still factoring that out. Essentially, right now, I think 36% of our total revenue comes from the One Bread Project. What we’re actually doing right now, currently, physically in Rwanda, we just had a meeting about it today, is actually having the One Bread Project be the social component, and having school feeding be just retail, essentially. So, that’s what’s driving business.

We see that as having big market potential, not just in Rwanda, but in the greater region, as evidenced by school feeding. We’re up to 25,000 kids now. If listeners are paying attention to the numbers, last week it was 24,000. This week, it’s 25,000 and that’s how fast it’s growing. We’re serving 72 or 73 schools in Rwanda, and 50% of those schools are paying something. It’s on a sliding scale. So, if the school can pay 100% of the price of bread, they will. If they cannot, then we work with them to figure out what they actually can pay, and then hopefully work them up to where they get to fully pay over a period of time, and that period of time is negotiable,

Spencer: And the children pay nothing for the bread, correct?

Culver: Yeah, you asked this last time, and I actually checked on this. That’s correct. So, the school is the one who has the transaction with The Women’s Bakery, so we’re receiving payment from the school. Now, how the school is raising that money is up to them. Some schools, maybe they have a budget that they’re getting from their county or their government or whatever, and they’re attributing some of that budget to getting the One Bread Project. Other schools, I do think, are actually going to parents, and so they’re raising money from parents, and the parents are able to see the benefit of this school feeding or school snack program, and so they’re contributing to that.

But yes, it’s The Women’s Bakery working directly with the schools, and the schools directly paying us.

Spencer: Okay, so these are schools who believe in the benefit of this project. We talked a lot last week about the return for the children, keeping them in school, improving their performance in school and what that does to benefit their communities overall. When you have more educated humans in a community, it’s going to benefit.

Culver: Exactly, and that’s what I was going to say. I think it’s schools and principals, not just believing in this, but also it’s quantifiable. They’re seeing it in the numbers, not just in attendance, but in performance, how kids are performing in school because of bread.

Spencer: I’m not familiar with the governmental processes in Rwanda. Do they receive funding based on performance? Does performance impact what kinds of resources they’re able to get?

Culver: You know, that’s a good question. I’m certainly not an authority on this, and I think my initial reaction to that is probably not, but I imagine there’s something; there’s some kind of system where the better kids perform … I don’t know if the government would single them out and they would get special treatment for that. The same is true in the US. If in a school the students are performing better, perhaps they’re matriculating into a better school beyond.

We’re working with elementary school students, which here is called primary, so they’re matriculating into a better secondary school. Parents will notice. Parents will shift their kids. When that happens, then, yeah, the government notices. But Joanie, honestly speaking, I actually don’t know how the money is distributed here.

Spencer: Okay, I was just sort of imagining out loud: Circular benefit. All right, so then I want to also understand how you are able to, from a business perspective, serve bread to schools on this sliding scale, while you still work toward your profitability.

Culver: Yeah, well, I think that this is where the social enterprise aspect comes in. The definition of social enterprise, which the way Pauline would define it, is filling the gap. The business can cover so much, and then if you were looking at this from a strict business standpoint, the net loss would be the social impact standpoint. So, that’s where the donations would come in. I think that’s how Pauline would see something like this. Pauline being our COO, who’s running everything here in East Africa.

For me, I think that this is where you have to balance the people and profit. If you’re mission centric, and we are, it’s women’s empowerment and then feeding babies, it pushes out your horizon for profitability, right? If you are not yet profitable, and that is still the goal, which it is for us, what is the horizon? And then how do we fund appropriately to be able to keep the bakery sustained, so that they could eventually reach that horizon? And that’s it. What The Women’s Bakery raises annually, from a donation standpoint, from a charitable standpoint, all of that money goes to supporting the operations to keep us on that path to the profitability horizon. It’s just much longer than it typically takes a for-profit that we’re used to in the West.

Spencer: Okay, and that’s what I was going to ask is, if that’s where the donations come in. The donations and the funding that you get from that avenue helps keep you afloat, so that you can charge those schools who can’t afford the bread the lower cost, or have a sliding scale so then they can provide that bread free of cost to the children who really need it. Right? Am I understanding that correctly?

Culver: Yes, you are. I think that’s one component, and then the other component … if you were to look at it as if donations are an investment, and your return on that investment, for us, is a social return. For example, we’ve grown the number of students served daily to 1,000 more kids just in the last week, and the donations make that possible. If you’re investing in so much, your return on that investment would be — from our standpoint — a social impact investment. So, it’s kids fed or women who have stable income, etc. But there will eventually be a financial return. It’s just not yet.

If you were to look for a financial return, which we’re not looking for that right now, we’re a charity. So, if you were to invest, there’s no financial return. But, if we were to speak in those terms, the horizon would be pushed out farther, because we are prioritizing the social impact over the profit right now.

Spencer: Okay, that totally makes sense. Let’s talk about that horizon, because this episode is focusing on the future. So, what does the horizon look like for One Bread, and how do you achieve it?

Culver: Yep, so again, the One Bread Project happened very organically in Rwanda. It was a group of bakers who decided that they wanted to serve a school where their kids were attending and they had no food, and then it ballooned into what it is now, serving 25,000 kids a day.

I think that what we’re seeing is, if we can convert … if it’s 50-50, 50% of the schools are paying, 50% of the schools aren’t … those are hypothetical numbers, but if we could convert the schools that aren’t paying into real market value, that gives us that horizon to profitability. So, keeping that in mind, and also having our social mission being the core of who we are, we have an exciting opportunity.

We were actually invited by a local county in Kenya … Kenya has 47 counties, which are like the US’ 50 states. So, a county is similar to a state in Kenya. Each state in the US has a governor; each county has a governor in Kenya. A county in Kenya found The Women’s Bakery and they’re attracted by our mission and our model. They have many youth in their county that they are interested in serving. So, they’re interested in the women’s empowerment, but then also being able to feed kids. We were invited by this county in Kenya to come and pilot a bakery.

This is exactly where I see the future of sustainability being for The Women’s Bakery because, unlike what we’re doing in Rwanda, which is … we started this, and it’s on a paying scale, we’re working with some schools that get free bread, we’re working with other schools that can pay half, some schools are paying full. If we partner, or when we partner with this county in Kenya, the county would be responsible for paying for the bread, which would then mean that the pilot bakery that we’re starting in Kenya would begin basically … if we have a two-year horizon, that two-year horizon is in the black because we don’t have the sliding scale. So, that is the future that I see for The Women’s Bakery and being able to adopt the One Bread Project.

Spencer: What do you think that timeline looks like? Like you said, with a social enterprise, the horizon … you have to be realistic about how far the horizon is. And when you think about the horizon in terms of art, sometimes it’s an illusion.

Culver: If we are successful with the contract that we have proposed to this Kenyan county, the horizon for our breaking even would be three to four years, which is just light years with where we are in Rwanda.

Spencer: Okay. So, like I said, sometimes the horizon is an illusion, but maybe, when you look at the journey as a timeline with each bakery and each opportunity and lesson that you learn from it, you’re chipping away at the distance.

Culver: Yeah, and that’s totally correct. We’ve been open with … and they know, our proof of concept, essentially, is Rwanda. Because it’s a proof of concept, we’ve been able to say to this county in Kenya, “We’re learning from the mistakes we made in Rwanda, and we’re not going to repeat those in Kenya. Therefore, this is what we need to be successful in Kenya. So, to enter into this contract with you, this is what we need.” We have a minimum number of kids served per day. We’re starting from — and I can say this from my perspective — a much stronger standpoint, than I began in Rwanda. Because when I began in Rwanda, I was like, “I think this could work!” And I had no numbers behind it, and now we have real numbers behind what could work in Kenya.

Spencer: It’s kind of cool to think … this has gone from, “We can do this!” to an actual viable business in multiple areas of East Africa. That’s pretty cool. And to actually have those numbers behind it to see how far you’ve come from, “We can do this. Let’s just do it.”

Culver: I agree. I think I get so jazzed by that because at least … we’re in the early stages, so things could change, but at least in the initial conversations I’ve had with this county in Kenya, is that if it works here, if The Women’s Bakery pilot works in this county, it could be replicated. And that really excites me because it’s replication, not just for the sake of free bread or for whatever, it’s because the model actually works. And the model being a profitable bakery, and the bakery is profiting from serving local communities, in this case, children, and it’s being powered by women, and that’s pretty cool. If we can replicate something like that, and it works, I think that’s the start of really being able to take off.

Spencer: So, what are the business implications for that?

Culver: From a monetary standpoint?

Spencer: How is it going to affect the business plan and, yeah, from a financial standpoint, what does it take to get that repeatability?

Culver: I’m so glad you asked that. That’s what Pauline and I are currently working on right now, which is … Our budget is going to grow. So, what is dedicated to Rwanda to ensure that we can … I used to use the word, and maybe I even said this on this podcast, ‘stabilize,’ but I think that’s actually a misnomer. We’re not stabilizing operations in Rwanda; we’re growing them. I’ve seen that in abundance now from my last week being here. There’s real opportunity here in what Pauline has been able to do and grow the bakeries. We have that growth opportunity. The time horizon is different than what we’re used to in the West, but it’s here.

So, how do we set The Women’s Bakery up for growth opportunity in Rwanda and be able to set ourselves up for a hefty investment in Kenya, where we do think we’ll have immediate working capital, whereas we did not in Rwanda. Our budget will double, which is something we have not seen in the immediate past. So, it just means we hit the ground running, and I have to go out and make a lot of pitches.

Spencer: Yeah, you’ve got your work cut out for you, for sure.

You mentioned just the operation, and that was sort of the next little bucket that I wanted to talk about. From that first operational bakery to the three and then the fourth on the horizon today, how far have you come, when you think about it, as far as how the bread’s made.

Culver: Joanie, this is well timed, because I’ve been visiting all three of our bakeries this week in Rwanda, and this is how I opened my comments to them. One of the examples that I used, and all of these women, most of them in Rwanda, have been working with us since about 2018, 2019, some earlier, 2015.

Most of these bakeries in Rwanda are now producing 300 to 500 kilograms of dough per day, which for those commercial bakeries, that doesn’t sound like a lot, but for us, it’s tremendous. The reason it’s tremendous is because, when we started, sometime between 2015 and 2017, we started by producing two kilograms of dough/bread a day. Two by hand, with crudely constructed ovens that we also built by hand that had a triple deck, but really narrow, so maybe two feet in width. It was all wood burning. We used wood — fire — to power the ovens. The back of the oven was always hotter. We would burn all of the buns then.

In 2015, we used crudely constructed metal ovens, and we baked 60 bread rolls. So, we make, basically, dinner rolls, 70-gram rolls that we serve to kids. We baked 60 bread rolls in 20 minutes. Now, thanks to our remarkable community, which is our bakers, but also our wider community, our managers, our donors, etc., each bakery has a rotary oven that bakes 800+ rolls every 20 minutes. This literally got a standing ovation today. In 2015, our total bread units distributed — and please notice the word distributed, not sold — was 200,000. I remember going to iba in Germany, standing up on stage saying, “We sold over 200,000 bread units last year.” And people are like, “Wait, did she say year or hour?”

So anyway, right now, in 2024, we’re projected to sell over 4.5 million units.

Spencer: Oh, my God, absolutely that deserves a standing ovation. Bravo, bravo.

Culver: It’s them. They’ve done an amazing job.

Spencer: What you’ve accomplished, how much female empowerment that has provided, and how many children that feeds, and how many families it feeds, because it’s not just One Bread in the schools … You’re selling these to African consumers who wouldn’t otherwise have access to this bread.

Culver: That’s right, or if they do … I think this is interesting for me to see, because right now I’m in the capital city of Rwanda, I’m in Kigali, where there are bakeries. But we’re uniquely positioned because we fortify our bread. We meet the World Food Programme fortification standards for nutrition, and nobody else is doing that. I think that really does matter. This is true in the US, too. I don’t know exactly the number, but the majority, the primary consumer for the family, the person who makes the decisions for purchasing, is often the female, whether she’s the mother or whoever, and the same is true here, right? If you have the ability to sell, “Hey, this bread is actually better than competitors because it’s good for you and it’s good for your kids,” it creates a different market opportunity that, at least so far, I’ve not yet seen.

Spencer: That’s so amazing. And you’re not working in an environment, like here in the US where it’s, “Consumers will be more likely to spend a little bit more on bread that’s healthier.” This is a consumer demographic that wants healthier bread but doesn’t have the means to pay a premium for it.

Culver: Right, exactly. And I think that that can be a double-edged sword for us. I think in more rural parts of Rwanda, that works in our favor, right? Because, again, accessibility is synonymous with affordability. But in Kigali, it can sometimes be counter intuitive. A consumer might say, “Well, if this is so good for me, then why is it so inexpensive? I don’t trust it. What’s inside of it?”

So, we’ve taken great pains to try and have a lot of education out there and be very transparent. We don’t have the same regulations in Rwanda for the ingredients that are in in the bread, but we do voluntarily tell people what’s inside the bread, so that they have an opportunity to educate themselves and why we’re saying this bread is better, and to know that there’s a mission behind this and that the affordability is intentional. We’re not trying to trick anybody.

Spencer: That kind of brings up a thought that I hadn’t really considered before: You also have to have good marketing then, just like any business. How do you do that? How do you market that? Do you have someone on staff? Is it grassroots? How does that work?

Culver: Yes, to the latter. We have been … “lean” would be a kind way of putting this. We have been anemic with our marketing and sales department. We haven’t had one. So now, under Pauline’s leadership, we’re building one and trying to figure out how we market this, because we’ve got a lot of different market segments. Joanie, you just pointed one out, which is if it’s affordable, that’s one market segment, and then the story would be another market segment. But then can we bring it all together?

That’s what we’re navigating right now because I think the capital city would be a completely different market segment than where our two other bakeries are, which are in more rural communities. The story would still resonate with everybody, but what is important to people? And that also relates to the quantity. In the capital city, we can sell loaves of bread, whereas in the rural communities we can’t. It’s too expensive. So we would sell rolls, essentially. Single servings.

Spencer: Does the story resonate in urban areas … when you buy a loaf of this bread, it is supporting an operation that can provide bread to children and to families in rural areas. Does that sort of humanitarian message … Does that resonate with people who are of better means in the cities?

Culver: I think that’s what we’re about to test, actually. If you were to talk to our team here, I think the immediate reaction would be yes, but we’re about to test that, and we’ll see. I mean, the jury is out. I’m eternally optimistic, so I think my gut instinct would be yes, but we’ll see.

I think that if you incentivize it where, if you were to say … especially if it’s you’re doing a fair market price … so, if this loaf of bread, which you can find at a supermarket, anyone else’s is this price, and then you have The Women’s Bakery, which is comparably priced, but then there’s a social mission behind it that can be easily and quickly explained, I think that people would gravitate toward the social mission, especially if it were comparably priced. And that’s what we’re about to test

Spencer: This is kind of a naive question. Could you, for those lows, charge a premium price in order to help fund the social mission?

Culver: Yeah, that’s not a naive question. I think yes, and again, that’s what we’re testing. I think what our team sees here … they see it more as being CSR, so Corporate Social Responsibility, carrying that burden more than the individual consumer. Maybe there is a small subset of affluent Rwandese where that would work, but that’s not enough that could sustain a whole school. And the school maybe has 1,000 or more kids, so one affluent family buying one loaf of bread … that couldn’t support a whole school. So that’s what our team is looking at … can we sell it to … the big business here in the capital city, are banks. So, can we sell it to a bank and say, “Hey, if you do this, you get to market this. And then if you buy X, we can serve a school of 1,000 kids for a year.”

Spencer: Okay, all right, that makes sense.

Culver: Yeah, I think this, I don’t know if it’s unique, but this gives me a lot of hope for the longevity of The Women’s Bakery, because that’s not my idea. That’s our team’s idea. And our team is Rwandese, Pauline is Kenyan. She is East African and running this, but all of our team members and our managers here in Rwanda are Rwandese, so they know the market, they understand it, and they’re the ones driving this.

Spencer: Okay, my next question, you’re probably going to be like, “Well, that’s a question for Pauline,” but again, we’re looking at the future, and this one, it might require a crystal ball or Pauline, or both. But what do you see operationally? What do you see for the future operationally? Do you ever see creating an operation that looks very commercial, where you could grow it into one large operation? Or are you thinking about opening more small bakeries that serve individual communities?

Culver: I think that this has been the strategic question for The Women’s Bakery for at least the last five years, and right now I see it being the former. I think it would be more to have a central production facility that acts as a hub, and then you have spokes, whether they’re retail outlets or your spokes are just simply distribution vehicles that can canvas … Rwanda is small. Rwanda is a very small country. It’s hilly and the roads … I mean it’s developed so much, but the roads are few, so it can be more difficult to get into more rural areas, but not impossible.

We’ve proven that through our two more rural entities, where we have commercial bakeries in rural areas that services rural areas. But what we’re seeing, as we grow, and especially growing because of demand, is that we need to be in a place that has reliable water, that has more reliable electricity. And if that’s true, then that would mean that a central production facility makes more sense. The farthest away place for us to get is, and I don’t think this is true, but it’s six hours. That’s easier to actually get a vehicle there than to try and build a bakery and sustain a bakery there.

Spencer: Yeah, that makes sense. If we think about … a couple weeks ago, we talked about when you first got off the ground, there was no electricity, and you were working off of generators. So having a bunch of generators, or one facility that can go all day long without stopping, that makes sense that that would be more viable.

