Welcome to the fourth season of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Stephen Hallam, brand ambassador for Dickinson & Morris and chair of judges for the Tiptree World Bread Awards, explores the elements of artisan bread baking that can — and should — be incorporated into commercial bread production. In this episode, he dives deep into ingredients, fermentation, and flavor and taste fundamentals.

Episodes will be released every Sunday through Sept. 11. Learn more here, and listen to Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple, Spotify, Google and Stitcher.

Joanie Spencer: Welcome to Troubleshooting Innovation, a Commercial Baking podcast. I’m your host, Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking. I’m speaking with Stephen Hallam, brand ambassador for Dickinson & Morris and chair of judges for the Tiptree World Bread Awards, which will take place at IBIE 2022, Sept. 18-21 in Las Vegas. This season, we are exploring the principles of artisan bread baking that can and should be incorporated into commercial bread production. Our first episode revolves around the fundamentals of commercially producing artisan bread. Stephen, thanks for joining me today. I’m so excited to speak with you.

Stephen Hallam: Hi, Joanie. The honor is mine.

Spencer: So we have a lot to talk about when it comes to artisan bread, baking and lessons that can be learned for the producers of commercially made bread. And specifically with IBIE right around the corner, something that I find really important is that artisan bread, bakers, artisan bakers in general, and commercial bakers are coming together at IBIE under one roof. And I think there’s so much that both sides can learn from the other. So we’re gonna dive into artisan bread baking. And the first question I want to ask you is, what are the most important product characteristics that cannot be lost, when a baker is commercially producing artisan bread?

Hallam: I think one can write a book on this, but to keep it sort of salient and brief and focused, whether you’re a small producer or a large producer artisanal commercial, a loaf of bread should give satisfaction to the consumer to the person that is buying it or being given it, they’re going to eat it, it should be nourishing, and they should like it. So for a loaf of bread to, first of all, have a good appearance… I’m talking broadly now, which can be dangerous, because there’s all different types of bread and loaves, etc. But whether we’re talking sourdough, whether it’s a challah, pretzel, whatever it may be, it will have an appearance and it will need to look good. And it’s only going to look good if a number of criteria in the whole process of making the loaf of bread have come together.

Yes, we have the flour, but we rely so much on the miller to be presenting us bakers with a flour that is consistent. And that’s a challenge in itself, because the wheat or whatever other grains are being used into the grist, are grown every year in different conditions. We tend to take for granted that we open the bag and the flour is there but huge amount of effort and skill goes into producing consistent flour for us. And straightaway, I’m assuming there’s a blend of wheats. I say wheats that could be other grains as well going into the flour. Latterly we there’s a huge interest in just heritage grains, old fashioned grains that through whatever reason are no longer used and they’re coming back to the fore because they’re giving different characteristics to the flour. There’s that and then you’re going to make a dough, the sort of water you use, that’s important the yeast whether you’re using yeast or not, whether you’ve got a sponge, a sourdough starter, a bigger colleague, whatever you wish, but some means of adding extra flavor to the dough. If it’s, let’s say a traditional sourdough, your yeast, your fermentation will come from your starter, you won’t be adding extra yeast, all of that needs controlling. And you’re going to make your dough how long you’re going to ferment it for you’re going to keep it so the longer you ferment it of course, the more flavor there will be, but will also affect the structure.

So when you’re mixing, you know, ensuring the flour has sufficient water so that it produces the protein that you need: that will be the structure of the loaf. Mixing time is fairly crucial, as is the water absorption and you’re going to leave it to ferment and then when you’re going to mold, if you haven’t got all these parts, right. When you come to mold, the loaf protein won’t have the right tension in it. It won’t hold up to how you want it to look. It may be, if it’s a very long fermented sourdough, that you’re not going to mold it. You need to treat it with much more care. And it could have an extremely high rate of, of hydration, so a lot of water in there, it’s very sticky, so you’ve got to treat all of that. Then you’re going to give it what maybe its final proof its final rising and domestic terms that could be done overnight, it could be done over a day, or it could be done in a speedier environment where you got a warm cupboard or prover, or what have you, then you’re going to bake it. And if you say you’ve over proved that you can let it go too long, then you may not get the effect you want to see in the oven, the oven needs to be the right sort of oven with the right sort of temperature. And you’re going to effectively bake the loaf and the baking should be just so shouldn’t be overbaked. In other words burnt, it shouldn’t be underbaked. So soggy, should be even not baked on one side and under baked on the other.

There’s an enormous amount of skill to getting the loaf into the oven, and then it’s got to be baked correctly. If all of that hasn’t come together correctly, the loaf itself will not look particularly attractive, and probably won’t be bought in a shop or wherever. And I’m only here talking about the external criteria, we went to talking about the appearance when you actually feel the low fuel crust on there. If making for example a baguette and you’re baking in steam to give the outer surface of the crust, its eggshells sort of very thin, lovely, crispy crust. And when you pick the load up, and you can feel it well you’ll be smelling it straightaway. There’s no better product I think in the world that can appeal to all of your senses. It’s a natural phenomena, isn’t it, when you pick a low folk, you’re going to squeeze it. In the UK, the millers have what’s called a squeeze test where they’re replicating what housewives do when they go and buy a loaf of bread, they squeeze it over here in Europe, most consumers are expecting it to be soft. So if it’s not soft, they’ll put it back and they’ll reach one that is when we come to cut the loaf, you’re feeling the knife going first of all through the crust and you’re listening to that, depending upon the type of loaf you’re making. If it’s a holler, for example, it is not going to be crispy, but the appearance should be bold, should have a lovely glaze, you’ll be looking at the plaits and they’ll be quite soft in sight. As you’re cutting, you’re taking all that into consideration. And then you’ll have an aroma coming to you. And you’re going to be looking at the texture inside, you’re going to be looking at the softness of the chrome, its resilience. And then the all-important taste and flavor. We have a way with when we’re assessing and judging a loaf of bread, taking the aroma and taking the flavor in one. So aroma, yes, that comes through our nose flavor really comes from the tip of the tongue. So with cut surface of a loaf of bread, you’d hold it up to your nose and you’d squeeze and at the same time tip of your tongue just touch the surface of the loaf. And you’ve got all your olfactory senses happening at once. You can straightaway pick up the length of fermentation, how much effort has gone into getting flavor into that loaf, the softness of the crumb, and the resilience you’re not going to get that unless all the different elements of the process the flowers, right, the mixings, right, the water absorptions, right. And some flowers that contain a lot of very strong gluten forming proteins take longer to mix, they take more hydration. And if you haven’t developed that enough, through longer mixing, then the result will show in the finished loaf.

Spencer: It’s really amazing that we’re talking about a product that comes from four ingredients — flour, water, salt and yeast — yet it is so complex. And one misstep can completely change a product or getting everything just right can create a really amazing experience that like you said it touches all four senses. I can’t think of many products that come from something so simple that are actually quite complex. If we look at The Renaissance that artisan bread has experienced over the past few years. I think it started before the pandemic. But I think the pandemic definitely kicked it into high gear with so many consumers trying to make sourdough in their own homes. What advice would you have for a commercial baker, who wants to bring artisan bread to consumers who don’t have the skills to make it in their home? Without just getting on the bandwagon? How can they really take this seriously and create a good loaf of bread in a commercial facility without just saying we want to get on that trend?

Hallam: Well, I think you touched on something very interesting there, Joanie, the pandemic, lots of people have nothing more to do their home. Bread is the stuff of life. It is simple, it is easy to make. There are hundreds of books about the mysteries and science of breadmaking. But you’re right, there’s just four ingredients. But keeping it simple. That’s what a lot of people have discovered that is very therapeutic, when you’re making bread yourself with your own hands at home. And if you scale that up, and you’re doing that, in a micro bakery, commercially, you’re still using the same principles. Instead of lots of pairs of hands, you’ll apply to a machine, but you’re still using the same ingredients. And the challenge then becomes to replicate what you’re doing by hand with a machine but not taking away the benefits of the natural ingredients. It is a proven fact that naturally leavened bread is better for your digestion, you digest it better than maybe some breads that have been processed extremely quickly. And by taking a shortcut of processing quickly, something is being added to the dose to speed that up to take the shortcuts that the natural process of fermentations gas produced stretches the dough, it stretches the protein, it softens it, it allows it to become extensible, and elastic.

Consumers have sort of gone back and rediscovered what basic bread is and what it tastes like. Now the crumb structure, it may be more open, it may not be perfectly white in color. Quite a lot of consumers if they’re asked what their vision of a of a loaf of bread is, they’ll say something nice and white and soft. Well to make it white, you’re adding extra things into the process to do that. And it could actually be longer mixing or more water, so that action actually bleaches a flour in a natural process. Once upon a time, we used to have agents that were added to flower that would bleach it because people liked white bread, just the basic principles of allowing nature to take its course. And then introducing steps to control that you can have too much fermentation, it can become too acid, the effect of the acidity can break down the very thing that you’re trying to develop and protecting that the protein. So it all falls apart. And sometimes you can’t have enough. So you could taste a loaf of bread and it’s well, there’s been very little fermentation and there’s no sound sponge or what have you. And there’s no flavor. It’s just serving as a vehicle that a slice of bread is a vehicle to put something else on. Or you can make it stand out by letting the fermentation happen, adding extra salad to it, but controlling it. Controlling it means watching your time and watching your temperature. Because if things get too warm, it can just race away with you.