Culver: Yeah and then Pauline’s idea — I think this is a really brilliant one that’s maybe not unique, but could be singularly successful in this region in East Africa — is if you have a central production facility, and then that’s your hub, and your spokes are the distribution, we could also have the retail … she’s calling them kiosks. Those could be what we call micro franchises. So those could be women owned, and they could sell The Women’s Bakery bread for wholesale. It opens up more opportunity for women. If we were to combine multiple bakeries into one large bakery, I think some people perhaps would worry, “Well, are you replacing jobs?” No, because then the retail outlets could still be women owned or women run. It opens up a lot more possibility for how to not only reach more communities with bread, but also empower more women.

Spencer: All right, that’s a big goal, but I think it’s doable.

Culver: I do, too, and that’s something we’ll pilot in Kenya as well. This isn’t to exclude Rwanda, it’s something that we want to try in Rwanda. But franchising is new to Rwanda, whereas franchising in Kenya is known. So, I think it would be an easier adoption rate in Kenya.

Spencer: Okay, I know that you are such an idea machine, like you are a non-stop idea machine. I’ve had so many conversations with you where you’re like, “Oh my god, maybe we could do that.” So that’s really big picture, and I have no doubt that you have thought about this many times over. But is there any thought given to what happens after Kenya? So, geographically, where do you go?

Culver: Yeah, East Africa is a large region, depending on who you speak to. It’s between seven and nine countries. So that’s a lot of the opportunity. And again, because we were invited into Kenya through a local government entity, I think government adoption just adds to the viability of expansion. Growth in the region is very much there. And then the other idea … this is not mine, this is Pauline’s and I think this is brilliant. I think this shows the lifespan of The Women’s Bakery where we can come full circle. We start by recruiting women and training them, right? Vocational training. They earn an accredited certificate; they earn gainful employment; they run this bakery.

But then Pauline’s idea is that we build Africa’s — whether it’s East Africa — premier training center, a bakery training center, where people can go through professional and technical baking and come out with that certificate, and then we help. Whether it’s working at The Women’s Bakery, it’s a pipeline for our bakeries, or whether it’s a pipeline for other companies within the baking industry, be it hotels, restaurants, what have you, it could be a hub for, certainly East Africa, but perhaps beyond East Africa, to set people up for success. People being individuals, women in particular, but then also companies. I think that’s a really nice idea that, to me, feels like we’re coming full circle.

Spencer: Yeah, and then you’re creating a labor force for other companies

Culver: And creating access to opportunity for women, right? Because this is something that many women may not have access to, and so if we could create access to that, that would be wonderful.

Spencer: That’s what I was just thinking. It takes women’s empowerment to another level altogether that then they have so many opportunities. I’m envisioning a woman who gets professional experience and education working for The Women’s Bakery so that she has an income to put her children through school. Well, then she has an opportunity to maybe work in the cafeteria at her child’s school so that she can be available to take her child to school and bring her child home, and so then she has a work life balance and educating her child. That idea creates endless possibilities and the circular benefit that I was talking about is exponential that one circle creates another. It overlaps into another, until it’s just an entire web of possibilities.

Culver: Yeah, that’s exactly how we see it, where you’re just creating a myriad of opportunities along a lot of different spectrums. Not just for women and the individual woman, but also companies and the baking industry as a whole on the continent. I think that that could be pretty darn powerful.

Spencer: Yes, ma’am, it can. This leads me to … we’re getting to the end of our time together, and I have kind of a big question that I want to ask you. The purpose of this podcast is to really look at innovation through the eyes of an individual who does it in a unique way and you’ve really built something here.

I want you to take a second and just reflect on this journey and what you built, starting at that first little Dutch oven over the fire, and what the possibilities are, and what this could become and how far reaching the benefits are. Can you believe it?

Culver: No. I was just talking about that tonight, actually. No, this has exceeded my wildest dreams, and so I do get excited about the future possibilities, because if we have survived this long through so much, dare I say, chaos, and all the obstacles that we’ve had to overcome, I do think that there is success for us in the future.

And when I say success, the way I define that is people. How many women have access to opportunities that they would otherwise not have access to? Because here at The Women’s Bakery, we believe that all women have inherent power. I think that when we say we empower women, it’s actually a misnomer. We don’t have a better word for that in English, but what I think is a more correct way of describing what we do at The Women’s Bakery is we actually create access for women to tap into their own inherent power, and then they build up their confidence, and therefore their agency to change their own lives and to change the lives of those around them, be it their families or their communities.

So, I think that alone, that ripple effect is worth everything. Then if you zoom out and you see the possibility, not just with the bakeries and feeding all the kids, but then if you go bigger than that, whether it’s bakeries all over East Africa, whether it’s a training center, that ripple effect could, I mean, it could be global. Africa could become the premier baking epicenter, right? And that’s pretty neat. I just think it’s amazing.

Spencer: I know that you don’t like taking credit for that, and that I do understand now, after having these conversations, that you are not a baker. However, you are a visionary. When the time comes that you are not directly involved with The Women’s Bakery, and you have passed on the reins to maybe Pauline, or whomever it might be … But when you are no longer directly part of it, what do you want the story about you to be? What do you want them to say about you?

Culver: Oh, boy.

Spencer: I’m going to end on a really uncomfortable question. And I know you don’t want to talk about yourself, and I know you don’t like taking credit. I love the smile on your face right now. But why I’m asking is it’s for the people who are listening to be able to think about what they want their story to be and what they contribute to their businesses or their communities. It’s important that we talk about this, and we recognize this, so that we inspire the next generation of our industry to do these types of things.

So, what do you want people to say about you?

Culver: Oh, I think off the top of my head … because I don’t want it to be about me, that’s not why I did this. So, I think that off the top of my head, I think the word that comes to mind is “possibility.” For people to see what can be possible, and if I could, in a small way, represent what could be possible, that is what I would hope for.

Spencer: Okay, and you know what I might say, “It wasn’t about why Markey did it, just about what she did, and she never stopped.” I think that that is one big thing that I’m taking away from these five weeks together is, when you feel the good happening, you have to just hold on to that good as tight as you can to bring it to fruition and never give up.

Culver: Yeah, exactly. Never give up. I was going to say indefatigable. Isn’t that a word — indefatigable? And yeah, actually, one of my mantras is to never give up. So personally, that’s true for me, and I think that there are certainly times when it’s appropriate to let go, and so we need to recognize when that is. But for me, personally, never giving up is important, and that’s why I … and I don’t always do this. This isn’t to suggest that I do this always, but this is why I try to frame failure as: If you fail, at least you’re falling forward, because when you get back up, you’re one step closer. So, for me, never giving up is important, especially if you believe in it. If you don’t, then maybe it’s time to let it go or to step away. But if you believe in it, never giving up is important.

Spencer: I think that that really sums this journey up and I think it’s really great advice for anyone, whether they’re trying to change the world or they’re just trying to start a business and trying to, you know, get their grandmother’s scones onto tables for people to enjoy and feel good and to have a little moment of happiness. And that’s really what bakers do. That’s what we do. And I know that you choose not to consider yourself a baker because you do that out of reverence, but I will say you have the heart of a baker.

Culver: Oh, thanks, Joanie, I appreciate it. That means a lot.

Spencer: That brings us to the end of this season of Troubleshooting Innovation and Markey, I just want to say thank you for taking five weeks with me and sharing your story on a deeper level than I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve known you for years. My hope is that everyone really got something out of this. And I just want to say thank you for your love of bread and for wanting to make that on your own and just that one little act of loving bread and wanting to have some bread to put the mayonnaise on was the match that lit a fuse that is changing lives, and maybe even, you know, on some level, saving lives. I just want to say thank you for that, and thank you for never giving up, and thank you for all that you’re doing for women and for communities in East Africa and for the industry, and thank you for sharing with the US baking industry what is possible when you don’t give up. Thank you.

Culver: Thank you, Joanie. That’s high praise. It’s been an honor. I’m grateful that you all find this a worthy story to cover, and so thank you for highlighting The Women’s Bakery and our work.

Welcome to Season 13 of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, is spending this season with Markey Culver, CEO of The Women’s Bakery, a social enterprise bakery in East Africa. They’re discovering the challenges and rewards that come with creating change through baking. Sponsored by Middleby Bakery Group.

In our fourth episode, Markey talks about how The Women’s Bakery has gone from empowering women to feeding kids with its One Bread Project.

Learn more about this season here, and tune into Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple or Spotify.

Joanie Spencer: Hi Markey, welcome back.

Markey Culver: Hi Joanie, nice to be here.

Spencer: So, this month has been so enlightening, and I’ve learned so much about your story that I didn’t already know. Just when I thought I knew everything, I’m learning more. And this next phase is the One Bread Program. We’ve kind of gone chronologically through The Women’s Bakery’s story and how it all started with that one loaf of bread that you made to go with your salad. Then last week, we ended with a very interesting stat: When you started the One Bread Program by providing bread to children through schools, you started with feeding 400, and you have now gone to feeding 24,000 children.

Culver: A day.

Spencer: A day! I believe you have achieved commercial bakery status.

Culver: Woo hoo!

Spencer: And you are changing the world, baby. So let’s talk about this. You said that Pauline, your COO, was a big driver because she recognized that you could feed children by providing bread to school. That’s what she recognized. Is that, right? Am I remembering that correctly?

Culver: Yeah, it’s under her leadership that the One Bread Project has grown as much as it has.

Spencer: Okay, let’s talk about how it started. How, how did Pauline sort of broach this?

Culver: Actually, Pauline came into this, Pauline began her tenure with The Women’s Bakery in 2021.

The One Bread Project, again, fits and starts. That’s been kind of the theme for the early days of The Women’s Bakery. But the One Bread Project formally started, I think, in 2019 with just one school. And I will be honest with you, I recently learned that it was an initiative of our bakers at one of our bakeries. Because when I was first starting the several iterations of The Women’s Bakery — or what became The Women’s Bakery — I always had an eye toward feeding kids but had never formalized it. We did start it at another, a different bakery where we were serving school, again, free bread in the really early days, and it was like 200 kids, but it stopped. It petered out. It didn’t really take off. So in 2019 something happened where it really did take off. So what I understand — and I was told this — I think that that’s actually a really important piece here, is that this is not all top down; like, I don’t drive everything, right?

I was informed how the One Bread Project started. And I thought, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t know that! I guess I should know that!’ So, what I was told was that it was our, one of our more rural bakeries, which is the Gicumbi bakery; it’s in the northern part of Rwanda. The women bakers there said — or, you know, came to the then leadership — and said, ‘Hey, our kids are going to school. We know they’re hungry, so can we start serving that school?’ That’s at least what I understand. And so the One Bread Project was formalized, I think, that way. And I believe it started where the bread was simply free.

And so I think that that’s why I really attribute the growth — the tremendous, and dare I say, exponential growth — of the One Bread Project to Pauline’s leadership. Because it was under her leadership that it really took off, and that she actually was able to do it in a way where we balanced free bread with paid bread, with schools or parents that were paying for bread. And that was her initiative, and she succeeded in that initiative.

When she came in to The Women’s Bakery in 2021, I can’t remember exactly how many children we were feeding. I think the weight was something like 90-10: where 90% of the kids we were serving, it was free bread, and 10% the schools, or parents or whomever were paying. And Pauline’s objective was to balance it out, to say, like, can we do like 70-30? What makes sense? Because when she came on, she was tasked with getting the bakeries profitable. So, she was hired as the director of operations, and her objective was, ‘Okay, how do we bring these three bakeries in Rwanda to true profitability so we can sustain these operations and then go build another bakery and replicate the model?’ So, her pushback then was, ‘Okay, I can do that, but then we have to stop feeding these kids for free.’ And so then that became a bit of a dilemma because neither of us, she saw the value of that, and she experienced the value. As a child, she grew up with a similar program. Actually, in Kenya, she is Kenyan, where she was the recipient of milk or bread or something in school and found it valuable, and so wanted to have something like that be available for kids now. So, she is the one who came up with the paying scale idea. She is the one who really pushed for schools to stair-step into paying, and I’m happy to report that now, even with the growth — so, going from 400 kids served a day in 2019 to over 24,000 kids being served a day today — Pauline has gotten us pretty close to like 60-40. Like 60% of the bread is free, but 40% are paying. So, we’re actually generating real revenue from schools. And now, the market that we see, or that she sees in Rwanda, for where we can actually start generating real revenue, and like building up that revenue, getting us closer to that profitability horizon is in schools — is in paying schools.

And then it was also Pauline’s idea to approach private schools. So, if we get private schools and they pay full pay, it allows us to subsidize, to better subsidize, schools that can’t. And so then just that’s when our numbers skyrocketed.

Spencer: So, do the schools pay for the bread, and then they offer it to the children for free? Or do the families buy it from the school?

Culver: That may be the makeup at some of the schools, but I think what it is, is that maybe parents contribute a little bit initially, like up front, and then school is able to say, ‘Okay, for the entire school year, 180 days, your child will get a fortified piece of bread every day.’

Spencer: I think I’ve heard you talk about this before. I may be wrong. But when a child is able to eat at school, the child is then more successful in school. And I believe that there are studies like, readily available in general about that, like, that’s a pretty well-known fact. But have you seen this cause-and-effect in the schools who are participating in the One Bread program?

Culver: Yes, we have. So, we’ve been tracking since — I think actually, maybe it was, maybe it was 2020 — we got our first grant in 2020, I think, for the One Bread Project. And then, yes, we conduct a survey.

So, this was something that actually was difficult for us to figure out how to do. because how do you track a child’s nutrition — and the improvement in nutrition? I learned that that was really, you could only track that through blood. Well, we’re a bakery. We’re not going to start drawing blood from kids like, I’m not going to do that. So we had to do like, a more qualitative evaluation. So we created a survey with multiple questions that we conducted at participating schools. Most of those schools were schools that received either free or heavily subsidized breads from the Women’s Bakery. And the questions, when I say qualitative, some were quantitative because it was like, ‘What we saw, and this was something we weren’t anticipating.’ The quantitative part was how much the attendance of a school changed and how dramatically. So, for example —and we have testimonies from principals saying this — where parents would learn that this school in this community is serving Women’s Bakery bread every day, and they would move their kids out of the school that they’re currently going to to put them into a school where there was Women’s Bakery bread. So, suddenly, a school that maybe had like their attendance was 500 kids ballooned into 1,000. And that’s also what made it difficult for us to keep up with it from a cost standpoint because we’d sign a contract with school, not anticipating that the attendance would increase so much, and it doubled, right? And so suddenly you have to double what you’re providing. So, yes.

Spencer: That answered, like the quantitative, and then…

Culver: Oh yeah. So that one was a little harder for us to track, to be honest. We do have really good data from the last year, like this last year, but that one was a little bit more difficult to track. And I don’t know exactly why. I don’t know if it’s like a human error on our standpoint or what, but I think that some of it had to do with attendance. If kids are coming mid year, are they performing better than they did at the start of the year? That’s just N/A, like not applicable. So, we didn’t really have that data. But for the most part, what we’ve seen is yes, that like, attendance not only increases, but then kids don’t drop out of school. Dropouts are usually pretty high, and so bread is keeping them in school. And then yes, the teachers report that students are performing better in school.

So we’re trying to now make our survey a little bit more sophisticated to get actual numbers. Like, how much better are they doing in school? Like, how how many tests have they passed? Are they able to sit for a national exam and pass it? I think that because this program has grown so quickly, we’re still learning what data points are important to keep track of. But yes, in short, kids are going to, staying in, and performing better at school.

Spencer: So then, from your perspective, just in in your lay opinion — you’re not an economist, you’re not a politician — but can you connect the dots, like, what happens to a population that has more educated people, and the people who are educated become better educated? What happens to a community when education is increased?

Culver: Autonomy and development! Yes, exactly that is yes. Honestly, if you were to distill everything that The Women’s Bakery is doing. I think that that is the ultimate goal. It’s like agency, it’s self actualization. And so we do that for women. And I think the byproduct here through bread is, is the children and the futures of families that can also happen. So yes, we absolutely see that. And I will say — and this gives me both hope and pride in The Women’s Bakery — is that I think that the One Bread Project and our proof of concept with this is starting to pay off. Because not only are more schools approaching us, not only are more schools paying for bread in Rwanda, but now we’re attracting people outside of Rwanda for the replication of this model, which would be amazing.

Spencer: And I mean, it just seems like it would feed economic development.

Culver: Oh, yeah, definitely. So Melinda French Gates, if you’re listening, or MacKenzie Scott: Yes, Joanie is correct. And yes, I accept. And I do see that as being a huge pathway to success because you’re talking about jobs like gainful employment for women. For me — and this is the ultimate vision of The Women’s Bakery — it’s redefining and reimagining business as it could be.

And so, this is business by and for women, and it’s working consciously for people, not exploitively against them. And so in this case, it would be kids, but then the future of those kids. So yeah, I see that as being amazing. And then I think that’s going forward, that’s looking at the future. And then if you go all the way back, or if you’re looking at this along the value chain, then how can you do that, also with all the raw materials, right? So, like, if you’re going to balloon and have this amazing school — and it’s not a feeding program, it’s a snack program — Pauline is dreaming right now and will be working with professional, technical bakers soon to actually make it more of a meal. How to put more hearty substance, whether it’s like a filling in bread or something to actually make it a meal. But right now, it’s just snack. I think that’s important to say. But like, all the way along the value chain, if you start with farming, like growing the wheat, milling the wheat, distributing the wheat, or fortifying the wheats, it just opens up a world of possibility, and I think an ecosystem of opportunity for the region.

Spencer: Are there specific parameters that define, like, are there defining factors for a meal program vs. a snack program?

Culver: Probably. Sorry, I don’t know. I think that for me, that’s me. I’m the one saying that because, like, I really want to feed kids and heartily. And so I think what we’re doing right now is we’re filling a gap, but it’s not all the way. Like, so, I think a piece of bread can be, really, can be an excellent source of food, yes, but it’s not a meal. And so then our next phase with the One Bread Project is, ‘Okay, great. How do we make it a meal?’ And the meal being like, ‘Okay, you need protein, you need vegetables and you need a grain.’ The complete meal.

Spencer: I mean, I think that this is, like a small but incredibly significant step, because seems like I call back on what you said every episode. I call back on what you said in the first episode that culturally in Rwanda, people ate one meal a day.

Culver: In the rural parts, yes.

Spencer: Right. In rural East Africa. And then here comes this suburban, Midwestern American woman who was like, ‘But I need a snack. Like, but I have lunch.’ And it started this effect of now snacks — like, one snack — supplementing in a day is for many schools becoming the norm. So, what an incredible impact on a culture.

Culver: Yeah. It could be really great. Yeah. I’m pretty excited about this. I think that the potential, especially if we can do it in a way that truly is sustainable — whether it’s working with governments or like local or national, or partnering with larger foundations — I think that this has the potential to really be shifting. Like it could shift a lot of stuff in a positive direction because it would encourage families to send their kids to school, kids to stay in school, kids to do better in school.

If we got — we as The Women’s Bakery — if we were to get bigger contracts like that, it would allow us to employ more women, like train and employ more women. There’s just, there’s a ripple effect that could be pretty large here.

Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s funny because it’s, it’s circular, and then it also ripples out. The more that circle is sustained, the bigger the ripple it creates.

Culver: Exactly.

Spencer: That’s amazing. Okay, so how does working with governments come into play? Do you, is this something new, or have you just been working directly with schools, and now you’re having conversations from a more legislative perspective?

Culver: Yes. In short, yes. I think that in Rwanda, we did. We tried to approach the — it’s called the Ministry of Education — last year about adopting this nationally. And while I do think that there’s potential for that, I think that we’re not quite there yet. According to the Ministry of Health, we need a large NGO, like a non-governmental organization’s backing, and their choice would be the World Food Program.

So, we went to the World Food Program, and they’re right now their focus area wouldn’t be exactly what we’re doing. They’re focusing in other areas globally, where they see the need being a little bit greater. But I do think that at least we know the pathway, and I think that the door could be open.

So yes, right now we’re working directly with schools in Rwanda, but we have been approached by local governments from other countries in the region, in East Africa. So I do think that if we have the proof of concept in Rwanda, and so then if we’re able to replicate, like pilot that, and replicate successfully that proof of concept in another country, then that could just be the momentum we need to open up a lot more doors. I think it’s difficult to work in a country anywhere if you don’t have government backing, but specifically in East Africa. So it is something we would certainly need.

Spencer: Right. That makes sense to me. So, okay, so from a business standpoint, proof of concept has been achieved, and you have the potential to replicate it. But how does One Bread fit into the business? So I guess what percentage of the business is One Bread, and who are your other customers?

Culver: What percent of our revenue is One Bread, I think is your question. I think it’s a really good one, because up until two days ago — I wish Pauline were on this call with me — because up until two days ago, I would say, ‘Well, it’s probably not, it’s probably not a driving factor in our revenue generation.’ But it is, actually, and it could be pretty massive. So I think that in Rwanda, right now, what Pauline is projecting for 2025, the revenue breakdown for One Bread paying schools would probably be close to 40% of our — maybe 50, even — like, overall revenue, which is significant. And I think she’s driving it to be even more because, again, she’s seeing that the market could be in private schools.

So, perhaps some listeners are confused right now because obviously we work in more rural areas, and so don’t we want to work with kids who are poor or maybe don’t have access to this? The short answer is yes, absolutely, and we’re looking for ways to do that sustainably. And so it’s not always through donations — or if it is through donations, how do we supplement it with something here that’s market-based — which would be private schools.

Spencer: Am I correct in thinking like that is the function of social enterprise, that you find areas of profitability to support the social impact?

Culver: Yes.

Spencer: So that you’re profitable, staying open, keeping the lights on — when there’s electricity — and then being able to provide affordable bread to those who can’t afford it.

Culver: Yes, I think absolutely. And social enterprise is still such a nascent like subset of business that there are a lot of definitions, but I think that’s an excellent one. Pauline describes it as being something that fills the gaps. So if you’ve got, like, if you’re looking at this as if you’re looking at a P and L, all the way down, you’ve got a gap. You’ve got a net negative or net loss, then that’s where the charity piece, the social piece, comes in, if you’re just looking at it from a pure business standpoint.

And then for me, I’m looking at it as you’re using a business model to achieve social good. So we’re like, empowering women. We’re feeding a bunch of kids using what will eventually be a self sustaining, i.e., profitable model.

Spencer: And you know, whenever you say fill the gaps — you’ve said it a few times over the past few weeks — and it makes me think of this concept of how the world is. So if you put it on an axis, and the horizontal axis is how the world is, and the vertical axis is how the world should be, so that it’s like this, we want to close the gap so that the world as it is is closer to how the world should be. And that, for me, is the social part.

Culver: Yeah, absolutely yes.

Spencer: So the horizontal axis is more flat and a little bit lower. How the world should be is more at a 45 or 60 or 75 degree angle. And we want to bring that access the how it is up, and get how it should be closer to how it is. And I think you guys are doing that.

Culver: That’s what we’re setting out to do. And that’s, that’s what I mean when I say reimagine. And so, I’m like, my medium is business. But like, so when I say reimagine business, it’s because I see business as a medium or tool to achieve positive, lasting social impact or social good. Like, if you don’t like the word impact, fine. But like great social good, and then it’s up to you how you define social good. And for us, it’s women and kids.

Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. So then, okay, so talk to me about the operational perspective of how One Bread fits into the business. Because every week I am just simply amazed at how The Women’s Bakery achieves as much as it does with so few resources as a semi automated bakery.

So, how are you making bread for other customers and for marketplaces while also feeding 24,000 children a day? How does that work operationally?

Culver: Yeah, that’s Pauline’s domain, which I’m so glad you asked it, because that is why I’m here in Rwanda. Because I also have that question, Joanie! I’m, I’m utterly flabbergasted every time I’m on a Zoom call because I work internationally; I live in the US, and I work abroad, and so my touch point is usually via Zoom and I’m often just utterly amazed at what we’re able to achieve, and I can’t wait to see it.

I just can’t wait. I think it’s in shifts. But I also would like to see I’d like to physically follow from start to finish. I want to see how the bread is made. I want to get into one of our little, rickety, hard bodies which delivers the bread, and I want to go to the school. So, once I’ve done that, I will report back.

Spencer: Okay, yes, definitely. And so next week we’re going to talk about the future, so that’s a perfect spot for us to wrap up, because I really wanted to take a look at the One Bread Program and what you’re achieving and how you’ve achieved it.

But next week, we’re going to talk about the future and sort of what’s kind of on the horizon and what you want to see The Women’s Bakery become. Let’s talk about some of the plans to achieve that. And so I think One Bread is a huge part of that. So I think it’s a great place to stop, and then we’re gonna pick it up next week and sort of use One Bread as a jumping off point for what the future holds for The Women’s Bakery. What do you think?

Culver: That sounds great.

Spencer: Okay, Markey, once again, thank you so much. I am just learning so much, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to you, and thanks for closing the gap.

Culver: Oh, thanks, Joanie, that was a nice way to end!

Welcome to Season 13 of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, is spending this season with Markey Culver, CEO of The Women’s Bakery, a social enterprise bakery in East Africa. They’re discovering the challenges and rewards that come with creating change through baking. Sponsored by Middleby Bakery Group.

In our third episode, Markey explores how The Women’s Bakery has remained viable in the face of seemingly insurmountable barriers. She discusses the impacts of automation, the pandemic, supply chain disruptions and more.

Learn more about this season here, and tune into Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple or Spotify.

Joanie Spencer: Hi Markey. Welcome back to week three.

Markey Culver: Hi Joanie, it’s nice to be here.

Spencer: I’m loving our conversation so far. This is such a special story to tell and it’s a long journey in a relatively short time. I think anybody who has attended a BEMA convention might be familiar with, operationally, how The Women’s Bakery has evolved, but I’m kind of excited to tell this story to our broader audience.

I’m going to start with one question that I sometimes badger you with. When we look at the timeline of The Women’s Bakery, at this point in the timeline, can we call you a baker yet?

Culver: Yes, yes, you can.

Spencer: That makes my heart happy. I’ve spent so many years hearing you say you’re not a baker, and I’m telling you: You are a baker.

Culver: Oh, wait, whoa, hold on. We are a bakery; I am not a baker.

Spencer: Darn it.

Culver: Sorry! We consider ourselves a bakery, yes, because our ladies are highly accomplished and very skilled bakers. But no, I’m not a baker. I consider myself a conductor.

Spencer: Okay, a ‘conductor.’ I like that. So, you’re the maestra; you’re the bakery maestra. I love it.

Last week we talked in depth about the lessons you learned in building the business, and those were really interesting, and some were lessons that I hadn’t been aware of, so, I really loved that. But this week, I want to dive into the lessons that you’ve learned around baking. How did you learn about the baking process and what you needed to do to support the bakery as it grew?

Culver: The reason I don’t call myself a baker is because I have never been formally trained, and while I am passionate about baking, I don’t think I would even consider myself an amateur baker. Learning the baking process was involved in many ways, mainly because of my inexperience and my lack of expertise in baking, but then I think, probably more importantly, being able to understand the local palate.

We’re in Rwanda, which is in East Africa. What does the palate want here? Then, as you and some of the listeners may know, The Women’s Bakery is a social enterprise, and yes, we build bakeries, but the bakeries are unique, not just because we train and empower women at these bakeries, but because we operate, now, commercial bakeries in more rural areas. Our expertise is servicing local communities, so predominantly rural communities, so understanding the local palate was really important for us. The trajectory that led us to where we are now with our products, which are constantly evolving … but what led us to where we are now was, “What is existing in the market? What do people like?”

I think that the only opportunity for us to do some real market research was in the capital city, which is Kigali, where, at the time when we started, there were a handful of bakeries, and the predominant product was just a simple white bread. If you said, “bread” to Rwandese people, that was what they knew; that was their only concept of bread. It was just a simple white bread. Trying to introduce products that may differ from white bread proved to be more challenging. So then, how do you become really adept at just making a simple white bread?

We had the good fortune of being connected to professional technical bakers early on and were trained in that, so we had people coming to train both me — which is hilarious — and specifically our women bakers in how to make a high quality and, I say, rich … I’m adapting my language because now our bread is very much fortified, and that’s a very real term … actual fortification in our bread. When we were first starting, I was using that word, but it was because I thought fortification was just with eggs, milk, peanut flour and how you pump this bread full of nutrients. But, as I’ve learned being in the baking industry, that’s not true fortification.

So yeah, we had professional technical bakers help us work with what raw materials were available in Rwanda or greater East Africa and create a rich white bread.

Spencer: Okay, so today, you’re referencing the bakeries. Today, November 2024, how many bakeries are there in The Women’s Bakery? How many facilities do you have?

Culver: We have three in Rwanda and one forthcoming, which is exciting.

Spencer: Okay, yes. That’s awesome. So, you truly are a commercial bakery operation now.

Culver: Yes, with a caveat. I think for many of your listeners, the commercial aspects, your lens is probably United States and European, and I think that, while we pump out a substantial amount of bread, it’s probably not at the level of commercial that many of your listeners are thinking. Our output is probably … between all three bakeries … we would probably be seen as artisanal bakeries if we were to be in the United States, because our output is probably between 30,000 and 50,000 units a day. Actually, maybe a little bit more, but I think that’s pretty small in the aspect of a commercial bakery.

Spencer: Relative to where you started, that’s a significant amount of growth.

Culver: Yes, relatively, yeah. When I was making one loaf a day and was like, “Woohoo! We can make money!”

Spencer: Isn’t it crazy?

Culver: Yeah, it’s wild.

Spencer: You know I’m a mom, and I’m always making these mom comparisons, but my son is now 14. He’s a freshman in high school. He’s driving, going to dances, playing high school sports, and so I look at him sometimes, and he’s just doing all of these adult-grade things, and I’m like, “Dude, I used to give you a bath in the kitchen sink; you were the size of my forearm, and now I’m giving you the keys to my car.” I feel like you can identify with that and that phrase, “The days are long, but the years are short.” You’ve just come so far.

Culver: Absolutely yes, while I very much hope to be a literal mother with a literal human baby, I do feel like a figurative mother with these bakeries and with The Women’s Bakery because, yes, that’s absolutely correct; I think that analogy is perfect. It seemed so big at the time when we started, and now it’s so much bigger than we could have even imagined. It depends on where we’re starting the timeline, and I think in this podcast, listeners will see that it started kind of by accident, organically in the Peace Corps, and then we started legitimately, and it failed, and then we started it again.

So, it’s been this trial and error for now … What? Almost 15 years? Not quite, but we’re getting close. I have an almost 15-year-old not-human baby.

Spencer: Oh my gosh. We are on the same path of motherhood. I like that “not-human baby,” and that’s exactly what it is.

Culver: Right? Yes, I do want a human baby, or twins or triplets, whatever, human babies as well at some point. But right now, my not-human baby has been all consuming, sometimes in a positive way, sometimes not.

Spencer: Well, that is motherhood in a nutshell. Okay, so you provided these caveats and clarified what an American or European commercial bakery might envision versus what you are. So, let’s talk about that in terms of automation. You have been able to introduce machines. Can you describe for the audience what automation looks like for a small East African bakery operation?

Culver: Yes, so I would define us as being semi-automated right now, with the future being probably still semi-automated, but in a more robust fashion than we currently are. In our three bakeries in Rwanda, we have, I think, 50-kilogram mixers, and we have a semi-manual dough divider. It’s one that you press down, and then it shapes the dough, but it’s not pumping out dough like multiple rolls a second; there’s still some manual work. Then we have a rotary oven. The reason we’re staying somewhat semi-automated … there’s two. The first and most important right now is that our mission … as you know, we have a major and a minor key to socially and economically empower women. That’s our major key. They are the most important. The minor key is to provide communities with access to high quality and nutritious breads that are affordably priced. So then, if women’s empowerment is our primary objective, but we automate everything, then we need really high volumes, because then women can work in other ways. It could be packaging, perhaps, or it could be sales, but right now, we have women bakers. With the 35 to 40 women bakers that we have in Rwanda, we don’t want to fully automate that, because that’s still their job. I think as we expand, as our volumes grow, we will become more automated. And Pauline, who is our COO, and I are looking at that, because the possibility is there; the possibility for pretty big growth and much larger volumes exists in the near future, which is exciting. The primary reason is because we want to still maintain employment opportunities for women. And then the secondary reason is because, again, it’s sort of, it’s the volume game. So, we don’t need to automate now, until we get the volumes.

Spencer: It’s very intentional … the way you’re doing it, and that makes sense. In the large bakery operations in the US, I hear a lot about … well, workforce, I think, is a whole other animal that we could get into, but it’s a very specific workforce situation in the US. The machines are trying to fill a gap here but they’re also trying to, like you said, make life easier for bakers and provide them with other opportunities. So that does make sense, that you’re trying to figure out what those other jobs and opportunities would be for the women, because they are first and foremost. I can see where automation is serving a very different need for you relative to what it is here in the US.

Culver: Yes, and we … I think this is an observation Pauline made when she first came to the US and went to a BEMA conference was all of the pain points that many bakers and bakeries experienced with the labor force, because it’s the polar opposite in East Africa. Many people are looking for jobs. The unemployment rate is quite high, so to have an opportunity like this is something that people would jump at, and women are often the ones who are overlooked. That’s why I think it’s really important to make sure that, as we grow, we’re doing it with the women in mind, since they’re at the center of everything we’re doing.

Spencer: Okay, so, at the risk of going down a rabbit hole, it kind of makes me wonder. In that first week, we talked about what being hungry looked like in Rwanda versus being hungry in the US. I feel like the same applies for labor and workforce, that it’s very much an employee’s market here in the US, and people here are like, “That’s a hard job. I don’t want to do a hard job.” A hard job there in East Africa would be a gift, almost. Is that a fair assumption or assessment?

Culver: I think it depends on how we’re defining gift. So, I think that employment, gainful employment, is an opportunity that yes, for most of those jobs it would be … I don’t know if I would call it a gift, because it’s something people certainly earn, but it would be a welcome opportunity. The number of businesses to people needing jobs is imbalanced here. There are not enough businesses to give people jobs; there are far more people. So, I think the more you can create opportunities, and obviously ethical and gainful opportunity, the better it can be for many people here.

Spencer: Okay, yeah, better choice of words to say opportunity than gift. Not gift as in handout, but like, “Wow. I really want to have a job. I really want to work, and the opportunity to work in a bakery is very welcome.”