Spencer: Right, when you think about consumers preferences for clean label products. I mean, I’d say it’s probably been in the past 10 years that consumers have taken to label reading. And I think the term clean label was probably an industry term before it was a consumer term, but it’s really what they were trying to do. And I believe that this resurgence of good bread came out of the clean label movement. Again, if we go back to what we were talking about the four simple ingredients and only takes four or even three ingredients to make a good loaf of bread. That is quintessentially a clean label product, right?

Hallam: Totally agree. Why have we become so infatuated? Of making things last a long time, and in their natural state, they’re not designed to do so. I think you have a classic example here of distribution, an artisan, craft baker, they’re making the bread, and they’re gonna sell it, and they’re going to sell it there. And then in the shop, to farmers markets, what they make today, they’ll sell today. And it’s not going to get wrapped, sliced, or used by or best before date on it of 10 days’ time. Because it’s got to go through a distribution network of whatever that may be the vans to go here and then to there and delivered on the other side of the country. To enable that to happen, things have got to be put in to that loaf of bread to give the impression, that is still a fresh loaf of bread or keep it saleable not just during the transport time, but when it gets to the other end and a consumers Baltics consumer doesn’t want to buy it with well, interest, I was going to say with just a day to two’s life on it. But hey, go to France. And, you know, traditionally, you’ve got all your baker’s baking twice a day, because some baguette that you bought for breakfast, due to the quality of the protein will be quite hard and tough. And you wouldn’t consider it in the same baguette in the evening. Over time, that has changed because milling methods have improved and wheat varieties have been introduced to the protein, if you like is been nurtured and adapted to enable less be just one bake a day and not necessarily two.

Spencer: Yeah, I’m happy that you brought that up that distribution because I was actually just yesterday speaking with a European baker, who their company has come into the US market and distribution was one of the biggest things that they had talked about in how they had to change their process because of the drive time. Like you said, commercial bakers are not selling what they make that same day they have to be put on a truck, they go to a distribution center, then they get sent out to the retail locations and put on a shelf. And so a lot of time has passed by the time that bread gets home to a consumer and then the consumer, American consumers want their stuff to last. They want their bread to be able to sit in the kitchen for a week and have the quality the same as when they purchased it. And that’s sort of a double-edged sword for a baker, don’t you think?

Hallam: I do think there’s an enormous amount of education to be done of the consumers to say, you know, you can’t have your cake and eat it. You know, if that’s what you really want, then you’ve got to change your shopping habit, you need to be supporting your small local artisan craft baker, because that’s the difference. They’re not having to change their product to suit the purpose.

Spencer: Yeah. And this European Baker that I talked to, I mean, they said that they did have to sort of adjust their process, but they were very, very choosy about how they do that, that you don’t just add any sort of shelf-life extender in that they’re very choosy about how they adjust their recipes, in order to accommodate for distribution without compromising the quality. So I mean, I do think it is possible. But I don’t think that it’s something that a commercial baker should take lightly, by any stretch of the imagination.

Hallam: No, there’s some things you can do that have huge effects. As soon as you wrap a product, you introduce what’s known as ERH equilibrium, relative humidity. So this is the humidity that’s in the bag. So between the wrapper, and the actual product now that’s if there’s a high humidity in there, then you’re going to get mold, surface mold quite quickly on the product, even though it’s wrapped. That can be controlled by the environment where you wrap the loaf of bread. So take for example, if you’re just wrapping it in a bakery, and it’s close to where you’re making everything, there’s lots of flour in there, and it’s all being done by hand. That wouldn’t be the best scenario if you’re wanting to extend the life of that life because when it comes down to the oven, it’s sterile. And the environment through which it passes is quite crucial to prevent surface born that say infection from mold or what have you, often the people that might be doing the wrapping, as well, the product needs protecting. So you can have the product wrapped on a machine and it’s gas flushed, there’s something about doing that for a loaf of bread that doesn’t sit comfortably with a lot of people, because the idea is to eat it not keep it, you know, it’s not a motorcar that you want to keep for two or three years before you or however long it might be before you exchange it, we don’t have a loaf of bread here, when you go to a restaurant for a meal, you know, you eat the meal there, and then you don’t take it away with you to eat four days later, do you?

Spencer: That’s a good point.

Hallam: Just a sort of off-the-cuff scenario there. But there’s other ways as well, of extending the shelf life and salt levels are one, just by slightly increasing the salt level in the product can dramatically reduce your equilibrium, relative humidity, something that’s particularly prevalent in cakes, because they have quite high sugar level. And that mold loves, of course. But that’s not to say, you’re creating a problem by having too much salt in it. There’s a lot of focus on salt levels in food, per se, around the world. You know, it’s not good for the ticker is it too much salt. But there is a balance. And salt in food is there not just to enhance flavor, it does have an astringent action on protein. But there is a balance between having sufficient for its technical purpose and sufficient for flavor purpose, as opposed to too much. When you’re rapping, you’ve got to start doing things to loaves of bread that you wouldn’t otherwise do.

Spencer: Right. So there’s another thing I wanted to ask you about. You’ve mentioned it a couple of times, and that is the wheat. Can you sort of enlighten me on your views on how some of these varieties of wheat can impact the quality of an artisan loaf of bread?

Hallam: Well, hugely.

Spencer: Do we have time?

Hallam: Yes, yes, I better write another book. When we talk of flour for bread making you immediately think wheat, the white flour comes from the endosperm. That’s the white sticky stuff inside a grain of wheat when you bite into it out in the field as you do as a child you’re walking along. And the miller’s job is to extract that and then dry it and convert it into this flour. And if you’re going to use the whole grain, the germ is generally removed. The germ is the powerhouse if you like, which when conditions are right, and the grain is planted, and the moisture is there, etc. It sends a little signal to everything and it all starts growing and the radical starts the roots start coming down and gloomy all goes up. And it’s the endosperm which is the starch that feeds the whole process. And you end up with the plant of wheat, which is quite remarkable when you think of what it’s all come from as one little seed or one little grain.

Where the wheat is grown, and how it’s grown, can have remarkable attributes to the final flour. So you could take one strain of wheat, you could grow it in Canada, you could grow it in America, you could grow it in Europe, and the resultant flour will be hugely radically different. The conditions of where it’s grown and how it’s grown, will affect the amount of gluten forming protein that is in the grain. It’s not necessarily about how much of this protein is there, but it’s about the quality of that protein. So for a long, long time, European wheats produced quite poor-quality flour the protein level was very low. Nowadays it’s much, much higher. But the actual qualities that flour has or the qualities of the protein when it’s made into bread is very much poorer than similar flour that comes from the prairies and from Canada. Different wheat varieties have different strengths let’s say in terms of different proteins different amounts of starch etc. So the miller will focus on that to get the right blend what we call a grist by mixing different grains together to give a consistent result for the flour they make you may want a very strong white flour because the bread is going to be baked with no support. So it’s going to be oven bottom baked, it will also need strength for the, for the molding process. When you come to mold the dough, there’s a tension there. And you can see the tension being built up as you mold it tighter and tighter. And if the protein hasn’t got the qualities needed to do that, it will just relax. It’ll just flatten out, which is not what you want added to this as the flavor that the flour gives.

There is a lot of interest at the moment of returning to some old varieties of grain that have long since disappeared. But they’re giving different textures to bread, they’re giving different flavors, different appearances. And there’s a consumer demand for that, because it’s in the mind that it’s pure, that is cleaner will go back to the clean label again, there’s a reason that perhaps they’ve been out bred and no longer around, you know, the desire to make things quicker, make things in inverted commas better. So this sort of redefines what you mean by better. People are becoming much more conscious of their own health, and the number of papers about what we should eat, how much we should eat, the effect of our digestion, because of all the various fast foods that’s produced in that category that we’re eating, as opposed to simple foods. And you can’t get anything much simpler than bread made in its raw state in its original state. So we then come back to what consumers want. Well, I think the majority of consumers want a loaf of bread that satisfies their desires, but that there is a growing percentage of consumers that are more interested in eating less but eating better. Not just wheat from which bread can be made. We all zoom in on wheat because wheat contains those gluten forming proteins gluten gliding and globulin in greater proportion than any other grain. But with an understanding of the science behind fermentation, other grains are beginning to be used. Gluten, people that have an intolerance to wheat gluten has been a huge catalyst I think in the use of spelt. A spelt actually, as an example, is the precursor to the wheat. It’s the oldest known grain certainly in Europe. It was there thousands and thousands of years ago. Spelt contains gluten-forming proteins but the bread made with spelt can be assimilated by people who have a wheat gluten intolerance, because most intolerances to gluten are for wheat gluten.

Spencer: Okay, Stephen, I have just enough time for one last question. And I want to kind of bring it back to IBIE and the Tiptree World Bread Awards, where you are the chair of judges. I do think that this event, which correct me if I’m wrong, but this is the first time that this competition is coming to IBIE, is that correct?