Culver: Yeah, absolutely. The reason I’m so keen on the word earn is because our women bakers, all of our team members, but our women bakers in particular, truly have earned their job and the title that comes with being a baker. That’s why I very willingly and gleefully say that I’m not a baker, because I have a very clear example of what a baker is in our women bakers, and they have worked so hard to be where they are and to earn the skills that they have now as professional bakers.

Spencer: Okay, I have to respect that. I love that, actually.

Let’s get back to machines. What are some of the challenges that you have experienced that come with introducing machines into an operation that the business model is social enterprise where profitability and capital investments look very different than a typical for-profit operation?

Culver: I was going to start by saying, “How much time do you have?” because I’m just going through the list. But I think from the lens of a social enterprise, it’s exactly what we were just talking about. When we first introduced machines, but the semi-automated machines, particularly the moulder or the dough shaper, our women bakers rejected it and it’s because they were fearful that that machine would take their job. It took a lot of intentional explaining and showing them that it’s not going to take their job, it’s actually going to make their days easier and they’ll be able to produce more.

So, from a social enterprise standpoint, it’s how you can approach it intentionally and be able to communicate effectively that there’s no threat to anyone’s job. I think the way it differs, probably, for many commercial bakeries in other places is we don’t have electricity in a lot of places here, or when there is electricity, it’s not always reliable. Our COO Pauline has 20 years of experience in the baking industry, so she knows tons. When she came into The Women’s Bakery in the middle of 2021, she walked into the original ovens that we had, which some were hand-built with tin, and then we had made one significant purchase early on with importing equipment, but it was secondhand equipment, and it just didn’t really work. It broke. We had a triple-deck oven where we had to prop the doors open with sticks because they didn’t have any springs left. Pauline saw a real need for us to upgrade our equipment and shifted us to electric equipment, so both the semi-automated but also electric equipment.

While that was really welcome and we needed it because our volumes increased, we needed greater capacity, it also presented another challenge: Electricity. So how do you do that? And then the other challenge is … Our specialty is operating in more rural areas, and it’s hard to get to. So … roads. How do you get the equipment there? If you come from a place where equipment manufacturers exist in the country where you are there’s a lead time, but it’s nothing compared to what we went through.

When we made our first really big purchase, and again, this is under Pauline’s leadership, we ordered all of our bakery equipment from a South African equipment manufacturer named McAdams International, and it took us months because we had to send it up the Indian Ocean. Rwanda is landlocked. It’s kind of central eastern Africa. So, we had to go through Tanzania, where there’s a port, and then put all of the equipment on a giant truck and bring it 36 hours interior into Rwanda. Perhaps a much simpler way to say all of this is logistics. Logistics were challenging.

Spencer: How did you overcome the electricity situation?

Culver: Through generous people, a very dedicated team and creativity. Generous people contributed generators, so that’s backup electricity that can keep our equipment going. A dedicated team … One of our bakeries didn’t have electricity or had very spotty electricity, and when the electricity went out, the bakers would stay and when the electricity went back on, they would hustle to get everything they needed to get done as ‘done’ as they could. Then, if the electricity went out, same thing. They were just dedicated to getting that bread out. That bakery in particular is the one that serves the highest number of children a day. I just think that that’s another testament to both our team, and also who The Women’s Bakery is, that we have such a dedicated team to serving those kids. We’re not going to miss a day of serving those kids.

Spencer: That is a very literal description of the phrase ‘Hurry up and wait.’

Culver: Yes, exactly. That’s exactly right.

Spencer: Only it’s ‘Wait and hurry up.’

Culver: Yes, exactly. And pray the electricity comes back on.

Spencer: What a commitment. I think it bears repeating that, culturally, the women are responsible for their homes. In that first episode, you described that the women were baking bread with you at your place, and the children came looking for them because they were like, “It’s dinner time and we only eat one meal a day. Why aren’t you feeding us?”

Those are the kind of people that we’re talking about, that it’s not like they don’t have anything better to do. Not that anybody who works in a bakery would ever say that. We all are humans and we have lives, but there’s a lot of pressure on these women for a host of other things; they bear a lot of responsibility in their lives. That, I think, is worth highlighting and calling out … that they’re baking where the electricity could go out at any moment, and they’re willing to stay and stick around and wait for the electricity to come back on so that they can get that product out, because they are feeding children. Part of your mission is making this food accessible to the people who need it. That’s incredible and really worth shedding light on.

Culver: Yeah, it’s a testament to them and to their ethics.

Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. I think we could all learn a lesson from that, and also think twice before we say we had a really hard day at work.

Culver: Oh, I think you can always say you’ve had a really hard day at work, but yeah, there are sometimes other challenges that when you hear them, you’re like, “Okay, good. That’s a nice reminder.”

Spencer: Yes, for sure. Perspective and everything is relative. So, what about raw materials and ingredients, like flour? Do we have time to get into that?

Culver: Yeah, we do. I’m sure all the bakers listening to this are cringing because they know what’s coming. I think it’s probably most of Africa, but especially in East Africa — and this is not an exaggerated number, I learned this number through an East African Grain Council that The Women’s Bakery is now a part of — 90% of the wheat in East Africa comes from Ukraine. So, as you can imagine, that was a challenge.

To back up to when we started, the objective was always that we could source raw materials locally, or as locally as possible. The original intent here was actually for local economic growth, that you could buy from a farmer, and you could make stuff with that farmer’s produce.

While wheat is grown in East Africa, it’s not grown in quantities that are substantial enough to support the entire region. So, there is an importation of wheat here. It’s milled, so the wheat berry would be imported to a port, and then it gets delivered to whatever destination country it’s going to. In that country there’s a giant mill. The wheat is milled here into flour, and then we buy that flour. So, yes, once we started to have enough market, enough volumes, it didn’t make sense for us to try and make our own flour. For example, when I was doing quick breads in the very beginning, it was a little bit of flour and then a lot of peanut flour, and it was to make something really hardy. Again, I’m not a baker, so it wasn’t very good. We needed to go back to wheat flour.

The raw materials have been another pretty large hurdle for The Women’s Bakery since our inception, because of a lot of factors. We just heard one with Ukraine: It was just simply getting it. You simply could not get flour, and if you could, the price was double. So that strained usbecause we’re a social enterprise where we’re intentionally capping ourselves at a price to make it affordable for people, and that means we have to make it at a cost that makes sense for the bakery, and when the wheat prices skyrocketed, we no longer could do that. It was either we burden the consumer, which would be the kids, in this case, or families, with the price increase of wheat, or we absorb it, and we chose to absorb it. Is that the most sustainable choice? It is not, but we will figure out how to work around it.

Spencer: However, I will say it’s more sustainable than the alternative.

Culver: Yeah, going out of business. That’s true, and that’s how I felt, honestly, because what one of the important contextual pieces here is that the war in Ukraine, the invasion, came on the heels of . So, The Women’s Bakery had just withstood COVID, which was no small feat. We in the United States experienced COVID … I think for many people, the brunt of COVID was 2020 but in Rwanda, the brunt of COVID was actually 2021, so we were just coming out of that when boom, Ukraine gets invaded, and our wheat supplies evaporate.

 The reason I say that … that is one component, that’s the primary component. The secondary component was, “Okay, great. Then how do we hedge for this? When we do find wheat, and if it’s at a price that we find reasonable, we purchase it in bulk … where do we store it? We have no storage.”To give people an image of what our bakeries look like in Rwanda, we have taken homes, residential homes, and renovated them into commercial bakeries. We have used all of the space in that home, which is now a commercial bakery. Where do you store wheat?

Also, Rwanda, while it is high in elevation … we’re in the Great Rift Valley. It’s high in elevation. We are equatorial. It’s a tropical climate, which means it’s hot and humid. We had somebody suggest, “Oh, we’ll just get a shipping container and store all the flour in there.” That’s a great idea for somebody who either has massive volumes, and you can use a shipping container’s worth of flour in a week, or someone who has refrigeration, and we had neither. It’s been a learning process and trying to get creative with how we’re doing it.

Spencer: This is hitting me kind of hard. I mean, my next question was … I want to talk about the years 2020-2023, and Africa in general, the continent, was hit really, really hard. First by COVID and then the impact of Ukraine. Flour availability was just one. These are … I don’t even want to say ‘seemingly’ insurmountable. These are insurmountable challenges. Wow.

I mean honestly, Markey, how is The Women’s Bakery alive and thriving after being hit with these challenges? These are impossible odds. Paint a picture for me and describe what was happening with The Women’s Bakery during the pandemic.

Culver: I totally will, but let me first answer the ‘how’. The ‘how’ is through our community, and I define The Women’s Bakery’s community as being our team. All of those who are employed by The Women’s Bakery, our donors, so all of those who support The Women’s Bakery and our customers, all of those who purchase bread from us. Without all of that — that ecosystem of people — we definitely wouldn’t have made it.

I was physically in Rwanda in … was it March? Man, I think it was March 2020, I remember the president at the time saying, “Right, America is closed.” And I was like, “Uh oh. Oh, I better go.” So I was in Rwanda, and actually, all of the fear that everybody felt during COVID, I felt it, too, and so did our team. So, the fear, of course, is the health and safety of your family, of yourself, but then there was a tertiary fear here, which was food security, especially in Rwanda.

Rwanda is a small, land-locked country and about the size of Maryland but has a population of 14 million people. I think it’s now the fifth or sixth most densely populated country in the world, meaning you just don’t have the land mass to produce the food that a country with that population demands. So, there was a fear that there would be a food shortage. I remember leaving the country in March 2020 and, through the generosity of our donors and our community, The Women’s Bakery was able to purchase, I think, two or three months of dry food goods for our entire team and their families. So, if one woman had nine kids, we purchased enough for her nine children to have food for two to three months. I give that just as an example of … that’s how stark it looked in 2020.

Rwanda is just a marvelous country, and just so, so much more progressive than I think people really know, and because it’s still primarily an agrarian society, and you have communities that live predominantly rurally, Rwanda had to take very extreme measures to keep their population safe. When we think the US closed, we have no idea. Rwanda was completely shuttered. You were not allowed to physically go outside.

So, the picture of COVID in Rwanda was a very dark one. All businesses were forced to shutter. The Women’s Bakery applied to the government to be deemed an essential business so we could still operate and deliver food, but that was touch and go. We would be approved, and we would do that for one week, and then everything would shut down again and we would have to pause our operations. COVID was basically like starting and stopping. You’re just taking your foot on and off the gas pedal and then constantly monitoring to make sure that your team is safe.

At another time I can get into how we did that, but we were very intentional, and we were very comprehensive with both communication and measures to keep our team safe, and I’m very happy to report that we did successfully. Our whole team stayed safe. We were one of the few organizations that I saw that, even while operations were totally paused or closed, no person on our team, no baker, especially, lost their salary. So, even though they weren’t working, we still paid our team, and that’s why I say that this was thanks to our community. If we didn’t have dedicated people who believed in The Women’s Bakery, we definitely wouldn’t have been able to do that.

So, that was COVID. Then we start to … and that was two years for us in Rwanda. And then, as I said, we started to emerge from that. Schools reopened, and then that’s when our volume really took off. The demand just skyrocketed. Because babies have been out of school for a year and a half, by that point, they were behind. So, kids are finally going to school; the schools are wanting bread; parents are ready to start helping. If they can’t pay full for bread, they can pay something for it, and The Women’s Bakery would subsidize part of that. Then our volumes grew at the start of 2021…

Spencer: And then Ukraine.

Culver: And then, yeah, Ukraine.

Spencer: Talk about a one-two punch.

Culver: Yeah, no kidding.

Spencer: Well, I have to say, when you say, “Thanks to the generosity of donors …” I can’t have that conversation without calling out the efforts of BEMA and all of the fundraisers that they did. I remember the 2020 convention we had to do remotely, and they did a remote, virtual fundraiser, and the BEMA members stepping up for a few chairman’s dinners, following them in the convention, went back to in person and having sort of an impromptu donation auction. Just everyone raising their hands and stepping up and contributing, some donated equipment. Just like, “How can we help?” And logistically, I know it’s just hard to physically donate things, but I do feel like the BEMA members … it was really neat to be able to see that firsthand and how they helped support The Women’s Bakery. So, I definitely want to give them a shout out for that.

Culver: I’m glad you did, and I appreciate that, because that is 100% correct. BEMA, through and through, has supported The Women’s Bakery and kept us afloat and … just such a strong foundation of dedicated donors who believe in what we’re doing, who believe in the women. The way I like to phrase how it felt for The Women’s Bakery during that time, and the way the community of supporters helped us is that The Women’s Bakery, because of the community support, primarily BEMA and these donors, enabled The Women’s Bakery to throw our arms out like a protective parent and keep our whole team safe while still being able to feed these babies.

Spencer: I think I kind of gave the name of this episode an AKA: The Kindness of Strangers and Friends. And I think just BEMA members who didn’t know you personally or were otherwise unfamiliar with The Women’s Bakery heard the story and really just stepped up and kind of threw their hat in the ring to help in any way that they could.

 That was that was really joyful to see the baking industry come together in order to enable The Women’s Bakery to stay afloat, because, again, it’s just insurmountable to go through the pandemic from that position and then get hit with the war and not be able to get the wheat, and then have to absorb those extra costs so as not to impact the children and families you’re trying to feed.

Culver: Precisely, yes.

Spencer: Amazing.

Culver: I’m inspired by the kindness of all people, strangers, people I know, because it really did … ‘Empowered.’ I think that’s a much better word. It empowered The Women’s Bakery to remain resilient, and that’s how I like to define The Women’s Bakery, is that we are adaptive and resilient, but we certainly couldn’t do it alone.

Spencer: I want to ask you a question. It’s not a personal question, but I want your personal perspective, because you’re speaking on behalf of The Women’s Bakery, basically, but I want to know … it’s something that I noticed. We had so many executive Zooms and panels and things during the pandemic to really get the perspective from what baking companies were going through and what they were doing. And I noticed that all of these executives and CEOs were all talking about their people and how their people felt, and how their people were doing, and what they were doing to help their people. And I would always chime in. I mean, I’m always the one, “I have a question!” And then I’m going to make everyone uncomfortable with my questions. But I was like, “What about you?” And no one would answer.

It took me until 2022, and I interviewed Joe Kenner — who is the president and CEO of Grayston Bakery, which is a certified B Corp in New York that pioneered open hiring — and his bakery was a hot spot, like a known hot spot in New York, and just hearing him talk about it, and it was after the fact again, it was, I think, 2022 and I said, “Were you okay?” And he was like, “No, I wasn’t okay. And I would have to talk myself down just to be able to get to sleep, and then I would wake up and have to give myself a pep talk.”

So, I’m going to ask you, like you, Markey Culver, personally, it’s a dumb question to ask if you were okay. How did you get through it?

Culver: Yeah, I definitely was not okay. I was so worried. I mean, you’re worried about, again, as I said, I was worried about my family, I was worried about my own safety, but then I was just so worried about our team, and what would happen, how we would get our team, if a woman got sick, how would we get her help? It was all of these ‘what ifs’ that everybody went through. And I think that yes, of course, one of the ‘what ifs’ is, “What if we don’t survive?” or, “How the heck are we going to survive?”

So, what energized me, and what kept all of us going during this time, was just realizing that we’re in this together and what can we do in the moment right now for one another? How could we encourage you? Rwandans truly, especially in Kigali, they physically couldn’t go outside, many of them. So, it’s like, “Okay, how can we find resources for them if they’re stuck inside their homes?” Because for many people in the US, you could go out and take a walk, right? So, then what other resources existed? How can we share those resources?

So no, I was not fine, and I also don’t give up easily. There would be days that were pretty tough, but I wouldn’t wallow. You have to get up and go, because you’ve got more than just you to think about.

Spencer: Did you ever say, “It’s just too hard? It would be easier on everybody if we just stopped and did something else.”

Culver: Yeah, how many times? But no, honestly during COVID, the real honesty was, no, actually. I was so focused on keeping the team healthy and getting us through this, that no, the hard part, the thinking, “Gosh, this is so hard. Are we going to make it? Would it be easier not to?” … that thought started to flirt with me during the war in Ukraine. We were only spending money; we weren’t making any money. I had made, what felt like, promises to donors, saying, “Our bakeries are going to be profitable!” which now I’ve learned, and I won’t ever say that, at least not so definitively like I did when we started.

But I really believe, and I know we will get there. And I really believe that that’s our model as a social enterprise, that we can have a charitable mission through an enterprise machine, like a model, and that enterprise must be self-sustaining. But the horizon for that … we just need to be more … I think the word I’ve used with myself and with our team is more patient and realistic with ourselves with what that means.

Spencer: I don’t know many people that wouldn’t have given up.

Culver: So, here’s the thing: You do actually, because I think if you had an entire team depending on you and their families depending on you, you’re not going to give up, and they’re not going to give up. I’m not trying to make it sound like doomsday, but when the stakes are that high and it’s real lives, you’re going to persevere. You will push through.

Spencer: Yeah, I mean, that’s true. I guess what I’m having a hard time envisioning is just being in that situation. It’s beyond what my mind can comprehend. And so, I’m thinking here are my boundaries, and what I’m capable of overcoming, and that was beyond those boundaries. But I think you’re right. I should take that back. I think we as human beings, if we’re put in that situation, we rise to the occasion.

Culver: I agree, actually, and I have great faith in humanity for that. I saw it firsthand. So yeah, you do rise to the occasion, and we had people do that for us, and we did that for our team.

Spencer: Especially bakers. This is a good reminder of not just humanity, but the humanity of bakers, and what they do this for is feeding people, and that’s whether they have machines and naive consumers assume that machines are taking jobs, or that big food companies put profits over people … At the end of the day, I would go so far as to say it’s not true. It’s just not true. Bakers bake because they want to feed people, and it’s, you know, one of the oldest foods.

Culver: Yeah, it’s a sign that you’re feeding a lot of people, enough that you need machines.

Spencer: Yes, and that’s truly the mission. And you know, I’ve told a lot of people over the years when I hire them, “You’ll just never grocery shop the same again. You’ll never really eat with the same mindset ever again” because when you see what’s going on behind the scenes, and you get to know the people who are making the food, you see it differently, because you know what goes into it, and you kind of learn the heart and soul of that.

So, I know we were supposed to be talking about operations, and I took this in a weird turn and got a little bit sentimental.

Culver: It’s still operational. I mean, all of this has to do with operations.

Spencer: We really talked about it from the human perspective and the emotional grit that it takes to overcome this, but from an operational standpoint, strictly operational … When you look at those years, 2020 to 2023 … How has The Women’s Bakery gotten to the other side of that? And how has working with machines, getting help from donors … How did that help get you to the other side? And how has it impacted the viability of the bakery today, November 2024?

Culver: It did get us to the other side, so I’ll just start there. We made it through all of that stuff, thank goodness. Now, I think there are many reasons which we just talked about but then I think one of the important reasons, too, was just the demand that grew in Rwanda. It grew — I use this word, and I think it’s appropriate — organically. And I say that because we don’t actually have a dedicated sales or marketing team in Rwanda, that’s something … to Pauline’s … that is something that she would love. You just have to, you know, parse it out. What can we afford this year, and what can we do? But the demand grew after COVID, and it grew primarily in schools, so that launched The Women’s Bakery into the phase that we’re currently in, and I think it will be our stepping stone for where we will be.

There is a caveat there, and it’s an important one, but it’s not necessarily a defining one. So, when I say demand, I mean people wanting bread. It doesn’t necessarily mean people can buy bread. So, Rwanda, after COVID … the economy got hammered, right? Then boom, Ukraine hits. The economy gets hammered again, then inflation skyrockets. So, families are hurting. Rwanda is already one of the poorest countries in the world. So, people, families, kids needed bread, wanted bread, and many couldn’t afford it. That’s when we saw our One Bread Project, which is our fortified snack program at schools, elementary schools in Rwanda, just skyrocket.

The reason it skyrocketed again was not because of our marketing, necessarily. It was because the schools that we were serving during and immediately after COVID, the word spread, and so more parents started to come to either their principals or to The Women’s Bakery. We got more and more requests from more schools to have fortified bread served daily to that school. And we believed that it was both our ethical duty, but also our mission. It correlated nicely with our mission, that we do this, that we grow this program.

I will say, though, that I had no idea how much it would grow, because I think that our numbers in … I know that when we started this program … and when I say we, I mean this was really driven by a group of women at one bakery who saw that their kids were hungry at school, they made food, could we figure this out? Yes, we can. So, we started serving that bread at schools, and it was for free. Then, when it ballooned, what we tried to figure out was, “How do we scale this in a way where it’s either like a pay scale, ‘This is our price, but if you pay some part of this price … we can do that.’” Or how do we work schools into a contract where maybe you’re receiving free bread for the first school year, but then for the next school year, you’re paying 25% of the price of bread, the next year you’re paying 50%, etc.

So, we do have that, and I think that between word getting out about kids being fed at school, which is already kind of a growing ‘trend’ in much of East Africa, and Rwanda being among them. So, we’re getting out about kids getting bread at school, and then knowing that it could be a stair-stepped approach to paying for the bread was really attractive for a lot of schools and a lot of families. So, our numbers went from … In 2019 when we launched the program, we were serving roughly four 400 kids a day. And now, in November 2024 we’re serving over 24,000 kids a day. With the same number of babies. And this is why machines do help. Same number of women, actually, now more women, but we wouldn’t have been able to meet that volume had it not been for, yes, the generosity of donors and the magnificence of machinery.

Spencer: “Magnificence of machinery.” How have I never written that as a headline? Oh, my God, you just did my job better than me, so you could do everything! Markey, that is a perfect segue. I think it’s a perfect punctuation point for this conversation, and a perfect segue to next week, where we are going to dive into the One Bread Program.

If we look at this, we’ve been doing this sort of chronologically. So, next week, we are going to talk about what is happening with One Bread and how you have you started with a mission to empower women, and now you have this huge mission to feed children in school, and this is going to create a huge ripple effect. I really want to talk about what you’re producing for the One Bread Program, and how it evolved, and how you went from 400 to 24,000. We’re going to spend time with that next week and talk about how you got there. For this week, what a great conversation once again.

Culver: Yay.

Spencer: I love this, and I just always love talking to you.

Culver: Yes, likewise.

Spencer: Thank you for taking time while you’re in Rwanda to have this conversation with me, and I will talk to you next week.

Culver: Sounds good.

Welcome to Season 13 of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, is spending this season with Markey Culver, CEO of The Women’s Bakery, a social enterprise bakery in East Africa. They’re discovering the challenges and rewards that come with creating change through baking. Sponsored by Middleby Bakery Group.

In our second episode, Markey shares the challenges involved with building and scaling a bakery in Rwanda, the lessons learned along the way and what ROI looks like in a social enterprise.

Learn more about this season here, and tune into Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple or Spotify.

Joanie Spencer: Hi Markey, thanks so much for joining me again this week.

Markey Culver: Hi Joanie. I’m glad to be back.

Spencer: Last week was an amazing conversation, and we ended it with talking about the moment where you realized that it was a viable concept. Really, it was that first moment, the first ‘Aha!’ moment you knew it was something you couldn’t let go of. But, when you think about that moment that you said, “Okay, it’s going to cost $200 to start it, and if you can come up with the first $100, I’m going to put in the second $100” … that was just the beginning of a really long road, and it’s had a lot of curves; it’s had a lot of bumps, but it’s also been deeply rewarding.

I just want to start out, and it’s kind of a big question, but can you walk me through how the business model was developed initially?

Culver: There are several iterations of the business model, or what is now the business model. Initially, as I said, I have no idea how I came up with this, but I thought it would cost $200 to build a quote, unquote bakery. I finished my service with the Peace Corps in November of 2012 and I came back to the United States having made a promise to this group of women with whom I was baking in the rural Rwandan village. I said, “When you raise $100 let me know, and I’ll come back and help you build this bakery.”

I think, in hindsight, looking back on that, I left them in suspended animation, and probably should have just stayed in the Peace Corps and followed this through. There were several reasons I didn’t, but I do remember one. I’m sure this is probably just an excuse, but you can’t really start a business in the Peace Corps. But I also was ready … I missed my family. I was ready to come back to the United States and eat cheese. God, I couldn’t wait to eat cheese and drink bourbon.

So anyway, I came back to the United States, was here at the end of 2012, and I meant what I said. I had made a promise to these ladies, and I meant it. I just did not think that they would raise the money as quickly as they did. I got a phone call in March of 2013 saying, “Hey, we did it. Time for you to come back.” And I was like, “Oh God.” And this isn’t an insult to Rwanda, but my ‘Oh God’ is just because I was trying to find a job in the United States, trying to figure out what it was like to live back in the United States, etc. while still having this … and it’s not nagging, because that makes it sound negative, but just having this thought, having the business model for what became The Women’s Bakery germinating in my mind. So, when I got that call from the bakers, I had to announce to my family from St. Louis, MO. “Right. I’m going back to Rwanda.” And everybody’s like, “No, you’re not.”

I took some time and was trying to pitch this idea of what would become The Women’s Bakery to my family, and everyone thought I was insane, because they’re like, “You’re back. It’s fine, great. Let’s move forward.”

But the person who really grabbed onto it was my middle brother David. David said, “You know, this is really interesting. Can you tell me more about that?” And so I did, and I explained it as, “Okay, exactly what we are today. I think that this could be a way for women to earn irrevocable skills, skills that can never be taken away. It’s a way for women to earn sustainable income, and then it’s a way to feed kids. It’s not a meal, but it’s a snack. If we fortify the snack and make it really nutritious, it could just be a nutrient boost for these kiddos who don’t have a lot of access to that. And my brother David was really captivated by, particularly, that last point.

David helped me develop the business plan. I was working for an insurance company at the time in St Louis. I would do my work and then, on the side, I would be writing business plans and trying to figure out breaking points and stuff, which I didn’t understand what that was because this is pre-business school. I told the women when I got the call that David and I had come up with what we felt was a pretty solid business plan at the time. It was called The Bushoga Women’s Bakery because it was the name of the village in which I served. I said, “Okay, David, can you come with me and help me build this first bakery?” And he was like, “Nah.” And I said, “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go in Europe if you come and you build this.” So that was the deal.

Spencer: It’s a pretty good bribe.

Culver: It was; it worked. In, I think it was, June or July of 2013, David and I flew Rwanda. We went back to Bushoga, the village. I was communicating with women at this time, but it was joyous, because this was something that people were excited about. It felt really viable.

We rented a house, and for the umpteenth time, I am not a baker. I had no exposure, really, to a bakery, and so I thought, “Oh, this is great, if I just buy 80 pots and we have charcoal stoves, we can easily pump out lots of loaves of bread,” which is exactly what we did. We had charcoal stoves, and they’re small so they’re contained. I don’t know how to describe this to an audience that hasn’t experienced this, but the house was rough cement, and there were rooms. There was one larger room that we put things in. So, we had these rooms and an open area, kind of like a foyer, and that’s where we could light these charcoal stoves, and in one of the rooms, that’s where we were kneading bread. I’m sure a lot of your audience is going to be horrified hearing this, because the food code … was there a food code? Who knows?

Spencer: I mean, we’re talking about an East African village.

Culver: But still, Rwanda is militaristic about cleanliness. We really … I did my best, and the ladies were very clean. I’d read somewhere it’s good to use wood, so we made a bunch of wooden tables, and kneaded bread on wood. But was it the most sanitary? No, I thought, probably naively, I was like, “Well, whatever germs are on there, and they’ll bake off, right? It’s going into an oven.”

Spencer: That’s called the kill step.

Culver: Well, okay, perfect. See, I knew that. Right, exactly. It’s called the kill step. That’s what it’s called. I had developed with David a very rudimentary training plan, like a lesson plan with the steps. Now, we would call this production. Didn’t know that word. It’s just, “Here are the steps in making bread. Here’s the recipe for the bread. This is what you need to follow. Here’s the timing.” That’s how we got started.

It was a pretty big deal, because the house where we rented, we paid for water to be brought into the house. So, it’s a big deal. There was a buzz in the community. People were excited about the idea that we were going to be selling bread. We started probably … we made, what, 10 loaves a day, and the loaves we made in circular pots. We would roll, probably 100-gram rolls of dough and place them in a pot and bake it that way so kids could pull off a hunk of bread more easily than cutting it.

That’s what we did. We tried to sell in loaves. We learned quickly that loaves were expensive, too expensive for people to purchase in the community. So, then we started making dough balls, putting them on trays. We made the ovens. David and I had investigated like, “How do you build an oven?” There were some gentlemen in neighboring villages, and they helped us construct an oven, which now, in hindsight, is a little bit horrifying, because it was an old petrol can that we hollowed out and put metal bars in so we could put trays that we made by hand into that, and we put it in the earth. Extremely rudimentary, and I think now, with the foresight that I have, had I actually contacted someone in the baking industry, which I didn’t know existed, we would have started in a much better place than a hollowed-out petrol can in the earth and trying to bake in that.

But that’s how we started. It was a … success is probably not the right word … It was going. Going to the point where it was cute, because the rolls of bread that we were selling were affectionately called Obama bread in our village ad in the neighboring villages, because word got that there was an American making bread. At the time President Obama was our president, and therefore American, and everything was Obama. So, our bread was called Obama bread.

Spencer: That’s funny.

Culver: I know. David and I were there three months, and that’s what I thought. I was like, “Great. It’s only going to take three months. We’ll build this bakery. We’ll get women trained and set up, and then you figure it out.” That was the initial model, was that this would be a bakery that the women owned through a cooperative they worked at. They sold the bread, and they would take home the profits from the sale of the bread, and it didn’t work.

It felt nice, right? Having done this now, I’m always a little skeptical when I see people trying to build something that, one, they don’t know very much about, and two, they’re in a different country where I’m like, “Well, I’ve been there.”

Spencer: Okay, so that’s what I was going to ask you. What would you say was the biggest learning curve: starting a business in a country where you weren’t a citizen, starting a business with a product you really didn’t have much experience making or teaching and training women, especially in that type of culture where women didn’t typically start businesses.

Culver: I mean, it’s the trifecta; it’s all of that. ‘Yes’ is my answer. I think that, now being where I am, I think you need one aspect of crazy and then another aspect of knowledge to be able to get started. But I think that my crazy … and this is where I caution people, “Is it crazy good or is it like a crazy ego, where you think you can actually get this done?” Right? Not to say that sometimes it can’t be both, and I’m sure that I had both of those at some point, but I do think that it was particularly challenging.

Yes, I felt that I knew Rwanda because I had lived there for over two years, but I really didn’t, and I certainly didn’t know, from a business standpoint how to incorporate a business, what the food code laws are — because they do exist — how to employ people, what the regulations are around that. There was a lot of ego and naivete going into this, thinking I know how to do this because I Googled it.

So yes, I think that was challenging. Then the other aspects, the cultural aspect, was challenging, too, because from an American standpoint, time is not elastic, right? If you say, “Hey, our meeting starts at 1 p.m., I’m going to show up at 12:50 p.m.”, and that’s normal in the US. Promptness and being very timely. From my experience starting the first bakery in Rwanda, it was not that way. Time is more elastic and it’s not because people are lazy. It’s because they’ve got a lot of stuff that they’re doing; they’ve got a lot that they’re responsible for.

So, we started, I think, with 10 or 12 women in Bushoga, and we would say, “Right, you need to come at 8 a.m.” and some women would show up at 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. But again, it’s not because they’re lazy or because they don’t know what time it is. It’s because they have a lot of other responsibilities. So, we’re just adding one more responsibility to this and expecting them to prioritize that over their other responsibilities. That is just straight up naivete.

From a product standpoint, I created … this is hilarious. We have a team member now … Well, we have many team members who are professional bakers but we have one in the United States who is going through a recipe book that I created early on, and she sent me a message saying, “Hey, is it okay if I just tweak this? Because I tried it, and I think it would be better this way.” And I was like, “Oh, it’s all garbage. I’m not a baker. Please, please update it. God, if somebody else is trying to follow this, please update it and make it something palatable.”

That’s why I say it’s the trifecta. It was a lot of naivete and bold optimism. I think that can get you in trouble sometimes, and then in other times, you can succeed. ‘Succeed’ might be a strong word. You can get to the next step.

Spencer: I mean, you could successfully get to the next step. I think succeeding … in order to have overall success, there has to be incremental wins along the way.

Culver: Yeah, exactly.

Spencer: So, what was the learning curve like for them? I’m thinking about it a different way than I initially intended, because I was thinking just of making bread without you there and making it their own, but culturally, when they live in an environment where time is elastic, that is diametrically opposed to the process of baking.

Culver: The regimented schedule of baking, right? Exactly.

Spencer: Right. So, what was that learning curve like for them?

Culver: For the women, I think it was quite steep, because, again, these women have so many other responsibilities outside of just trying to bake. My assumption was, “Oh, well, we will do this all day, five days a week, and this is your job. Now, this is a job, and it is a job for which you will be paid. Therefore, you need to be here eight hours a day.” That was a steep learning curve for them, too, not because they don’t know what work is. It’s like they have so much work. Which work takes precedence right now?

I found a person who baked in a town several hours away. So, I called in a professional baker, who is Rwandan, and he came to help with some of the training. I think there was a real … in addition to the learning curve, which was mainly around responsibility and time … and by responsibility, I mean they’re juggling so many different responsibilities. The learning curve, I think, was still exciting because they were making a product that they really wanted to make, and learn how to improve, and then learn how to sell.

I think that the other kind of steep learning curve for all of us was actually sales, trying to figure out, “Okay, how do we sell this?” That one … I mean, we’re still learning that in East Africa. We’re still learning what the best practices are, what the best methods are. But in a rural Rwandan village, how does one do that? Especially in Rwanda, which is so clean, and they value cleanliness so much, so you can’t just walk out holding a loaf of bread saying, “Hey, who wants to buy this loaf of bread?” And there’s no packaging. How does one package … just stuck it in a paper bag and said, “Do you want to try this? Also pay me money.” So that was a steep learning curve.

Then the steepest learning curve, and ultimately, what led to or was a primary factor in the demise of this original bakery was the rainy season. If we sell bread on foot, which is what we did, how do you do that when it rains? How do you protect bread? If the bread is in paper bags, which it was, and typically when it rains, that’s when people go inside. And then, if they’re inside, they can’t do very much, so they rest. They’ll either take a nap or, you know, whatever. It’s rest time.

That was something that everybody wanted to do, including the women bakers. Not only could we not physically go out and sell because of the rain, they too, wanted to go home and rest. So, if you’re expecting to sell 20 loaves of bread a day, but you sell zero, and you do that for a whole month of the rainy season, then you have no revenue. And how do you buy raw materials? So, that was the steepest learning curve, I think for all of us.