Hallam: That’s correct. Yes. The World Bread Awards in the US was launched about five years ago in New York. It’s sponsored by Tiptree, a big, internationally known British brand, focusing on jams, chutneys, preserves, etc. And we’ve come across to IBIE, who are co-partners in the awards together with the American Society of Baking. And it’s essentially about promoting bread because there are no other awards in the USA, that celebrate bread. And that’s important, right? All too often. We read on the news for anything to be newsworthy, it needs to be something that’s gone wrong, in general. And across the world, you know, people can be so slow to celebrate success. But as soon as you do, it’s not just the product that gets the focus. It’s the people behind it. And in terms of the bread awards, it’s the loaves that win. Now that there are different categories for different types of loaves and each loaf is judged again, against different criteria. Their parents the crust, baked texture, their aroma, their flavor. And it’s always the loaf that is assessed not the people behind making the loaf, the bakers, the chefs, etc. Yes, they will get the praise for having made the loaf, but it’s the loaf that’s the hero.

Spencer: Yeah. And that’s why I’m so fascinated that this event is happening at IBIE, because I do see it sort of as an intersection of the artisan bakers and the commercial bakers. And like you said, it’s about the loaf, and not the person or the company behind that loaf.

Hallam: Here’s the thing. Any business always needs to focus on quality, you know that there’s no business that can survive by reducing quality. There’s no brand or business out there that in the long term has gained by reducing quality you might benefit in the short term by reducing quality on something but in, in my world, and the world of bread, it should be a no-no, right from the word gate, it takes absolutely no longer and hardly saving any expense at all, to reduce your quality. So you should always looking to be do better, to do better and improve. But, you know, as businesses grow, we always looked to aspire and do better and get bigger. Oak trees come from acorns don’t like you know, things start small. And as a craft baker, a micro baker to begin with somebody that started as a hobby. And that hobby then turns into a business. And then they’ve got to find another hobby to do if they have time. If you’re a baker you’d be looking to begin with. And at an event like IBIE, it’s the ideal exposition for aspiring craft bakers to come see where they can head and how they can improve, and how they can do more. And it will be up to them how they incorporate that into their business.

The first thing that craft baker is going to be upset about is not doing it themselves with their own hands. But you’ve got to know how to do that to be able to use the machine effectively, and adjust that machine as opposed to buying a machine because you’ve been told it will do X, Y and Zed and press a button and stand there and it doesn’t do that. Well, if you’ve got that craft knowledge to start with whatever the machine might be, or piece of cake, or oven or what have you. If you’ve got that knowledge, it’s going to put you in a hugely strong place.

Spencer: Absolutely. I could not agree with you more. And that is exactly what I hope to accomplish in this season of Troubleshooting Innovation. Stephen, I want to tap into your expertise to share with commercial bakers to sort of get back to that artisan mindset, because I do think that that will help exponentially in an automated process. I’m so excited to dive in over the course of five weeks with you as we lead up to IBIE and the Tiptree World Bread Awards to look at all of these principles. Next week, we’re going focus on something that you mentioned, and that’s time and temperature and the criticality of that in the process. So I’m excited to dive into that with you next week.

Hallam: Looking forward to it to Joanie.

Spencer: Thank you for listening to Troubleshooting Innovation. Tune in next week when Stephen Hallam and I discuss time and temperature, two of the most important factors when scaling up in artisan bread production.

Welcome to the third season of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Josh Allen, award-winning artisan baker and founder of Companion Baking in St. Louis, is redefining ways to think about artisan bread production. In the sixth and final episode of the season, special guest Josh Galliano joins the conversation. As a James Beard nominated chef and Companion’s innovation leader and QA manager, Galliano shares how his culinary background impacts innovation at the bakery.

Listen to Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple, Spotify or Google. Hosted by Joanie Spencer, Commercial Baking editor-in-chief. Sponsored by AB Mauri North America.

Joanie Spencer: Josh and Josh, thank you so much for joining me this week. I’m excited to have you both here today to really get a feel for your dynamic and hear both of your perspectives. I’d love to hear how you two met.

Josh Allen: Josh Galliano has always been an incredibly giving chef, super generous with his time and with his resources. And so I believe over the years after he moved to St. Louis, that we just met a number of times at chefs events and charitable endeavors and different dinners and things like that and kind of formed a relationship, just sort of within the community. We have an incredibly small, very tight knit restaurant community here in St. Louis, which is really nice. And as a kind of a micro vendor to that community for a long time. We were sort of always on the peripheral. And I was always kind of in awe of of what some of these chefs and folks have done, including Josh and so we just kind of met in those circles initially.

Spencer: Okay, so Josh Galliano, how did you sort of come to know Companion, and how did you get involved on the bakery side?

Josh Galliano: I started to know companion kind of like how Josh said, through all these different chefs event, there was one in particular that I was a part of that Josh really kindly offered to make whatever bread any chef needed. And I was blown away by the fact that, you know, here you have a bunch of creative chefs, and they could come up with anything. Companion and Josh were completely willing to make it for them from scratch. And it was just really kind of awe inspiring to see it happen. And it just kind of built in my mind from there that, you know, it was a good partnership to have. When I was creating a sandwich heavy menu for concept in downtown St. Louis, I knew that Companion could do the types of bread that I had thought would go well with the sandwiches as well as provide me the service that I needed to make sure that if I was there or not there, the bread was always going to be great. And the sandwiches would be made properly, because everything was on time and in our hands. And after that, you know, we kind of stayed in touch. And like Josh said, it’s a very small St. Louis food community. And it’s great because we all share and collaborate together. So at some point, I was making bread at a restaurant that I worked at, and kind of getting more into fermentation. And Josh saw some of the pictures I posted on Instagram, and messaged me if I was interested in joining the dark side. And I was just kind of blown away by that idea. I needed to expand what I was learning and challenge myself in a different way. And Companion definitely provided that kind of outlet for me.

Spencer: I think it’s really funny that some of the best relationships start on Instagram.

Galliano: It is true, definitely true.

Spencer: So, I’m interested about that Instagram part of it, because if I remember correctly, you were just kind of tinkering with baking just in your own kitchen and posting things that you just thought were cool. And then Josh Allen, didn’t you see those pictures and say, yeah, I’ve got to have this guy in my bakery?

Allen: Well, yeah, I mean, his his reputation obviously preceded itself as it related to the culinary arts, and then he was starting to dabble in bread. And you know, I think Instagram is a great way to see what somebody is really into, right? Because the things that they start posting personally are the things that they’re intrigued by and curious about. And I think more than anything, when we look to add folks to our team, especially folks in a leadership kind of role, curiosity is probably the number one attribute. Because we’re going to constantly get ourselves into situations that we don’t necessarily know how to get out of. And I think finding people that are curious is just a tremendous trade. And so Josh posting about things and showing what he was doing at home and on the weekends and this is a guy that I already knew to be working a ridiculous number of hours with a young family that continued to grow even after he joined us. I knew if he was baking bread that he was into it. So yeah, I think I think the direct message feature was nice. I think I just reached out and said maybe it’s time to, like Josh said, join the dark side and get out of the kitchen. And we can offer things that our restaurant community can’t sometimes as it relates to hours and days of the week. I think it can be potentially a lot more monotonous in the bakery business, because if we’re doing our job right, then everything should be the same every day. But at the same time quality of life wise it can be more intriguing and a little bit better than the restaurant world.

Spencer: So Josh Galliano, I’m interested to hear what that transition was like going from the culinary side to the bakery side and what that learning curve was like. We talked a little bit about it when I visited the bakery in terms of what urgency means relative to culinary arts and relative to baking, so can you walk me through that transition?

Galliano: The change of pace and the work life balance were definitely big for me and my family. And then the part that didn’t really change so much was the the feeling of a sense of urgency,  but it was the timing of the urgency that that change. In a restaurant, you have your five o’clock deadline, and your mise en place needs to be there or the nights going to go down in a bunch of flames. But in a bakery, you don’t have that because it’s this very deliberate rhythm and flow. We’re making a bread and it has two hours of fermentation. And then we’re going to do makeup, and then a little bit more fermentation. So it was a much more timed existence as I moved into the bakery. But what didn’t change was when things started to kind of coalesce together. So you know, if summertime hit and it was a warmer day, things might ferment a little different. So there would be that sense of urgency there as far as we have to tackle a, b, and c, and if not, things are going to turn into a big ball of flames. So that urgency was still there, it was just in a different form and a different mentality for something I wasn’t quite used to, but at the same time felt really familiar.

Spencer: I’ve always heard that, and I kind of grew up with this. My mom was really great in the kitchen, but she loved cooking and not so much baking because there was a little bit more room for interpretation when you’re cooking versus that precision that’s required with baking. So how was that for you? Are you one of those who can easily use both sides of your brain? Are you a little ambidextrous in that way?

Galliano: I feel like in one sense, it is kind of the right left balance of our brains that really helps to make things flow in a bakery. Sometimes you would see this baker is adding a little bit more flour if they thought that the starter was a little more moist that day. But, I think the thing that helped me was the movement in the past decade or so where so much of what we do in restaurants is weighed out in grams. You look at some of the cookbooks that are out there now. And they’re great, because they’re all in grams. And they’re easily scaled up. And they’re easily replicated in your home kitchen or your commercial kitchen. And so that that kind of structure really lends well into baking because we are so weight specific, we have to be right. If we’re going to put a nutrition label on to a piece of bread or a dessert, we have to be exact on what we’re putting into it so that the customer knows this is how many calories I need to have for my nutrition or this is what’s going to need to be adjusted in the rest of my diet so that I can enjoy that croissant. Those things were already in me, it was just a matter of moving from grams to ounces and moving from sub gram scales into a bigger scale, so to speak.

Spencer: Right. So Josh Allen, from your perspective, how does having Josh Galliano’s chef background and that chef’s perspective on your team give you an edge? You both said, you know, come over to the dark side, he was a customer and he came over to the vendor side. So how does that experience in the kitchen give you an edge for your product development, but also with customer relationships? Because as we know, in this season, relationships are everything for this bakery.

Allen: Having Josh join our team gave us an instant level of credibility. I mean, not that we didn’t have any we because we were old enough, probably. The business was well into its teenage years when Josh joined the team, we were actually almost 20 years old when. But it just really increased the level of credibility we have when it related to chefs. I’ve always been somebody that knows we have to go into the kitchen when we meet with somebody and really see how they’re using the product and the equipment they’re using. And I tried to spend a lot of energy learning that over the years, but obviously never having really worked in that space, I did a little bit of a restaurant work when I was in college, but I was mainly a baker not having that knowledge and that expertise. So I had to try to get it on the run, as I was calling on folks over the years. But Josh had a really strong understanding of kitchen flow and of equipment and all kinds of different ways in which these folks are going to abuse our product once it gets into their back door. And I think him being able to talk that talk and walk that walk with the customers leads a level of credibility that we didn’t have before. Then internally, he’s just a tremendous resource to bounce ideas off of. And again, we’ve been doing it for an awful long time, the bakery is approaching 30 years old. So we have a lot of experience with product development. But Josh brings all of that together. And it’s really nice to be able to bounce ideas off of him and see his perspective and see other products that he’s used before. He’s worked in other parts of the world and in other parts of the country, and has a lot of experience in a lot of different stuff. I think it’s been equal in terms of the internal and the external piece. And that just speaks a lot to him. He brings a tremendous amount of humility to the process, which is what I always tried to bring, and we talked about it in the first couple of episodes that we’re looking to help the customer tell their story. We’re not necessarily trying to push our story on to them. And Josh really got that right away. And he’s cool with that. I mean, it’s hard for a chef. I didn’t expect that to be easy for him, but it has been easy for him and that humility to the process really is incredibly valuable and has helped us really drive the business forward. Josh, I apologize. What’s it been? seven years, eight years that you’ve been on the team?

Galliano: I’m working on my seventh.

Spencer: I’m just kind of imagining the ideation process with customers. And it has to be really cool to kind of have Josh Galliano in your corner. I said that when we visited at the bakery, Josh Galliano, you’re kind of a ringer, because when your whole core is telling someone else’s story, and you’re trying to develop these products for your customer to use and make their own. What a great resource to have Josh Galliano to be able to say, yes, that will work with this type of sandwich or no, we need to sort of tweak the bread to do this or that in order to create the sandwich or to work with the sandwich the way it should, right?

Galliano: In many ways, I think you’re spot on. You know, so much of what we try to do is let the customer lead the conversation as far as what they want and what they’re envisioning. And I try not to jump in and say no. I try to always keep an open mind and keep a yes mentality so that they don’t have to hear about anything that we would have trouble with in the bakery or in the makeup. Instead, I want them to understand that we’re going to do our best for them and for what they want to have happen on their plate or on their sandwiches, so that we can kind of take some of that stress off their shoulders and concentrate on that beautiful creation that happens within their restaurant. So in many cases, it’s really us helping them but it’s also us helping them through collaboration. And we really try not to say that we have all the answers for them. But we’re going to work super hard to make sure that we do give them the answer that’s going to work best in their restaurant or in their club setting.

Allen:  I’ll just add to that and say that it’s really who Josh and I are in terms of how we approach the process. And at the same time, it really is a wonderful sales technique, not that we really look at it that way. But if a customer gets to play in the development piece and really take ownership in the product that we’re bringing forward, it’s very difficult for them not to be super excited about it and interested in moving forward because it isn’t us laying product on the table and saying, “here’s what we think your story should be and here’s the products that we think fit.” It’s really them playing a role in that, and when they can take ownership in that and when they can feel that they played a part in the fruition of that product from bag of flour to their backdoor, it really does solidify the relationship in a way that’s that’s really incredible.

Spencer: I mean, I just love the two perspectives that you both bring together. It’s just it’s such a perfect pairing. And you guys are the Starsky and Hutch of the baking industry.

Allen: That’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said to us, I think.

Spencer: So taking this beyond just what you two are able to do together. Josh Galliano, I’m interested with your seven years in the baking industry, what kind of partnerships have you been able to develop outside of the bakery to sort of guide the r&d process? How was working with supplier partners contributing to the innovation that Companion brings to the table?

Galliano: I feel that we’ve been really lucky in our relationships and that goes towards our vendors for the fact that they’re very personal. We have a wonderful kind of history with some of our vendors for ingredients, and we have a wonderful history with some of the vendors that we’ve used for equipment. Whenever we have an issue, they’re really just a phone call away. And in many cases, we see those kind of issues pop up kind of cyclically, and they are right there for us every time. And then other times, you know, we found new relationships and new partnerships that really have expanded what we do in the bakery for our customers. So I think AB Mauri is a perfect example for us, and we’ve used some of their products for years, but we never knew them personally. And so once they had located into a new development area of St. Louis, we got to know them and what they were capable of. And they brought us into their facility to kind of show us around and show some of the possibilities that we could work together on. So I guess the best example would be getting in there, and actually them showing us how they test breads and test some of our breads in particular, because when we looked at developing different breads, it was always about did it hit the right flavors for us? Did it function well in our system, and in our process? With AB Mauri they were testing breads with equipment that I’ve never used before. It was kind of like a geeky kid who just really got excited, and they played with me on that. They showed me how I could improve the breads and make it to where the function wasn’t just did it perform okay, it was “did it really excel in our in our facility did it hit all the marks that we needed to make sure that it was great bread going to our customer?” And that kind of relationship has been something that I’ve been able to utilize over and over again, some of their scientists are just so fantastic with their depth of knowledge and how I can make what we do here even better. It’s really unmistakable how much they’ve helped us to improve.

Spencer: Would it be a fair assumption to say that by having that resource sort of right there at your fingertips, down the street and going into their innovation hub, that can broaden your perspective on r&d and product development on a bigger scale? So then you know what you need from other suppliers, maybe other ingredients suppliers, or how the product is being machined so you can have deeper conversations with equipment suppliers? Is there sort of a ripple effect?

Galliano: I would say absolutely. And the ripple effect goes in so many different directions, right? In one sense, the ripple effect goes down to our customers. I saw how they would present me with information from testing. And I loved it, it was great. It was all the information I needed to understand the bread more. And from that, I was able to create different cutting and scoring documents for us to use internally as well as to help me speak to customers in new ways that they understood better when they asked us to do testing. And then kind of to your question, yeah, we definitely were able to take that information and go back to our make up of machinery and say  “I want our bread to be more like this.” I need x y&z out of it. And because of what I was able to tell them in more specific terms, other than I want a more airy bread, they were able to tell us, okay, try these different settings and see how it performs. And then let’s do a little bit of variable isolation and work through the different possibilities. It was really eye opening to me, but it was also right in our wheelhouse of always being curious.

Spencer: I love that. And I love the idea of being curious. I think we talked a little bit about this throughout this season, that it’s not just about asking why, it’s about asking why not as well. And that all comes down to curiosity. And that’s really where innovation comes from. This podcast is called Troubleshooting Innovation, and you both are such experts in your field. I think you’re bringing such good information and ideas and things to think about for everyone in our industry. And so as we’re nearing the end, one of my last questions is really what advice do you have for bakeries that might not be so lucky as to get a Josh Galliano. How can bakers develop culinary relationships in order to get into the mind of their customers? And I think that goes beyond just foodservice customers. I mean to get into the mind of how a consumer is going to use bread that they make as well, what advice would you have?