Spencer: That’s a hard one. How did you overcome that?

Culver: We didn’t. That’s why the bakery failed. We didn’t overcome that one.

Spencer: So, then what happened?

Culver: That original bakery failed, and it failed pretty quickly after it launched, and it was nothing wrong. It was just that we hadn’t designed it in a way that it would work for the women and for the village. I felt that I didn’t understand enough about business, that I had failed, actually, the women and I had failed the business because I wasn’t able … we would call it a lumpy season, right? Where sometimes you have revenue and other times you don’t. So, it creates a lumpy look if you were to chart it out, and I didn’t know that.

When you have working capital, that working capital comes from your revenue, that’s how you buy your raw materials. Well, when you don’t have that, how are you going to buy raw material? So, the women got spooked, and they came and because it was a cooperative, because this is something we all started communally, the women were like, “Well, this is going to fail, and I want my pot back.” So, they would come and take their pot. And I don’t blame them, honestly.

So yeah, the first bakery did not succeed, and there are many reasons for that. And I think that, when I look back on that, a lot of it was just me, as I didn’t know enough, and therefore I couldn’t have set this bakery, this company and the women up for success in the way that it would have lasted.

So, the first bakery closed, and I was pretty upset, and so were the women. What they ended up doing … We had a handful of women who still baked from home and would try and sell it from home, and there might still be one woman still doing that, but that original bakery in those 10 or 12 women … that does not exist anymore. That’s what I mean by failing forward. Because when that failed, it was devastating, and I couldn’t let go of the idea, and nor could my brother, because my brother had seen it work.

It was funny, too, because when he was there, I remember some gentlemen, some Rwandan gentlemen, coming into the bakery to talk to David, my brother, and they were asking for him to start a men’s bakery. They were like, “Excellent. Now that you’re here, it is time for you to start a men’s bakery, because we’re ready.” And it was so sweet, too, because David was like, “I’m so flattered. Thank you so much, but I want to stick with the women.” I really think that that was neat. And it was, obviously, very heartening for both, like, both men and the women in that village,

Anyway, so yes, that failed. It was sad, and then you have to pick up the pieces. And I had to decide whether or not I wanted to pick up the pieces. It was something I still really believed in. But in a way I felt like I hadn’t really restarted my life. It’s not to suggest that my life stopped during the Peace Corps, but I had already made a decision in the Peace Corps that I wasn’t going to live in Rwanda forever. I did want to go back to the United States, and I thought maybe I would like to go into banking with an ‘N’.

Spencer: You still have the ‘N’ on your radar?

Culver: Yes, exactly, because I thought that’s how I could do the most good. I thought … basically a social venture capital firm. That’s what I wanted to do. And for all intents and purposes, that’s what The Women’s Bakery is today, and that’s what I wanted to do. I thought, “Great, if I can channel money this way and get people who actually know what they’re doing and support them, then that’s the best of all worlds.”

So, I came back to the United States and couldn’t let go of this idea, neither could David. I just kept plugging away at the business model. Then I called a good friend of mine in the Peace Corps who had a very similar story to mine. She also started baking bread, a different type of bread, in her village. She was selling it also at a market. So, she had experience with this as well.

To make a very long story short, what ended up happening is I had a donor approach me who had heard about The Bushoga Women’s Bakery, and she said, “I really want you to start something like this again.” And I said, “Oh, no, thank you.” And she was like, “No, that’s the incorrect answer.” She wrote me a check for the startup capital to resurrect The Bushoga Women’s Bakery, which we then called The Rwanda Women’s Bakery. I called my friend from the Peace Corps, and I said, “Hey, I think this is viable. Would you like to work with me?” And she said yes.

That was the first iteration of The Rwanda Women’s Bakery, which was in 2014. I can go through that model too, but this is what I’m talking about. It’s just so many iterations of some successes and then also failures.

Spencer: Okay, I want to call something out, because you said, and I agree with you wholeheartedly, when you’re doing something like this, you have to have the right combination of like, experience and crazy, and it has to be the right type of crazy. And I get what you’re saying. There’s some crazy that comes from ego, like, “I can do this,” and crazy that comes from passion, like, “No matter what it takes, I know I believe in this.” I think when you fail, how you recover from that, the proportion of passion to ego is a huge determining factor in if you fall forward, or if you fall back.

Culver: I think that’s accurate. I don’t know if it’s passion or belief, because I think for me, the crazy was like, “No, I genuinely believe that this can work. I don’t know exactly how, but I genuinely believe that this can work.” ‘This’ being — and now I’m much more articulate about it, because I have done it for so long — I believe that we can build a women-powered bakery that can sell bread to a local community and be profitable and can sustain itself from that.

I genuinely believe that we can socially and economically empower women so there are wraparound services with this as well, but women have access to education and vocational training, women have earned their income like gainful employment, and then women are skillfully making and selling bread to the local community in a way that sustains that bakery, and that was something I’ve never been able to let go of. So, I think as much as I would like to say there was no ego in that, I’m sure there was, but the crazy there, maybe that’s passion, but it was more for me belief, like I truly believe that something like this could work.

Spencer: You are the first person who taught me the term ‘social enterprise’, and then another Baker in St. Louis said it. I was on a tour, and I heard it, and I was like, “I know someone! I know someone!” You coined that term for me. I know you didn’t invent it, but I learned what social enterprise means by learning about The Women’s Bakery.

Also, when you say belief — everything that you’ve been saying since we started the conversation last week — it’s a calling. Hearing you talk is just like … you hear about people having a calling, and this is very clearly … you were called to do this, and every time you tried to chase something that wasn’t this, you inevitably found your way back to it by your choice or someone else’s.

Culver: Yes, yes, that is accurate.100 percent.

Spencer: So, you just described social enterprise for me. How did it come together as a social enterprise when you re-started The Rwanda Women’s Bakery? And then as that model shifted … How did you keep that model of social enterprise as it shifted to the next iteration?

Culver: Yeah, I think there’s still an evolution right now, even with The Women’s Bakery and social enterprise. The way I’ll say I define social enterprise is that you have a charitable mission and a for-profit vehicle. Our charitable mission is we create access to social and economic empowerment opportunities for women, and we create access to nutritious bread that’s affordable for the community. The way that we drive that mission is through the sale of bread.

It’s interesting because our COO Pauline actually has a slightly different definition of social enterprise, and it’s one that I really like. She calls it a gap. So, we are an enterprise, in her mind, we are a commercial business, but we’re dedicated to the social aspects of that business. We’re dedicated to women; we’re dedicated to the wraparound services that we have for women, and those just quickly being we have on-site daycares for women, we provide various training programs like financial literacy training programs.

Those social wraparound services are costly, and they fall outside of the business context. Right now, The Women’s Bakery is a hybrid, where we have for-profit entities, but they’re not profitable yet, and so we subsidize that with donations. That’s the gap that Pauline identifies, and we’re still evolving. So, when we first started, I probably called it a social enterprise — The Bushoga Women’s Bakery — because I wanted to focus on women and I wanted to focus on children.

This is funny because I run a non-profit, but I didn’t believe in non-profits at the time. It’s not because I don’t believe in them in general, I think that I had seen so many failed non-profits abroad, that I really didn’t want to repeat that, because I think that oftentimes they can do more harm than good, and I didn’t want to repeat that. I wanted there to be an enterprise aspect, because that, in theory, makes it more sustainable where you perhaps need donations, or in this sense, investment, until you can be profitable, and then it will sustain itself.

That’s always been a driving force for me, because it alleviates dependency, right? You’re no longer dependent on funds over which you have no control, like the Rwandan women, right? Yeah, they’re not raising money in the United States. I’m raising money in the United States. So that’s what the social enterprise is. And I don’t think that we strayed that much from it, it’s just what has been challenging is the enterprise component. The evolution of the enterprise has been, “Okay, how do we expand our product offerings, where we can maintain our mission, but we can also generate revenue and enough revenue to actually cover our costs and ultimately, one day be profitable?”

Spencer: Well, how does that look from the women’s perspective? I’m thinking about it in context of the culture … like what we talked about earlier … that this was a community in rural East Africa, where you do enough to just stabilize yourself. So, is that a mindset shift for them, like we can be profitable, we can have a solid income and do good?

Culver: I will say, that was the learning curve for me, and I learned this launching the first iteration of The Women’s Bakery, because the original model was the women still own the bakery like, “You own this bakery. We as the corporation do not. You own it and you run it. We’ll train you how to run it, but you ultimately own it.”

Through a series of many trials and a lot of errors and failures, we learned that at least at that time, and I think still to a degree now, women did not want to own the bakeries. And it’s not because the interest wasn’t there. It was because the exposure wasn’t enough for them to see the possibilities. What I mean by that is, the women just wanted a job. They wanted stable income on which they could rely. Owning a business comes with great risk and the collateral that they have if something does go wrong, and we saw this with The Bushoga Women’s Bakery, you’re going to pick up your pots and go home. But, if you have a larger operation than that, what do you do?

I think that for them to understand, for our bakers and our team members to understand the social enterprise model, that’s why I say we’re still evolving. I think that it takes continuous communication, and it takes … we have a saying in Missouri, the ‘Show Me’ state, “You gotta see it to believe it.” It’s very similar in Rwanda, and I think as it should be, right? You can’t expect to just have it like, “Oh, great, this is profitable immediately and I understand how to make it profitable and what to do with the profits.” That’s a very naive approach to any type of business.

Spencer: If only it were that easy.

Culver: Yes, exactly, then there would be a lot more profitable businesses sooner, right?

Spencer: Exactly. Okay, I know we’ve only gotten to a few of the iterations, but like you said, it’s still evolving. But I want to talk about the benefits to the women and how these ‘Aha!’ moments grew and drove you through some of the ups and downs. Do you know, off the top of your head — I know it was one of the early statistics that I learned from you — what was the average income for a Rwandan woman, and how did that income … I know it was exponential, triple digit … increase?

Culver: I think what you’re remembering … I made a presentation to BEMA, and it’s funny that you bring this up, because I was just thinking about this the other night. We just did a survey of the women bakers, and our social impact program manager just sent out the survey. This is a way for us to track, “Are we actually doing what we say we’re doing?” When we say women’s empowerment, who’s defining it, what’s the definition, and is it real, you know? What is it?

So, I think that the statistic I used was for one of our bakeries, which we have three bakeries in Rwanda. This group is probably an average for the women at the other two bakeries. Prior to working for The Women’s Bakery, if you were to monetize what their annual income was, and I say monetize, because remember, if they’re subsistence farmers, if you sell their products, then you have money. If you don’t …

Spencer: There’s no actual income.

Culver: Right. We did an average of one of the bakeries, for the bakers, and I think it was $50 a year. That’s pretty low, again, monetized. So, I think that they could barter, they have other things, but still, we’re talking about poverty. Dare I say, extreme poverty. So now those women bakers, that same group, is earning, I think it’s like $120 or $150 a month.

Spencer: That’s amazing.

Culver: Yeah, it is amazing. I think that this is what Pauline would point out as the social enterprise. So, is that bakery profitable? No. Then people would say, “Well, why?” Okay, well, there’s one of the whys: We would love to increase those women’s salaries or maybe we have. That bakery has been open since 2017 and women have had a raise since then, even though that bakery is not and was never profitable. But we’ve done that because there are certain metrics by which we measure women’s empowerment, and income is one of them, right? Savings is another. So that bakery is not profitable, and we’re filling in that gap through donations because of that social mission.

Spencer: And I remember you saying once that with that income, you mentioned savings, but do I remember correctly that women would use their income to then educate their children? In the first episode last week, you said, if you’re lucky enough to get an education …

Culver: That’s exactly right.

Spencer: So now this is empowering women to be able to get education for their children.

Culver: That is 100 percent correct, Joanie. Women were able to save money to send their kids to school. And right now, according to our 2024 survey of our 30 women bakers, 74% report that, yes, they can afford school fees. Eight percent, and this may not add up completely to 100 because I’m rounding, 8% say no — and I can explain that — and 17.6% report non-applicable, meaning either their kids are too old for school, or they have babies. So short answer, yes, they were able to save money to send their kids to school, but not immediately. That was actually a big hurdle that we had, because women were not making enough money initially. Hence why we did raise salaries, hence why the bakeries had a longer horizon for profitability, because we did increase women’s salaries.

But I just learned for those women who report not being able to afford their children’s school fees, it’s either because they have one woman has nine children, that’s a lot of kids and a lot of school tuition to pay, and then a lot of these ladies are now trying to send their children to university. University is much more expensive than primary or secondary school. That is an interesting thing to learn and an interesting problem to begin to solve with these women.

Spencer: So, you’ve had successes, and sometimes wins lead to new challenges … As you’re growing and evolving, how hard is it? I guess this is where growing pains come from. So how have you been able to navigate the evolution of The Women’s Bakery?

Culver: For me, it is making sure that I am really listening and I’m really open to hearing what I may not want to hear, if that makes sense. I think that we say we empower women, and then making sure that the reports that we’re actually … when we are collecting data, are we asking the right questions? And if we are, the answers that we get, some we may not like.

I’ll give you an example. We have one woman who is a baker, and she’s an original, been with us since day one, and she has been our pinnacle, at least from a PR standpoint. And we’re not like sleazy PR. I’ve really tried to say, “This is real.” What we are reporting, what we’re projecting to the world that we do is real, and this is what women are saying.

So, our pinnacle woman that we have elevated and used on all of our things, a report came back that she was not sleeping on a bed, and it’s like, well, what the heck? You make a lot more money than you did, we’ve been through savings or financial literacy programs in which there are saving classes, classes about savings. So how is it possible that you’re reporting you don’t have enough money to buy a mattress? Well, what we learned is she’s sending her son to university. She’s able to pay for university, and all of her money is going towards that, where she’s not able to pay for herself for a mattress.

Spencer: Typical mother.

Culver: Yeah, exactly. So, I think managing that evolution, how do you do that, right? I think that it’s being able to, as leaders, hear the hard things and then work with it. And that’s new; that’s brand-new information as of last month.

I just want to point that out, because I think it takes people who are committed to the mission and people who are committed to sustainable change. Do we just give this woman money to buy a mattress? Yes, that’s one option. What are the other options, though, that would make it sustainable? That’s what we’re exploring. Now, I actually don’t have an answer for you, because we’re in it right now, but the management of that is making sure that you are, as a leader, listening, and that you are exploring things from multiple angles, with an eye on, for me and I think for Pauline, our COO, an eye on the sustainable. What is going to benefit this woman, and then what will also benefit the company?

Spencer: When you figure that out, I think you need to share it with the industry, because there are a lot of for-profit, straight for-profit, commercial bakery businesses who support their employees in similar ways. So, to know how you can support the employee who is in need, while having a solution that also isn’t just giving charity, but creating something that betters their life and betters the company … A lot of people are going to want to know and tap into that.

Culver: Yeah. Okay, cool. Honestly, it’s validating to hear that, because for me, it always comes back to agency. And this is again from having seen so many failed nonprofits or NGOs abroad, where it’s not that I don’t believe charity can’t work, but that’s a one-time thing. And if we give this, in this particular example, we give her money for a mattress, she’s going to save that money and send it to her kid in university; I would too.

So then how do you make something where you’re tapping into her agency and she’s choosing, like she’s the one driving those decisions and making those choices. That is part of the evolution, where maybe some problems are quote unquote solved, but it does open up bigger problems, right? She was able to send her kids to primary and secondary school, but, boy, we certainly hadn’t thought about university. That’s flipping amazing and expensive. So what does one do?

Spencer: And it also goes back to that autonomy.

Culver: Yes, exactly. I believe pretty strongly in autonomy, not to say that we’re not a community and we do work collectively, but in this particular scenario, how does she exercise her autonomy? If there is an avenue for us to assist her, how? What is it? How do we do it?

Spencer: You have to keep me posted on that, because I do want to know. I want to know what the solution is.

Culver: I will. I will see her in two weeks, and I will keep you posted.

Spencer: I’m going to hold you to that. Okay, I’m going to ask you one last question for this week, and it’s, you’re going to laugh at me, but I’m going to ask it anyway. You’re going to be like, “What are you even talking about?”

Okay, so, in American business culture, entrepreneurs are new businesses. We get about … and I’m saying ‘we’ because my business is an entrepreneurial business, and relatively new, so we always look at the five-year mark. A new business or an entrepreneur gets five years to sort of get it right before they move forward or stall out. How did that five-year rule apply to you?

Culver: I was going to say, girl we blew way past that. We failed all the way through. This is funny, because you’re bringing me back to presentations that I used to make in St Louis right around that five-year mark, and I called it affectionately “Death Valley.” Like, “Please help us, because we are currently in Death Valley, and I believe that we can make it to the other side, but it is going to take X dollars.”

 I think that for some businesses, yes, the five-year rule may apply. I think for us it does not. And I will say the person who opened my eyes the most to that is Pauline, our COO. She challenged me on our product lines, she challenged me on our pricing and she challenged me on the horizon for profitability … “Why do you have a two-year mark on this? Or, why do you have a three-year mark on this? And why the heck are you communicating it to the broader audience? And then, when you don’t meet it, you’re fine with that.”

So, for us being able to really, truly look at, “Okay, here’s our mission, here’s our model, and then here’s our long-term goal, and here are the metrics by which we will be measuring ourselves to see how close we are to achieving that goal.” Pauline has helped me shift some of those metrics, not just the goal post. The goal post is still there, so it’s like women’s empowerment, feeding babes, and then these bakeries being profitable by doing all of that, right? But what is that goal post and what is actually, not just reasonable, but doable in a place like Rwanda, in a region like East Africa?