Allen: I can try to tackle that one. You know, I think the biggest thing like I mentioned, you know pre Josh, to look at the bakery in those terms, you know, it was me getting into the kitchen and spending time with our customers in their kitchen, and really making sure that I understood how they were going to use the product, what they were looking for from the product. Was it plate presentation, was it holding time was it “is the product gonna sit above a line with high humidity?” All of those things play a role in what ways we can meet their expectations. And so I think to really understand the customer was to be with the customer. And we love bringing them in here for a tour, but sometimes going in to see them and to see how they operate makes a difference. And we have a sales team that, going back to that word, is super curious about how folks are using our products as well. And so whether it’s Josh or myself, or one of one of our team being out in the field and being inside of restaurants, that makes a huge difference. We always kind of talk about that, if our only job was to make bread, it would be easy, but we’ve got to figure out how to get it in the right box, to the right customer. And then make sure that it works for them inside of their restaurant all the way through to consumption, that it doesn’t just end at our door. And we’ve got to have a team of people curious about how to do that. And over the years, especially early on, we participated. Josh and I met at chef dinners and different events and farmers markets and selling markets where we had a chance to directly converse with the customer, and also we mentioned in the first episode we have a couple of cafes, which is a great learning opportunity for us to see how product performs and to see what folks think of certain things on on certain sandwiches. Is this bread too hard, too crusty, too soft, not sturdy enough, whatever those things are, that we have a chance to work through. I think we have all those different opportunities. So as Josh mentioned, experimentation becomes a big thing, one in the trial and error process of developing a product for a new customer, but also inside of our own cafes and at selling events or markets or things like that. And then just getting in to the back door and doing it and getting into the back door of the restaurant and kind of seeing what’s happening. But that curiosity is a big piece. And then the last thing that I will say is that, you know, one of my goals is always to bring people into the organization that are smarter and more experienced than I am and certainly fill the gaps of whatever knowledge and expertise I might have. And you know, Josh certainly did that for us. But we have others here who have done that from a distribution operations, logistics, sales, all of those different things. So I encourage folks to constantly bring people into their organization that make their organization better with a broader range of experiences. And I’m going to learn from those folks every day. And so that curiosity continues as we continue to move forward.

Spencer: I love that it comes down to culture and having that culture of yes that you have, and providing the opportunity for people to be curious, Josh Galliano what would you say as someone with culinary experience, what would you say to a baker who doesn’t have someone on staff with culinary experience? What do they need to be thinking about in their product development?

Galliano: I feel like Josh really covered a lot when it came to the product development and how the innovation relates to the customer. But I think we also have a lot of internal customers. And that’s one thing that I kind of love that Josh touched on is that we have a very bright team of people. And it’s not just in the upper management, it’s really throughout the whole organization. And so I really tried to keep a very open mind and open ear to a lot of what is being experienced and talked about from our production floor or back in packing, it really comes down to a lot of little big breakthroughs. And those breakthroughs are phenomenal for making life either easier for our bakers a little bit better for what they’re experiencing, or even just a little bit better for the breads to where it improves the the experience for the customer. And it could be just as simple as how you’re fine tuning the settings on the machine, or how you’re scheduling the dough to be produced for the day. And those little breakthroughs really begin to add up. They add up over time to not just improve the experience within the bakery, but they’ll start to improve the experience on the bottom line. And whether that bottom line is because we’re reducing trash or whether it’s that we’re actually seeing an increase in sales, those all add up to make it a successful business. And those things then lead into that culture that we’re really trying to keep supporting here of curiosity, of being always improving and always working toward making it a little bit better than the day before.

Spencer: Okay, you two, I could not think of a better way to end this season of Troubleshooting Innovation. What incredible insight and great advice from a truly innovative bakery that looks at the world through a very unique lens. I can’t thank you enough. This was an incredible conversation and Josh Galliano, thanks for joining us on this last episode and bringing your perspective. It’s really eye opening.

Galliano: Well, thank you. I really enjoyed it.

Spencer: And Josh Allen, thank you so much for sharing your insight over these six weeks of Troubleshooting Innovation. I think that you gave our audience a ton to think about and a lot to learn. So thank you again for your time and your wisdom and sharing your experience with us.

Allen: Thanks, Joanie. It’s been a real pleasure for me too.

Welcome to the third season of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Josh Allen, award-winning artisan baker and founder of Companion Baking in St. Louis, is redefining ways to think about artisan bread production. The conversation in this episode revolves around the importance of the intention behind product development.

Listen to Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple, Spotify or Google. Hosted by Joanie Spencer, Commercial Baking editor-in-chief. Sponsored by AB Mauri North America.

Joanie Spencer: Josh, thanks for joining me again this week. I chose this week’s topic because we’ve had some interesting discussions around what it means to be artisan, so I’d like to kick this episode off by picking your brain on what terms like “artisan” and “craft” mean to you.

Josh Allen: I think in general, they both mean the same thing, which is bread or baked goods made with intention. That’s a word that you used and that’s certainly a word we use here. We don’t ever really formally or informally refer to ourselves as an artisan bakery. I sort of believe in Nancy Silverton’s approach that I heard once where she talks about how once you go to mechanization, really in any process, you’re getting away from an artisanal product that should be made by hand and baked in an oven, forged by fire. I do believe that’s true, but I also think there are plenty of instances in which even following artisanal processes doesn’t necessarily mean they’re intentional. There can be not great product produced by hand, baked in a woodfired oven. And I think there can be some terrific products produced with full mechanization and automation all the way through, depending on the intention of the baker and the bakers involved.

Spencer: I totally agree with you. I will tell you that I could make a bread by hand, and it most certainly would not be an artisan bread.

Allen: Yeah, and I think that’s absolutely the case. And I think it’s hard to bring that intention to everything that you do. That’s certainly a challenge that we have and, almost 30 years into the craft, it becomes a challenge every day and making sure that as new bakers come into the fold here that we communicate that and that even though it might be a line running, or it might be a mixer that you turn on, we’re still paying attention. We still have to pay attention to the temperature of the ingredients and the development of that dough. It’s not always set the mixer for 11 minutes and that’s the end of it. Things do change, and humidity does have an effect, and the age of the starter or the pre-ferment. We have to pay attention to all the little things and all the details. It’s great that the backbreaking part of it may be eliminated because of mechanization, but where we use our brains and where we use our instincts doesn’t change.

Spencer: Right. And you know, I was just having a conversation about how with automation, you don’t take the thinking out of it, you can’t treat a human being like a robot. There has to be a thought process that goes into bread production.

Allen: If there’s anything that we’ve seen, it’s that you need more brain power with automation as opposed to less. I think there’s an instinctual feel that comes making a loaf of bread by hand. Those that have done it sort of understand that as you knead and develop that dough in your hands, that feel of what’s happening can sort of take over. And that feel goes away when you’re mixing in a machine and running on an automated line or even semi-automated line. You really have to pay attention, and your other senses have to be heightened to ensure that we’re doing the right things.

Spencer: Yeah. And you know, I want to go back to our very first episode, something that you mentioned — and it’s also something that we talked about a little bit when I visited your bakery — is how with the right intention, something as simple as a hoagie bun could in many ways be just as beautiful as an artisan loaf from Tartine. Can you share an example of how you’ve experienced that?

Allen: Well, certainly. I guess beauty in that case would be in the eye of the beholder. But yeah, I mean, absolutely. We developed a po’boy bread for a chef in St. Louis, who actually has multiple restaurants in St. Louis, and then multiple restaurants in Tulsa, OK. His name is Kevin Nash, and he’s very good friend of ours. He’s one of only two James Beard winners that we’ve created here in St. Louis. So we’re super proud of them. And we enjoy product development with really everybody in the industry, but it’s really fun with folks who are that skilled and that meticulous and that passionate about what they do.

Kevin was creating a concept called Peacemaker and a peacemaker is essentially the poor boy that traveled south from the Northeast down to Louisiana. And he was looking to create a very specific hoagie basically, and one that he was going to handle uniquely in his restaurant and build a really amazing sandwich program with fried oysters and a lot of different things that he wanted to do on this. He had very specific intentions, to use the word we’ve been using, for that product. The development time on that was… It took a long time to get him what he wanted. And we really enjoyed it and got a kick out of it. And it was kind of a very passion project for all of us, because he had this incredible sense of how he wanted the whole experience to be for his customer. And he even changed throughout, you know, initially he was going to warm it in a convection oven so it would have kind of that shattering crust that sometimes you see in po’boy sandwiches, and then he ended up going to like an oyster butter on a flat top and it changed the texture he wanted on the outside and the inside. And look, it wasn’t easy to do, it’s still not easy to continue to replicate for him on an ongoing basis, because we know he’s paying attention. He’s the one on the line a lot of times making the sandwiches, and so that really kind of reiterated for me how important it was for us to pay attention to everything: to a great burger bun to a great hoagie to a really nice, you know, hearth baked sourdough bread. Like, it really doesn’t matter.

If passion comes from us to create and help the customer tell their story, which is what we talked about initially, if that narrative is theirs and bread is gonna play a role in that narrative, then what we do every day for them is super important, because it’s not a throwaway to them. And it can’t be a throwaway to us. I think certainly with Instagram and social media, you know, the world gets caught up in these beautiful, dark crusted, blistery loaves of sourdough bread. I’m as big of a fan as anybody of those things, but in the end, I do strongly believe that making beautiful bread for a customer — and beauty is what they’re looking for, what the characteristics that are super important to them — for them to tell that story is every bit as challenging. And every bit is challenging for us to do. That’s what sort of gets us out of bed every day.

Spencer: This is one of my favorite things that I’ve learned from you and all of our conversations that we’ve been having: that it really changes how you think about, like you said, beauty in the eye of the beholder. I remember you telling me a little bit about the po’boy sandwich and how you said you took some of those hoagie rolls home with you. And it’s like, yeah, when it’s sitting on my kitchen table, okay, it’s a hoagie roll. But the fact that you can create something so award winning when it’s on that plate, and such a beautiful sandwich, even though at first glance, it looks like it’s just a roll. That is so incredible to think about the things that a baker can produce with a loaf of bread.

Allen: And to think about what a chef can do. Chef Kevin deserves all the credit for that sandwich. You know, we created for him what he wanted, we gave him the vehicle for him to tell his story, and then he is the one that makes it sing. Like I told you, I took it home and my kids are like, “What is this? This looks like a underbaked little slab of dough,” which essentially is what that po’boy kind of has that appearance of, but then when he puts it on the flattop with oyster butter and grills the inside and creates that interior texture to match up against the fried oyster, but still the soft exterior… The whole thing comes together in a way that’s really amazing. I honestly don’t take any credit for it, it’s all him and it was all with his direction. And I give Josh Galliano here, our innovation leader, huge props because he was a big part of that development and helping us figure out how to do it. That’s been really fun for us. And then it’s fun to see the restaurant get the awards and the accolades. And people talk about that sandwich, and they don’t talk about us in relation to that sandwich. And again, it’s not our story to tell, but we want to keep helping push that along and making that product available. And when that stuff happens, you create a customer for a long time. Like it’s going to be hard. I believe it would be hard for Kevin to go somewhere else and have somebody care as much about helping him tell his story as we do. We’ve been doing business with him for an awful long time and, knock on wood, if we continue to do what we’re doing right, we don’t see that changing. Because we’re invested in that with him. And that means a lot to folks.

Spencer: Yeah. And you know, that’s a great segue to the next thing I wanted to ask you. What’s the secret to truly intentional product development? Because you know, they say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So how do you effectively turn intention into practice?

Allen: We’ve built our business model around it. So for us, it works. As we talked about initially, our business is built on these relationships with our end customers and helping them tell their story. That’s what we do, that’s what we value. That’s the mission every day that we bring here. We’re really not a bakery for the most part. We do have a handful of items that sell under our brand that maybe we’re known for, or that we happen to have a good following for, but for the most part, the majority of our business comes from us helping other people tell their story and nobody really ever knows that it’s our stuff. And that’s okay. Because of that, that’s how we do product development here.

We don’t do a lot of product development where we sit in a room and say, “We think the market is ready for chocolate chip strawberry bread, and this is what it’s gonna look like and how it’s gonna be packaged. And let’s take this to market and go flood the marketplace with this particular product.” Now what we do is identify customers, mainly multi-unit operators that have enough volume, where it really makes sense for us to be talking to them, but not so big where they’re necessarily able to go to a real large manufacturer and get help. So for us, that sweet spot is like 15 to 250 units or something like that, delis, restaurants, small grocery stores. We go and develop those relationships and help them solve their problems or help them tell stories that they’re not yet able to tell. So the development is very intentional — again, to go back to that word — in that we’re looking to solve a problem, or to find a product or develop a product for them that they feel like they have a need for. It’s not pushing something into the marketplace. It’s just a different way of doing business. It’s the niche that we find ourselves in, and it’s what we love to do.

I grew up in developing relationships in the food business. I’ve enjoyed that all the way through. So for me, it’s a lot more fun to work with a chef or work with a culinary director of a large group and say, “Okay, what problems can we solve? What do you need? What’s coming in the pipeline? What’s the what’s in menu development? What can we do to help you tell that story?” And that’s what we’re developing against, which is different than us taking a shot at where we think the market is going or what the next trend is. So then the product development becomes intentional in that. And then we have to say, “Okay, what is the final application?” You know, that tells us what kind of oven system we use, is it a convection oven or hearth oven? What kind of divider do we use? How do we mix that? Does it have a pre-ferment? Does it have a sourdough starter or a levain? Is it nothing because the flavor development is less forward and less acidic? All the different things that we’re going to talk to them about, before we ever even turn on a mixer to show them a product, we want to go through that exercise with them to truly understand what the need is. And we can kind of go through that whole thing. We’re very transparent in the process of saying, “This is the kind of price point we could hit or couldn’t hit.”

In some of these instances when we go through these exercises, you know, it turns out that we’re just not the right answer. Maybe they’re too price conscious or too price forward. And we’re never going to be the cheapest person, we’re never going to be able to produce the product the least expensively, but again, the conversation is where a lot of this kind of stuff flushes out. And again, the intention of it is to go through it so that we get a full understanding and then way down the line, we’ll start putting some products together and show them some stuff. We save a lot of time and energy for ourselves and candidly for them, as well, the more conversations we can have before we start tasting bread.

Spencer: It seems like the relationship is a critical part of the intention, like you can’t be intentional without understanding what the relationship is between you and your customer. Right?

Allen: Absolutely. And it’s not easy to compete on that. That’s our point of difference, though, right? Like, we want to do that. That’s what gets us excited. There are plenty of manufacturers that use broker networks across the country. So you may never speak to the manufacturer, you may never talk to the baker, you’re talking to a network of brokers who are making products available or salespeople via broadline distributors who, you know, are selling things out of a book and they happen to be selling bread, but they don’t have an intimate knowledge or a passion. So they can tell you, “Here’s the 12 stock SKU that we have in the freezer, but if you need something special or you want something developed, that’s not something that we can do. You can pick from one of these items and see if one of these things works for you.” So our point of difference is the eagerness — not only the ability, but the eagerness — to want to sit down with the customer and try to figure that out. It’s a longer process. It doesn’t necessarily yield a speedy sale because we have to go through that whole development process with almost every customer. But again, it solidifies that. It sets an anchor differently than we would set if we’re just another SKU on somebody’s stock list. It really does. It develops a relationship and it’s hard to compete with a relationship

Spencer: Honestly, I would argue that artisan bread relies just as much on the relationship and why you’re creating that bread as it does what type of oven that it goes into. Because, again, I could make bread in my kitchen, not in an industrial oven, and it would not be artisan. Like you can throw those ingredients together and make a loaf of bread. And just because it’s not mechanized, doesn’t mean that it’s not artisan, or…?

Allen: I agree. And you know, we’re not so naive as to think that everybody cares, right? We’ve talked to plenty of customers who are like, “Hey, how much is that hamburger bun?” And we turn things off a lot because we recognize that, you know, not everybody is Chef Kevin Nash and who’s passionate about creating this incredible sandwich. But we’re just trying to seek those people out. There’s enough of those people that we can keep ourselves busy. And we don’t try to compete on the commodity side of things because we’re just not that good. We’re not that efficient, we can’t buy in a big enough scale to keep our ingredient cost down, you know, we’re never going to compete on the commodity side of hamburger buns or dinner rolls or even really nice baguettes, because there are there are operations that are set to produce those at scale, that really great quality stuff a lot less expensively than we’re able to do it. But we’re always looking, we’re always on the hunt, for the customers that are interested in telling a story. They’re the fun ones that we go find. And I will say that nine times out of 10, they’re like blown away that there’s a manufacturer that carries that same passion. They really enjoy the process as well, because they didn’t necessarily know that they could find that kind of vendor support that would be interested in even helping them do that.

Spencer: Yeah. And I mean, I have to say that I haven’t talked to a lot of bakers that have this perspective that you do. So I do agree that it’s such an intriguing point of differentiation for your bakery.

Allen: Yeah. We got to go find those people. We got to continue to get the word out. These kinds of podcast opportunities for me help us tell our story, which is that we’re interested in helping others tell their story. But yeah, I don’t think there’s many of us. I think that it becomes a unique sales process when you do it. Because in most instances, and you set that first meeting up, most people are expecting you to open a bag and throw your loaves out on the table and say, “Here’s all the features and benefits of the things that we do and what we make.” And we take it completely differently, right? Like we walk into that room and we say, “What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? What’s the story that you want to tell? What’s missing from what you’re doing? What’s not working?”

How can I show you something to fix a problem if I don’t know what your problem is? So we have to go through that exercise first. Some people aren’t interested in that, they get turned off by that, but other people are really intrigued by that. It’s opened up some doors for us that’s allowed us to continue to grow the business. And hopefully, we’ll continue to do so in the future.

Spencer: Man, I would love to be a fly on the wall when you have that initial conversation, when they’re just expecting you to sort of list the menu of your products. Then you launch into a conversation about, “Let’s talk about your problems and your pain points and how we can help you solve that.” I’d love to see the reactions from your customers.

Allen: You know, we have a couple of salespeople that travel quite a bit and do a lot of work on the phone. In lot of their experiences, I mean, they do the same thing. And they do it better than I do it. Certainly you get a few hang ups, and you get a few folks that aren’t interested in that. Again, like I said, just tell me how much your bread costs are, tell me what you got. But we recognize that those aren’t the customers that we’re going to keep in the long term. Those aren’t the relationships that we want to spend a whole heck of a lot of energy trying to build. But once we get there, and once we can get folks to sit down and open up about that, it’s really kind of amazing, actually. Some of the things that we learn are unique, some things have nothing to do with the product and have everything to do with logistics or distribution or a willingness to try things that are different, or “Hey, could you put it in this size of box for me? Because we’ve invested in all of these reaching coolers that are this size and our other manufacturer’s box doesn’t fit, and you know, they’re not willing to change the size of the box.” Sometimes that’s to do with the bread right? Like sometimes their problems are, “This baker only works through this distributor but I’m getting ready to change and go to this distributor. Are you open to that?”