One of the things we have at The Women’s Bakery is we say we’re not American culture. We’re not Rwandan culture. It’s a brand-new culture. It’s The Women’s Bakery culture. So, I had that also being American, where it’s like, “Oh God, we have to hit … we have to be in the black in five years. Like, that’s what we have to do.” There’s actually a lot of freedom if you alleviate yourself from those pressures, because I think you actually have a far more intentional model, and you create a better culture. When I first started The Women’s Bakery, and boy, if you talk to some people who used to work for us back then, it was hard. I was pushing people really hard, because I really wanted to hit that mark, and we didn’t. We weren’t even close, and we burned a lot of people out in the process.

So, I think that by setting your own trajectory, you also set your own tone, and that, at the end of the day, is very important.

Spencer: I think that that is really good advice and business in general, regardless of culture, and it’s good advice, especially for social enterprise.

Culver: We need a much longer runway. So, I have a hero named Jacqueline Novogratz. She wrote a book that I would recommend to anyone called The Blue Sweater, and she calls for social enterprises. So, a regular business would get an investment or a loan, right? And if you have an investor, the investor wants a return on their investment in three to five years.

For social enterprises, Jacqueline Novogratz, who runs a social venture capital firm, calls it patient capital, where that runway is much longer. So, whereas you have a strict for-profit business, your runway is three to five years for an ROI. For social enterprise, it might be 10 or more years. And I think that if you’re in this new field … and this is … it’s a brand-new field … it’s not straight charity, and it’s not straight business. You’re in the middle somewhere. So, because of that, you need a different financial structure. And I think that certainly applies, which is why The Women’s Bakery does. We have revenue from the bakeries, and then we have revenue from donations, and we use both to fuel our existing bakeries and our growth.

Spencer: Do you … this is kind of an out-of-left-field question. I know we’re supposed to end with that one, but just talking about how you fuel with the funds that you receive. Is there ever, and you know, the tone of evolving the business … Will the charitable donations ever become its own entity, where the funds from the bakery profits would fuel that?

Culver: Yes, okay, so this is where I get so pumped, because this is long term and what I see. So, our incorporation in the United States is a 501(c)(3) public charity. So, I think that actually becomes quite strategic, because you could still bring in donations. People still get their tax write offs, etc. Then if the bakeries, or should I say, when the bakeries are profitable, and we’re still getting donations, then we become what I ultimately think would be amazing: a social venture capital firm.

Donors basically become impact investors. Now you may not get a financial return. Your return is social, so we might need to make sure some donors feel comfortable with that. If others do not, then yes, they would stop donating. But I think it could be similar to, if you’ve heard of the organization, Kiva. Kiva lends money to people, and those people can start businesses, and that’s wonderful, and you don’t necessarily get that money back, right?

So, The Women’s Bakery could be something like that, where, if those bakeries are existing, bakeries are profitable, but we’re still getting donations, it allows us to reinvest in those existing bakeries, to grow them — which we desperately need because we’re feeding so many kids — to build new bakeries and feed more kids, empower more women. It allows us to expand in a way that I think would otherwise be a little bit more prohibitive if we were like a straight charity or a straight business.

Spencer: The reason why I asked is that there is a bakery here in the US that is a social enterprise, and I’m sure you know who I’m talking about, with an open hiring practice. They had a bakery and a foundation that were separate entities. So, the profits from the bakery funded the foundation, which put all of their life skill programs into place to help them gain employment outside of the bakery. And they, in the last two years I think, merged into one entity.

Culver: I think it makes a lot of sense to do that. And here’s the thing for us, because we have a parent company in the US that wholly owns a subsidiary in Rwanda… when we become profitable in Rwanda, and we’re thinking about expanding into Kenya, so when we become profitable in those two countries, the vision I have right now for this is actually that money stays there, because that was the whole intent to begin with.

So, it wouldn’t be like, matriculate the money back into the US and figure out what to do here. It would be there. And what economic programs could we do there that would … I use this word, and it’s not quite right … but like, build wealth or build income for existing women bakers? Pauline has this beautiful vision of micro-franchising opportunities, so entrepreneurial opportunities for women. There’s a lot that we can either reinvest into the bakeries or in new investment in East Africa that would drive a lot … economic empowerment, economic opportunities. Joanie, you know we want to grow wheat so these bakeries could feel that … there’s a lot that we could do.

Spencer: That’s amazing. Okay, I’m going to call it for this week. This was an incredible conversation. This was amazing, and just a lot of talking about the business side of it, and the ups and downs of the business, and I think that that is an important aspect of this story in general. But next week, we’re going to get back to the baking side, and we’re really going to look at how you created an actual operation and how machines started coming into play.

Culver: Okay, well, that’s new. The machines are new. But yes, okay, great.

Spencer: Okay, so we’re going to talk about just how it’s turned into an operation next week, and maybe not the way a large US commercial baker thinks of an operation, but an operational bakery, nonetheless. So, I’m excited to look at that side and the baking side for this week.

Thanks for all of these incredible lessons and all the hard work that you’ve done, and above all, Markey, thanks for sticking with it. You have created something truly special, and I also appreciate you taking this time with me today.

Culver: It’s team effort, though. It’s not just me, it’s our team. But thank you very much, and I’m delighted to be with you all.

Spencer: Okay, I will talk to you next week.

Welcome to Season 13 of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, is spending this season with Markey Culver, CEO of The Women’s Bakery, a social enterprise bakery in East Africa. They’re discovering the challenges and rewards that come with creating change through baking. Sponsored by Middleby Bakery Group.

In our first episode, Markey explains how she went from a business student in St. Louis to a bakery entrepreneur in Rwanda, drastically changing lives for East African women with a simple loaf of bread.

Learn more about this season here, and tune into Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple or Spotify.

Joanie Spencer: Hi Markey. Thank you so much for joining me. I’m so excited to spend the next five weeks with you.

Markey Culver: I’m delighted to be here. I feel honored, so thank you.

Spencer: Markey, you know that I very proudly consider you a friend, and I’m proud to think of myself as your friend, but, I’m also a fan.

I meant to do a little research because I have heard it said that, I think it’s like, eight percent of the world’s population actually changes the world. And you know that I’ve always believed that you are one of that small portion of people who is going to be responsible for changing the world. Much of the industry is familiar with The Women’s Bakery, but there is still a portion that doesn’t know what’s going on and what you’ve done in Africa.

So, I just want to tell this entire story from beginning to end over the next five weeks, and the first step is going all the way back to before you were in Rwanda. What were you doing before that? How did you get there?

Culver: I am from St Louis, MO, but before getting to Rwanda, I actually lived in Austin, TX. At the time I thought I wanted to be in law, but I knew that before I launched into what I thought was going to be a legal career, I wanted to do something that had a bigger purpose than I did, and to me that calling was in the Peace Corps. So, I applied to the Peace Corps, and during my interview stages, I was told that it’s a little bit more difficult to get accepted into the Peace Corps if you request where you want to go, or if you request where you don’t want to go.

So, I had that knowledge going into my final interview, but then they did ask me in the interview. They said, “Hey, is there anywhere you really don’t want to go in the Peace Corps?” Out of ignorance, and it’s true ignorance, I just said, “Yeah, I don’t really want to go to Rwanda.” And so, I’m sure the person who was interviewing me was like, “Ha, ha, ha, this chick will never make it,” and assigned me to Rwanda. So, in 2010 I left the United States for Rwanda as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Spencer: Wow. That was in 2010, so we’re looking at a 14-year history. Can you describe what was it like in Rwanda? Just agriculturally, socioeconomically, and especially someone who grew up in St. Louis, lived in Texas, like classic … you’re a middle American, upper middle class, white woman, and you end up in Rwanda. What was that experience like?

Culver: So again, I say ignorance, because if you actually google Rwanda, I think most people who are not from the African continent, or even those who are, what you know of Rwanda is the 1994 genocide. So, that’s why I say I was ignorant, because if you dig a little bit deeper, Rwanda is actually an amazing country and has an amazing story of resilience and development. So, I feel quite grateful that my trajectory went toward Rwanda.

The structure of the Peace Corps is that a country must invite the United States Peace Corps in. And there’s a specific reason. So, Rwanda in, I think it was 2006 or 2007, switched the medium of instruction in school from French to English. So, Rwanda is a former Belgian colony, and if you were lucky enough to be educated, you were educated in French.

Then in, between, I don’t remember exactly when 2007, 2008 or 2009, the president of Rwanda switched it to English. And there are probably many reasons for that, but the primary reason was Rwanda is in central East Africa, and all of the countries that border Rwanda are former British colonies, and the commercial language is English. So, Rwanda, in an effort to tap into some of that commercial success, wanted to educate their populace in English.

Rwanda asked volunteers from the United States, Peace Corps volunteers, to come over and train teachers to teach in English in Rwanda, and then to be teachers in classrooms, teaching English as a foreign language. So, that’s what I was assigned to do.

Being from the Midwest, and how I found Rwanda, I had never been to the African continent. My travel exposure was relatively limited. So honestly, I was blown away at how amazing Rwanda was, and I say that because what you read about Rwanda is often cast in more of a negative light, right, where they had this horrible genocide, and there was so much destruction, and it really set the country back several decades. While there are aspects of that that are quite true, Rwanda is remarkable in how much progress they have made, because the 1994 genocide was actually a culmination of multiple genocides. They gained their independence in 1959 and then there’s just been a series of genocides. So, I was blown away at how amazing Rwanda is, and was in 2010, and part of that was just how quickly things developed.

So, I landed in the capital city, which is Kigali, and the Peace Corps training happened just outside of that, so it felt far more developed. I don’t use that term lightly. I don’t actually like that term, but I think that when you think of the Peace Corps, and you especially think of the Peace Corps and being assigned to East Africa, if you’ve never been to the continent, you’re not quite sure what to anticipate, and I was certainly that way. It was just far more developed than I was anticipating.

That being said, when I was finally assigned to the village where I ultimately ended up for two years, it was a little bit more probably what many Westerners envision, where you’re in a rural environment. So, I served in a rural town that’s called Bushoga. It’s in the northeastern part of Rwanda. And I make a joke that our village was a village of 600: 300 cows and 300 people. So, it was more agrarian, very much so.

Most of Rwanda still is agrarian. And what I mean by that is Rwanda … Well, we’re from Missouri, so we can do this. Rwanda is about a sixth the size of Missouri but has double the population of Missouri. There are about 13 million people in Rwanda. So, it is very densely populated. I think it’s like the fifth or sixth most densely populated country in the world. So, this was a rural place, but still densely populated, and most people in this village were subsistence farmers, meaning that they grew what their family, their immediate family, needed, and then if there were surplus, they would barter. So, if you had a surplus of tomatoes, you would barter someone for beans.

What I found obviously different than where I’d come from is, while my home where I lived was made out of mudbrick and cement, I had no running water, certainly no plumbing. There was spotty electricity, but I was one of the lucky ones that did actually have spotty electricity, and I had a communal latrine that was about 30 or 40 feet from my house. So just a very different experience than I think many people grow up with, at least in the United States.

Spencer: Okay, I think our audience has caught on to … you are not a baker.

Culver: God, no. I wish I were.

Spencer: You did not set out to create a bakery in Rwanda. You don’t have any baking background at all. Just knowing you, as long as I have, I know the story. It all started when you figured out how to make bread, but it was for, initially, a self-serving reason.

Culver: Oh, yes, it was very much self-serving. Okay, so, now I feel like I can be so much more honest with people, because I can be more myself, and The Women’s Bakery is very much viable, and we’re headed in, I think, the right direction, so I can be more honest with how it started.

So, yes, one of the reasons I started baking bread, and the honest truth, was because I was embarrassed that I was eating mayonnaise with a spoon, like, I was emaciated in the Peace Corps. And I’m huge; I’m six feet tall, I’m already pretty thin, and it’s very customary in rural Rwanda to have one meal a day. And so, I, realistically, probably in the first year, tried to do the same, but I found that quite difficult. And so, I taught at a school, as I said, and then I also worked at a rural health clinic. And so, I would come home in the middle of the day and literally eat mayonnaise with a spoon, which is disgusting, so I needed a vehicle, right? I needed a vehicle on which to smear mayonnaise and shove it into my mouth.

So, the way all of this started is by accident, to be honest. I was hungry, and I was watching where this village was … there was like a thoroughfare, so connecting one larger town to another larger town, and a lot of people would bring their produce back and forth. So, there was access to produce. And when I say that I mean cabbage, onions, tomatoes, things like that.

After a year, I would come home and make myself lunch. And for me, that was a salad. I would chop up cabbage, onions and tomatoes, we had avocados, and so I’d smush up avocados, mix it with some white vinegar, and make myself a little salad, and then just slather mayonnaise all over it, because you could actually find mayonnaise everywhere. It’s shelf stable. You don’t need refrigeration — surprise! By the way, being from the Midwest, I grew up hating mayonnaise, and I had this moment in the Peace Corps, probably like, I don’t know, nine to 10 months in, where I was walking past a shelf of just dry foods, and there were tubs of mayonnaise there, and I walked past it, my body was like, “I must have the mayonnaise.” So, I bought it and went home and sat on my cement floor and ate mayonnaise with a spoon and thought, “That’s it. I can’t do this anymore. We need to change something.”

I had attended a Peace Corps conference, and one of our fellow volunteers was talking about how she was making bread in her village. And I thought, “Well, that’s cool. How do you do that?” Because bread is known … in the capital city, in Kigali, you can certainly find bread. And then in the more rural areas, bread is a known commodity. It’s just really difficult to find. So, when I found out that this gal was making bread, I asked her where she learned, and she was like, “Oh no, it’s just in the Peace Corps handbook.” We had a cookbook or a handbook with recipes from Peace Corps volunteers all over the world. One of the recipes was for bread. And I thought, “Well, what the hell. I’ll try it.” And I did.

So, to make a very long story short, I found all the ingredients that I needed, which were pretty simple. The Peace Corps, during our training, had taught us how to make what we call a Dutch oven, so over an open fire with pots and stones, and I made a loaf of bread. It was … you know, I’m not a baker, and I know your audience is bakers, but it was passable as bread. It allowed me to smear mayonnaise on it and then throw my salad on top of it. And, yeah, that’s how I started. There’s more to it, but that’s how I made the first loaf of bread.

Spencer: I think our audience of bakers will truly, deeply appreciate that this is how it started, because this is such a quintessential story of bread being a staff of life. You were hungry, and you needed to sustain yourself, and with four ingredients — flour, water, salt and yeast — you were able to sustain yourself. And then it became a catalyst for big change that we’re going to dive into.

So, I guess that’s going to be my next question … What happened next? You kind of got busted with the bread.

Culver: Yeah, right, yes. As I said, I started going home midday to make myself lunch, and the lunch was salad. And so, by that point, I was … and I’m not complimenting myself, but I was established enough … I’d been in this village for a year … I was established enough that people knew my name, they kind of knew my schedule. So, it was almost like a walk of shame, right? I had to go from my school and walk through the village, “downtown,” and walk past people, mainly men, because women typically work in the fields, and men were kind of sitting in town, and they would holler at me, and they’d say, “Hey, where are you going? We know you’re going to go home and eat lunch.”

I would at first feign like, “No, no, I’m not going to eat,” because it was very taboo. You only truly have a meal a day, which is dinner. But then after a couple of weeks, I was like, “You know what, whatever. Yes, I’m going home and to make myself salad, and it’s going to be amazing.” And so, the men in the village were like, “Awesome. Well, if you’re going home to have food, we’re coming with you” because it was very communal. And this is something I loved. And like, “Great. If you’re going to go make food, I’m joining you, and we can have a meal together.”

So, they followed me into my house. Again, no malintent. This is all like, we’re a big community. And then once they saw that I was making salad, they were horrified, because food, especially in rural Rwanda, in order for it to be called food, it has to be cooked for a lot of reasons, but primarily safety. It’s safer for food to be cooked because then you kill any bacteria or whatever is on there. And so, the men were horrified that I was eating raw food. They went home, and they told their wives, like, “Oh my gosh, can you believe this crazy white girl? She’s just making raw for lunch and eating it. Isn’t that insane?”

The women feigned horror, because these are the women I worked with in the health center, in the maternity and nutrition wards, and we’re a community, so I knew them anyway. So, the women feigned horror like, “Oh, can you believe that? That’s so insane.” Then they would come up to me and say, “Hey, by the way, could you please teach us how to do that? We want to learn how to make salad.”

I started what I call … it’s not really salad-making classes. It was more just gab time for gals. The women would come over between noon and 2 p.m., and we would make salads together. Sometimes it was a platform to teach them about nutrition — I had to teach myself, too — and just an opportunity for the women to get together. We talked about their kids’ health. So, we were doing that for, let’s say, a couple months, having salad afternoons.

Then I figured out how to make bread. That day … I don’t think I had anything in the afternoon because I couldn’t have … I guess I was finished with school, because when the women came in for their salad-making midday afternoon time, I had already baked my first loaf of bread, and it was cooling on my table. The women saw it, and they asked what it was, and when I told them it was bread, they were like, “Oh, cool, that’s great. Where did you buy it?” And I said, “Oh, no, I didn’t buy it. I actually made it.”