In a culture of “yes,” most of the time we say yes and figure out whether that’s a good decision later, but we’re going through that exercise with them. But most people don’t ask that. They don’t ask what’s not working. Most people just want to show their features and their benefits. And it’s easy because we’re proud of what we do, so you do have that tendency to want to go there with a bag of bread and show folks, “This is our beautiful brioche bun. And this is our French baguette. And here’s all this great stuff that we’re making.” But in the end, they could be sitting there with a problem that has nothing to do with anything sitting on the table. And now you’re starting to waste their time, and now they’re fidgeting and trying to get out of a meeting. When you turn it around and you just say, “Look, I don’t have anything today, but let’s have a conversation about what’s not working and what you want. And then I’ll come back with hopefully what it is you’re looking for,” it slows it down a little bit. It’s not an easy process to go through. But it’s definitely worth it in the end.

Spencer: But you know, if you think about artisan bread from just a production standpoint, it’s a slow process. And so I feel like you are looking at the entire relationship through the eyes of an artisan: That you want to take your time to get to know them and find out what those problems are to create something really meaningful, and then come back and show them not. Here’s the beautiful bread that I made. But here’s the beautiful bread that I made for you.

Allen: Oh, absolutely. Early on, when we started the holistic approach, it was about, “What’s my display going to look like at the farmers market or in this small grocery store?” The intention was I going to make it look nice at that point. And then let’s work backwards from there on what kind of oven, what time does that come out of the oven, and how do I set my schedule. Now we’re starting to recognize — it’s taken a long time — that it’s the plate inside of a restaurant. And for us now, because we go through frozen distribution, we have to think about it all the way through: How’s it going to get packaged? How does it get palletized? What’s the logistics of getting it from St. Louis to somewhere in Pennsylvania? Or Denver, CO? And how do we get it all the way there and onto the plate to the customer so that they can tell their story? We got to think about all those steps in that process.

With that holistic approach, it’s not trying to force a round peg into a square hole. We’ve got to think about it from the beginning and work backwards from there. How do you want that to come into you? What’s that look like? Does pack size make a difference to you? We’ve got to ask all those questions so that when we come back with an answer, we’ve got it all answered. Sometimes you can solve a problem on the product and then you realize, wait a minute, I can’t get it to you because that product isn’t gonna fit in the box. We’ve had conversations with folks who say they need a 24-inch baguette, and being naive or ignorant or whatever term as we go through this exercise, then we realized that a pallet is 48 inches and a box has to be 25 inches if we want to hold the 24-inch baguette, so it’s not gonna fit on the pallet. Like I can’t ship your 24-inch baguettes. So had we thought about that, you know, maybe we would have made them a 12-inch baguette instead or ask if there’s a different size. Can we think about what you’re serving? Is there a way to do this differently so that that it’s going to fit in the case, which is going to maximize the cube on the truck? We got to think about it all the way through.

We’ve made enough mistakes in that “yes” culture of ours to start learning to ask more questions. And to me, knowledge for us just allows us to ask better questions. Every time we learn something, it means we have a new question we get to ask. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we know more about anything.

Spencer: I love it. So I just can’t help but wonder, Josh, when we look at the state of the baking industry and where we go from here… How do you think innovation could change in our industry? If every baker — no matter what they made, even if it’s just those high speed hamburger buns — how could innovation change if they went about their product development with this kind of mindset: the mindset of artisan?

Allen: Well, I think specialization is certainly happening. I think we’re starting to see, as the food industry evolves, differentiation becomes the biggest thing. Like there are so many great places selling chicken tenders, or so many great burger places, or whatever it is that you’re seeing. I mean, take the chicken sandwich phenomenon that’s going on across the country. Whatever it is, the way they’re going to differentiate themselves is via all of those ingredients. I think bakers have to start thinking about that all the way through. I recognize there are limitations on equipment and speed and price and everything has to be part of it, but as we talked about at the beginning, as long as the intention is right, those are the constraints that you have to work around. I do believe because constraints bring greater creativity as opposed to less creativity, because you sort of know the box that you’re dealing in and then you can start to get creative within that.

But I think, just as we talked about, it’s just intention. So any baker can put a strong intention to take care of the customer into their process and developing those relationships. It may not be something that’s particularly important in the larger scale or commercial sense, and obviously we are not very big, so somebody much larger than us could sort of smile and smirk and say, “That’s great for the little guy in St. Louis to do that.” And that’s cool. That’s where we’re gonna find our growth vehicle for us in doing that. But we intend — at whatever size we get, and we won’t put a limitation on that because we don’t know — but that this is how we’re going to continue to grow the business because it’s what we have a passion for. We have a passion for making a great product, but we have a passion for making a great product for somebody. And finding those somebodies is the harder part than it is making the great product.

Spencer: I love this insight, Josh. It’s just so different, and it’s really refreshing. Thank you so much. Those are all my questions for this episode. I’m really looking forward to next week because we’re going to take this a step further and invite a special guest into this conversation. You mentioned him earlier today, and that’s Josh Galliano, your head of innovation. There’s a really unique relationship there because he was actually a customer at one point, right?

Allen: He was a customer and he was a multi-time nominated James Beard chef. He’s just a tremendous culinary talent and a great guy that was always posting bread pictures on his Instagram account. I mean, the guy would work all hours of the night, he’d go home and make bread for his family. I just reached out to him one day and I said, “Maybe it’s time we stop just posting pictures on Instagram, and you come in here and you start making bread.” It was a good time for him to make a change. He’s got a young, beautiful family, and they live outside of St. Louis on a farm. I hope and I think it’s been a really great fit for him. He brings such a wonderful perspective to the conversations that we can have with our customers because he understands what their challenges are, much better than I do. He can talk the talk and he can walk the walk. And he can go into the kitchens with them and really kind of see what they need and what they’re looking for. And he has such a such a wonderful demeanor, but also just a great perspective and so much knowledge. So yeah, he has been a great asset for us.

Spencer: I cannot wait to have a conversation with both of you because I feel like you alluded to this. He’s sort of the key to putting all of this intention that you have into practice. And I think you guys are great team and I’m excited to invite him into the conversation next week.

Allen: I look forward to it!

Spencer: All right, Josh. Thanks again, and I will talk to you next week.

Welcome to the third season of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Josh Allen, award-winning artisan baker and founder of Companion Baking in St. Louis, is redefining ways to think about artisan bread production. In this episode, he unpacks what happens when a bakery always says yes, identifying the benefits and anticipating and troubleshooting the pitfalls.

Listen to Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple, Spotify or Google. Hosted by Joanie Spencer, Commercial Baking editor-in-chief. Sponsored by AB Mauri North America.

Joanie Spencer: I’m really excited about this episode in particular, because I think it draws on a very interesting part of your history and your narrative, and that is the rule of improv. If I’m remembering correctly, the rule of improv is that you always say yes, and I think that’s really interesting when you apply it to baking. So can you talk about how you personally learned the rule of improv and how you’ve applied that rule to running your bakery business?

Josh Allen: Absolutely. And whatever I do, I’m going to butcher because we’re talking about an awful long time ago, but we mentioned that I grew up in the food business. And when I went to college, I had the luxury — for lack of a better way of saying it — of just studying liberal arts. I was an American Studies major, which meant really, I could take anything with America in the title and it would count towards my major. I also really wanted to study different ways to communicate. I really had this sense growing up, forever, that I was going to go into my family’s business. I didn’t even think about anything else. I wasn’t worried about graduate school, I wasn’t worried about testing again, or any other experiences, I really wanted to take the opportunity. So I took public speaking, I took some drama classes, I took art classes, I took a lot of different stuff. One of the classes I took was a couple different semesters of improv, and I was terrible at it.

So this is not about me being some improv performer. But I found it to be incredibly fascinating as it related to the idea of customer service. And I can actually remember very shortly after graduating, going back to my professor and talking to her about potentially writing a book on customer service and the art of improv. It never went anywhere because I started baking, and that was sort of the end of it, but the idea was really about how you go into a scene with folks. And if there’s four or five or six people in a scene, or even just two people in a scene, you can’t get ahead of yourself and say, “This is how I think this is gonna play out,” because you’ve got all of these people that are doing whatever they’re going to do and bringing their experiences and their sense of what’s happening. So you just have to go with the flow the whole time. And as soon as you start blocking somebody, if they say, “Yeah, I’ve got a pink hat on and I’m getting ready to walk out in the rain,” you can’t say, “Well, no, it just stopped raining outside.” Because that’s just not how it works. It’s really the idea of no blocking more than it is the idea of always saying yes, but you just got to go with it and kind of see where it takes you and enjoy that journey and try to do your participation.

So that’s sort of been a way we’ve created a culture of ‘yes’ here, in that sense. It’s led to some super interesting opportunities, and ones that have really created the business, to be quite candid with you. It’s also just a lot more fun.

Spencer: Yeah, like you said, it probably goes back to just not blocking, rather than you just automatically saying yes. I imagine that in business, it might not always be safe to say yes to everything. Is that fair?

Allen: Oh, absolutely. Because in the end, what we’re trying to do is take care of our customers. If a customer comes to us for a certain product, a certain delivery location, a certain price or something like that … If we can’t achieve that for them, and if we say yes and then fail, not only does that hurt us, but it hurts them. Certainly, you’ve got to bring a sense of realism and capability to that. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t go out on a limb.