It was immediate. They were like, “Cool. Screw salad. We don’t care about salad anymore. We definitely want to learn how to make bread.” So, quickly our salad-making lessons became bread-making lessons, which is hilarious, again, for the professional bakers who may be listening to this, because to remind you, I had only made bread once in my life, like yeast bread. And the women were like, “Great, we’re going to do this,” and I was like, “Sure, I can totally … I totally know what I’m doing, and I’ll totally teach you.”

Spencer: That’s so you, Markey, because you’re like, “I don’t want to go to Rwanda. Oh, I’m going to Rwanda? Great. Okay. Oh, we’re going to figure this out.” There’s a pattern, and we’re going to see that pattern unfold a lot. But I have to point something out that I’m finding very interesting in this story. I can’t help but notice some significant cultural differences.

One that the women are the ones who are working in the field and the men are hanging out in town. Very interesting; not something we’re used to here in the United States. And also, that eating a second meal … you felt, you said, a walk of shame. And so culturally, like in America, we are like, “I haven’t eaten in an hour. I’m starving. What am I going to do?” You know? The first time my kid said, “I’m starving,” and I said, “You are a white boy from Johnson County, KS, one thing I can guarantee is that you’ll never starve. You are not starving.”

Just that it’s a little bit shameful to have a second meal is very interesting, and then just your salad-making finger quote class with the women that transcends culture. Women get together, they find a reason to get together, and then they learn from each other, and they form a pack that is, no matter what culture you’re in, that bond that women have, really, I love. So, that’s my little aside.

Culver: No, it is, and I do want to make one quick clarification. It’s not black and white. It’s not 100 percent women work in the field and 100 percent men just sit in town. That tends to be, in many rural places, the norm. But there are plenty of men who work in the field and plenty of women who are running shops in town or sitting in town. It’s just I did find that it was more customary for women to be working in the field and for men to be sitting in town. I just don’t want to cast a negative light and say like, “Right, all Rwandan men are sitting in town.”

Spencer: I know, I get that. It’s just in this particular narrative, what I’m envisioning is just something that is so outside of my little American bubble, and it’s very interesting to hear those cultural differences, and then see where it’s all the same, and that just that human bond transcends those cultural differences.

Okay, so the women said, “Screw the salad, we’re making bread.”

Culver: Yeah, that’s accurate. That’s exactly what happened. I said, “Okay, great, no problem, ladies, I would love to make bread with you. Please come tomorrow, and we’ll do this. Instead of doing salad, we’ll do bread.” There were probably five or seven ladies who would come every day. So, the next day, I got ready, I got wheat flour and yeast in a town that was about a 20-minute motorcycle ride; those motorcycles are your taxi. So, it was about a 20-minute motorcycle ride away. I bought that stuff, and then I had water, salt and a little bit of sugar or honey. So, the women came the next day. Again, I think it was about seven women that came.

But because I am a novice and I’d only baked yeast bread once in my life, I did not time this well, right? So, they came between, what, noon and 2 p.m. There’s a saying in Rwanda that time is elastic. So, if you say noon, people will show up at 2 p.m., and that’s like, totally normal and very acceptable. So, between noon and 2 p.m., we’re kind of getting everybody together, and I have my Peace Corps cookbook out where I’m trying to follow the instructions again, specifically the kneading aspect, because I’m new to this.

We mixed this and it’s just one loaf. I didn’t have the foresight to do multiple loaves or have women bring their own pots and we would bake multiple loaves of bread. Nope, just one. So, we’re all taking turns kneading the bread, and then, you know, you have to let it rise. What should have been probably tighter on time became very spread out. If we started around 2 p.m., then by the time we finally finished kneading and letting the bread rise and knead again, let it rise and start to bake it in the Dutch oven, it’s dusk, and dusk is mealtime in the village. Mealtime is typically prepared by the women. So, the women are supposed to be at home preparing a dinner for their families, but the women weren’t. These women weren’t at home. They were with me at my house, standing outside waiting for this one loaf of bread to finish baking.

So, of course, all their kids come looking for them. This is a really small community, so everyone knew where I lived, and that this crazy person is eating mayonnaise with a spoon and making bread. What’s she doing? So, all these kids are like, “Yeah, our mom is definitely over at her house. We’re going to go.”

 We’re sitting outside of my house … and just to paint the picture, it was beautiful. Rwanda is very clean. It’s a very clean country. So, the backyard was dirt, but it was very well kept. You would sweep it because that kept insects out and snakes and rodents. So, we’re all sitting out in the dirt; the women and I are literally in a circle around my Dutch oven, waiting for this one loaf of bread to finish baking, and then all these kids come out.

 I think the typical family size in rural Rwanda is between three and six kids. So, if you have seven women, you multiply that … it’s just tons of kids. So, we have seven women, then boom, it balloons up. We’ve got all these kids. Everybody’s waiting for this one loaf of bread to finish baking, and I’m biting my nails because I think, “Oh God, I’m going to damage my reputation and the trust of these community members if this bread stinks.” If it stinks, they’d be like, “Okay, well, we’re not listening to you anymore.”

 Finally, the bread finishes baking, and I take it out and I try a piece. It’s good, thank God. I’m tearing off pieces of the bread and handing it to the ladies. And then the most amazing thing happened. This was my ‘Aha!’ moment. We were seated in a circle around an open fire with these pots, and all the women have this like hunk of bread, and as soon as the women try the bread that they just made, they just helped to prepare, and realize that it was good, they ripped it up and handed it to the kids behind them.

I didn’t even have time … I was taking the pots off of the open fire, and I looked up and all the bread that I had passed out to the women was now being gobbled by children. So, I looked up and there are these wide-eyed kids fisting bread, and they were so delighted, right? Of course, because it’s delicious. It’s bread. And I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is it. This is how we create a nutritious snack, essentially.”

We can’t create a meal necessarily, from bread, but we can create a really nutritious snack if we pump this bread full of nutrients. Now, again, I’m not a professional baker, so for me, the nutrients were like, “Okay, what vegetables do we have that we can incorporate?” And then peanuts were a cash crop where we were, and we already pulverized them into flour. And I thought, “Okay, perfect. I know peanuts have fat and protein, so we can put that in the bread and make it super nutritious.” And that was my idea. I thought, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do. Instead of our daily salad-making lessons, we can have bread-making time, and I’ll supply the ingredients, and the women just bring their pots, and then they can go home and bake bread, and it can be a nutritious snack for their kids.” And that was the original intent, but it morphed into something a lot more than that.

Spencer: You had a few more ‘Aha!’ moments that drove that evolution, so, let’s talk about that. I know the women started doing something else with the bread that was very enlightening for you, and this is your story. I’m not going to say it, so I want you to outline it for me.

Culver: I don’t know how many weeks … the time, honestly, is a little bit fuzzy for me, but we truly did start having pretty regular bread-making sessions with ladies at my house, and it grew. More women started showing up. At one point, I remember coming back from school in the midafternoon … I had finished school, so I came home around, I don’t know, 2 p.m., 3 p.m., 4 p.m. …  and there was a gentleman waiting outside my house with a note, and it was like, would I please accept his wife into my bread-making class? He’d walked for three hours. He was three hours away, and news had spread that far that this was happening. To me, that was already significant enough where I thought, “Okay, cool. I had five women who were interested in salads, and now it’s like, 30 women are interested in breadmaking.”

So, I was doing that, but then, after a couple of weeks, I had a group of women approach me, and they were like, “Hey, we could sell this bread at a local market,” and I was like, “Oh, do you think so?” They were like, “Yeah, we definitely think we could sell this,” and I was like, “Cool, try it,” and they did, and it worked. So, my original thought of, “Oh, this is just a way for women to make something like a protein-packed or a nutrient-packed snack at home for their kids,” turned into women identifying that there was demand for something that right now only they could supply, which was pretty fascinating.

This wasn’t me going out to the local market saying, “Hey, who wants bread?” This was women saying, “I think that this is something we can do, and we’re going to try it.” I wasn’t even with them, so that was cool. That was my second ‘Aha!’ moment, and it’s very similar to what I just said, where the women had figured out demand and we had the supply. So, that formalized the idea a little bit more, where it’s like, “Okay, well, how do we create something where the women could continue to make bread and possibly earn a little bit of money from making that bread?” And that truly was the genesis for what has become The Women’s Bakery.

Spencer: I am just smiling so big right now because I’ve heard this story so many times. I’ve told this story so many times. And, first of all, it never fails to hit me in my heart. I feel this story in my heart. But talking about it with you, knowing that it’s an audience of professional bakers who will be listening and hearing how many times already, in these few minutes that we’ve had this conversation, you say, “I’m not a professional baker. I’m not a baker.”

But what you’ve done is the core philosophy of baking and just feeding people and providing a livelihood through making bread, and that’s really impactful. For someone who never even had baking on her radar, who didn’t bake in her kitchen, who didn’t set out to do this, and never really planned to start a business … you did exactly what baking is intended to do, just out of sheer circumstance, and it’s just a really beautiful thing.

Culver: Thanks, Joanie. because I wanted to be … after a year into the Peace Corps, I was like, “Oh, okay, I want to be in finance. I want to be in business. I want to be in finance, not law.” And I thought coming back to the United States, I wanted to be a banker with an N, not a baker, so, I appreciate all of that. Even though I’m still not a baker, I feel like I’m a buttress to the social enterprise that is now The Women’s Bakery.

Spencer: Okay, so now let’s start talking about The Women’s Bakery. We’ve kind of got that origin story foundation laid out. How many women were there when it first got started, when you were baking bread and selling it?

Culver: So probably … and this is before it was formalized. My Peace Corps service was 2010 to 2012, and I started baking with this group of women right in the middle. So, 2011. It was pretty nascent; it wasn’t really a business. I certainly wouldn’t call it that, because I bought the raw materials. I bought the wheat and the yeast, and then the women would experiment with … maybe some grew peanuts, and so they would experiment with that. Some grew carrots, and they would experiment with that. I think that was more … there was nothing formal, no formal business yet.

Then in 2012, right before I was leaving, it was a group of probably about seven or eight women who were interested in having this be more formalized. And when I say formalized, I think that the original vision that these women had for what became The Women’s Bakery was a cooperative, where everything was co-owned. If they had been to a bakery, it was not what we would envision as a bakery. And so that was my word … not that I had invented the word bakery, but in thinking, “Oh, okay, great, we could centralize something like this, and you all could make bread, and we could sell it in larger volumes, and we could go to farther markets.”

That concept came about right toward the end of my Peace Corps service. I remember sitting in my yard with a group of seven or eight ladies, and God, the bakers are going to laugh when they hear this. My naivete, thinking like, “Right, okay, it’s going to cost $200 to build a bakery. That’s it. That’s all we need, and we can totally do it.” So, as I left the Peace Corps, I told the ladies, “If you raise half of this, I’ll match it. So, if you raise 100 bucks, I’ll match 100 bucks, and I’ll come back and I’ll help you build a bakery.” That is iteration one in 2012.

Spencer: Here’s a question that I want to ask you. I want to ask about some of the immediate results. It might be time hopping a little bit because I want to deep dive into the iterations and those lessons that you learned. What were the immediate results of these women having this opportunity to make their own bread, feed their families and then subsequently earn a living from it?

Culver: I think the immediate results were a bit more intangible. There were some tangible things, but from what I remember, it was just sheer excitement where it was like, “Okay, cool. We have this new thing, this new skill, and this skill has the opportunity to generate income.”

To me, the nutrient-dense part of the bread was exciting because I again, as I told you, I worked in the nutrition and maternity wards, and so every day I would see acutely malnourished kids, so I was excited by the opportunity to have bread be a vehicle for enhanced nutrition, or at least enhanced access. I’m not going to pretend that this bread could supplement a meal, but it was certainly more than what kids were getting.

I think for the women, the immediate result was excitement. I think then it turned into something more, where it was thinking about what possibilities could exist in the future. I think that the income generation aspect, like if that were immediate, I think that that’s not something that we dwelled on very much until we formally started the first bakery and that became more real.

Spencer: What I think is really cool is the autonomy that it provided these women, because it wasn’t you saying, “Okay, now you’ve made this. You know what would be really cool? You could go out and sell this.” The fact that they discovered this on their own and went out and did it, discovered this is a life skill that I can apply and do something with.

In a culture where resources are scarce, you make enough to get by, and then what you have extra, you barter to get what you don’t have. It was just very … you get yourself to the surface and stay at the surface. You go out in the field, and you work; you get one meal a day. If you’re not there to make that meal, your kids are going to come looking for you. And it was just all very … this is it. We get to the surface, and then we stay here. This was a moment where they had autonomy to see what’s possible. Like you said, it created possibilities, and they did that on their own.

Culver: I think that’s an interesting word. I’ve never really thought about it that way, and I do think you’re right. I think there was an aspect of autonomy, and perhaps that is what generated the excitement, but I don’t know. And also, bread is delicious. Who doesn’t like bread, right? So, yes, the excitement, from an existential standpoint, was probably driven by the sense of autonomy, but then there’s also a very simple piece, which is like, “Wow, bread is delicious. I’m going to eat it.”

Spencer: When you’re used to eating cooked carrots and cooked potatoes, and you get a chance to have delicious bread …

Culver: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Spencer: Okay, so I have a question. I don’t know if it might be just a little bit too deep for this episode. Maybe I’ll ask it now and then I’ll ask it in the last episode, too, because I bet your answer in the beginning is going to be different than your answer at the end, because this is going to be a very chronological conversation.

During this time, I’m curious about your mindset because you weren’t a baker, and you’re teaching baking. You started teaching people after you made one loaf of bread. What did you learn about the craft of baking, and then what did you learn about yourself during the unfolding of this?

Culver: I have so much respect for bakers, so I will start there, because I love that you called it a craft. I do think it’s a craft and an art. What I learned very quickly about baking is that I know so little. I learned two things. One, I know so little, so I wanted to read a lot more about baking, and then I got overwhelmed reading more about baking, because I thought, “Good God, how does one actually figure out how to do this?”  That was one aspect, which is humility; being humbled by how much can go into bread.

But then there was another level for me, and I think that this can only happen when someone is a novice. I was like, “Cool. It’s so malleable, like we can do so much, and it will still sort of turn out.” Because I’m not a professional baker, right? If it tastes good, then therefore it is good. It may not have the right crumb, it might not rise enough … I don’t know, I know that now.

But I was really excited about what one could do with dough and what the end result could be. That again, is circling back to my thoughts of these kids. We’ve got tons of peanuts, we’ve got bean paste, we’ve got carrots, we’ve got beets. There’s a way for us to pack this bread full of stuff, and as long as it still tastes good, people will enjoy it and kids will eat it. Maybe women will sell it. Maybe it’ll stink, and we’ll try again.

So, I think what I learned about bread was that I was excited it could be such a malleable vehicle, from my perspective, for so much good. One aspect, women who had the autonomy, they can make bread, maybe they sell it and earn some money, but then, especially what you could put into bread to make it nutrient dense for kids. So, that’s what I learned about bread. I know a lot more now.

Then what I learned about myself … I think what I learned … Again, I know I made a joke about this before, but this is real. “Oh, okay, this may not be the answer, but it is an answer.” If the women know their culture, they know their community, they know their market … what I know is I have a different perspective, so they have that perspective, and I could bring a different perspective and be a buttress to help catapult it to the next level.  What I learned about myself was, what could I be good at and where could I be useful in something like this?

Spencer: I love that. So, I think that is a great segue for my last question, Markey, and that is, you know, you learn these things about the craft, about yourself and your role in all of this. So, at what point did you realize, or did it become, a viable business?

Culver: I think that I knew … if you’ve ever had, this nagging idea that you just can’t get rid of it, it won’t go away no matter how radical or how silly or whatever it is, it just won’t go away … That was for me, pretty much, on day one, just what I described with all those kids eating bread, where I was like, “Aha! Oh my gosh, this is how we do it. This is it.” And then once the women sold the bread, I was like, “Oh, this is so much better than I could have imagined.”

I think that the thought of this becoming a viable business happened pretty early on for me, it just took a lot of work to actually get there and a lot of failure.  What I found most inspiring when I was starting, and still do, is actually hearing people’s honest stories of failure and what you do after that.

Spencer: Yeah, failure is good. It truly is, and any successful entrepreneur will say they believe in failure.

Culver: I’m still scared of it, so I think that’s true, and I still fear it. So, it’s like one of those double-edged swords.

Spencer: It’s not about the fear, it’s about what you do with the fear that counts.

Culver: Yeah. So, for me, my thought with failure, and someone else said this, these are not my words, but, as long as you’re falling forward … when you get back up, you’re one step closer to where you want to go.

Spencer: Oh, I love that. I love that. Okay, this is a good place to stop.  Next week, we are going to talk about some of those lessons that you learned as The Women’s Bakery started taking off and evolved into a few different things and the lessons that you learned from those changes. It’s going to be a great conversation, and this entire month is just going to be amazing.

After that, we’re going to talk about the production and sort of the operational side of how the bread is made.  Then we’re going to talk about The Women’s Bakery’s One Bread Program, which is amazing, because the change has had such a ripple effect, and it’s bigger than probably you ever could have imagined that it would be. And then in our last week, we’ll talk about the future and what your vision is for the life and health of The Women’s Bakery.

But for now, I’m going to say goodbye and thank you. I’m just loving this. We’re off to a great start, and it’s an honor to share this story with our audience.

Culver: Thanks, Joanie, it’s great to be here. So, thank you for still being interested in all of this.

Spencer: Always.