You know, our business forever changed in 2012 or 2013. There was a grocery store chain that was expanding across the country. They ended up with a store in Columbia, MO. They were kind of in Colorado and heading east at that point. They called and said, “Our frozen manufacturer let us down. We can’t get any product in Colombia. It’s about two and a half hours from St. Louis. We need bread tomorrow.” And I said, “Okay, let’s do it. We can get your bread tomorrow. Well, we can get your bread for the rest of the week. And then I’m going to come down there and we’re going to figure out if this is something that makes sense for either one of us.” But you know, I’m intrigued enough by what’s happening and seeing this opportunity for growth enough to just try to figure it out. We’re not going to make any money in the next four or five days, shipping bread two and a half hours away and having to use an outside service to do it, but we’re probably not going to lose any money either. So let’s get it down there and see what the opportunity was.

Taking that attitude on was different than saying, “I can’t get your bread in Colombia.” That would have been really easy to just turn it off. There was no way to make money in the short term doing that. But I think that willingness to go out on a limb [is important], because I knew how to do it. I didn’t know if it was going to work or not, but I knew that I wouldn’t let them down in the short term. I didn’t over promise and say they were going to have bread forever. I just said, “Look, I can get you through the rest of this week because this is your opening. I know it’s important to you. Then give me an opportunity to come talk to you.” And it turns out that they ended up loving what we did appreciated what we did. They gave us time to create some frozen products for them to then go into all their stores, and then we wouldn’t have built our new factory if it wasn’t for their growth and that opportunity. It all stemmed from just a willingness to sort of see it through. I think that’s super important.

Everybody knows that between production and sales, there’s always that battle. Production always wants to say no to whatever new opportunity sales brings, and production wants to say, “Well, I just created this new product,” and sales says, “I don’t think it can sell.” There’s always that kind of internal battle that’s happening. We could just turn that around and get a culture of yeah, let’s try that and just see what happens. Let’s be realistic, let’s have a real end date that if this doesn’t work, then it doesn’t make sense, but still taking shots at things. I do believe in the Wayne Gretzky idea that you miss 100% of the shots you never take. And I wouldn’t be talking with you today if we hadn’t taken that shot with that grocery store in Colombia, because it allowed us to expand our business, go into frozen, increase our distribution, meet new partners and [find] new relationships that have turned into other stores and other restaurant partners. That’s where we are today. It really all goes back to that phone call, and it’s really interesting to think about that. So that’s the culture we’re trying to create here. You know, that’s between companions, between departments, between the cafes that we have, and our wholesale operation and between us and our customers. It’s that sort of culture of saying, “Yeah, let’s give that a shot. And let’s see what happens.”

Spencer: So then what happens if you take that risk? You say yes, and you get into it, and you find out it probably wasn’t the right decision. I’m guessing that maybe that’s happened once, maybe twice? So if my assumption is correct, can you tell me how you navigate those kinds of situations and learn and course correct within that situation?

Allen: Well, I think it goes back to making sure that you’re under-promising in that. So if we’re going to help that customer fix that short term issue, deal with it in the short term and then say this just doesn’t make sense for us to continue this. And again, I really believe even though we’re in a transactional business, I believe that profitability — because my dad beat me over the head with it … in a very positive way — that it is relationship driven. We’re not going to make any money tomorrow making sure that you have something, if we have to go out of our way to go to another distributor to buy it and to deliver it to them. So they made a lot of short-term decisions that kept the relationship going. Because it’s a relationship: Over time, it’s thousands of transactions that develop the profitability of the business, not just the single transaction. So when we would do something, if we started making a bun for a restaurant group that in the end, we just couldn’t keep up with the production, or we didn’t have the equipment to slice it or it turned out to be much more of a pain in the butt than we thought it was going to be … before it gets too far, we go to them and say, “Look, this isn’t working for us. I know we’re taking care of you right now. Tell me how much time you need to find the next supplier,” or “Let me see if I can help you find somebody else who can do this better, more efficiently, because I’ve got to bow out of this in X number of days,” or whatever it is.

And again, we want to make sure we take care of the customer. It’s an incredibly incestuous industry and that chef or that purchasing agent is going to end up somewhere else. That’s an opportunity for us. And so how we handle that breakup is just as important as how we handled the initial sales opportunity. So as long as we do it with transparency and honesty and forward communication, it’s usually okay. Like they don’t want to do business with somebody that’s not making any money in the short term. They might, but in the long term, they know that’s not the answer. So almost all of the time they’ve been appreciative of us taking a chance at it. Hey, we said this might not work for us but we’re willing to give it a shot, and then we turn it off or we do something else. I think that’s allowed us to build the business. It’s given us better ideas and more information for the next time that similar kind of opportunity pops up. This is why this doesn’t work or hey, I can make you that bun at that price, but slicing just doesn’t work for me and the way my operation is so I’m not going to be able to slice it. Is that a deal breaker for you? It’s about giving the customer the opportunity, knowing enough to ask the right questions and provide enough information to give them the chance to say no, because that’s super important to them as well.

Spencer: That’s a good segue to the next question. And that is: How do you recover from something like that? Like, how hard is it to continue to have the courage to take risks and say yes to opportunities if you got burned on a previous one, and especially if someone tells you it’s a bad idea, but you believe in your gut it’s a good idea. How do you overcome those fears and hesitations?

Allen: Well, let’s go back to what you said before about getting burned. We don’t get burned in those opportunities. If we go into it recognizing that it’s kind of an experiment, you’re not failing, you’re learning. So it’s okay. We’re not going to hit them all out of the park, some of them are going to work. As long as we learn from it and we fortify our knowledge base, and our team and our understanding of the next time this kind of thing comes around, here’s the things that we need to ask for differently, or here’s what we need to communicate better, or this is what we’re going to talk to production about, or this is the piece of equipment that we should get before we run into that situation again so that we can handle it … then we learned from it. And then it’s probably better that we failed, because honestly, we learn more from failure most of the time than we do from success. So that’s not the problem.

The other thing you mentioned was when you think it’s a good idea and other people don’t. If we talk about it in terms of that experiment piece, and let’s try it and see what happens, then we’re all doing it. And we’re much more apt to support other people inside the organization and want to take a crack at that. Because we know that people will support us when we want to take a shot at something. And you know, we have a packaging supervisor that wanted to change some equipment around and we had some people who thought that was just terrible idea, like the slicer shouldn’t go there, the packaging machine shouldn’t go there. But really, in the end, it was like … let’s try it. What’s it going to hurt us to move the stuff around and see if it makes any sense. And we didn’t end up exactly where we were. But we ended up in a different place than we started. Now it’s dramatically more efficient and it makes more sense. That whole team has taken ownership of an area that they didn’t have that much ownership of before we started that process. Just that willingness to do it and to see what happens and to recognize that as long as we go into it knowing that it might not work, then we don’t go so far. You know, we’re not 100% committed because we recognize that it’s okay to say this isn’t working for us.

Spencer: Okay, so then building that culture of yes, it sounds like it’s helping to work across multiple areas of the company to find some synergies. You mentioned R&D is going to come up with a great product that sales thinks they can’t sell, and vice versa. So how does having this overarching culture of yes, and being willing to take risks — yeah, we can try that, and no, if it doesn’t work we can course correct — how does that create synergies between sales, marketing, R&D and operations?

Allen: It creates trust. So I think in the end, that’s what we’re trying to do. In the end, I think if we can trust each other, that idea might work. It’s trust and vulnerability, right? Like we’re vulnerable enough to put something out there that we know might not work, might not succeed, but we want to give it a try. We believe enough in it. Here’s what we thought about it, here’s our plan. This is what we think then if our whole team of people can then get behind it and say, “Okay, let’s give it a shot and see what happens.” And we start to build that trust across those departments.

We saw a lot of that with our waste reduction. We’ve talked about that in a few episodes so far. And you know, there’s been a lot of little things that we’ve done, it’s been a ton of incremental changes to the way that we manage our waste here that has saved us the 1 million lbs. per year that we’ve been able to achieve. There’s a couple of big things, but it’s been a lot of little things. And that’s just been saying, “Hey, what if we try this? Why are we doing this this way, when we could try it a different way?” The fact of the matter is, in so many instances, it wasn’t working. Like we know we were generating too much waste, so we were willing to take that chance and take that risk. We want to grow our business so we’re gonna have to take some risks with new customers, new opportunities, new products, whatever those are. It’s not just gonna happen without us going out on a limb in a couple of instances and making sure that we’ve got a safety net underneath us so that we don’t — to your point — we don’t fall, break our neck. But we’ve got to be willing to take those risks. And we’ve got to get everybody on board with that. Production has to be excited about the sales opportunity, sales has to be excited about what production is producing or throwing at them, and various things.

I think trust and vulnerability are difficult things to measure, you know. And they’re hard things to grow, whether that’s in a marital relationship or certainly at work. It’s even harder because we don’t have the background and the expertise to know about everybody and all the things that they bring to the table. But we can do that by giving folks a safe place to try things and a safe place to experiment.

Spencer: I feel like you all are really good at not only asking why, but also asking why not?

Allen: Yes, that’s true. That’s a great way to say it. I think that’s absolutely true. And you got to be able to ask both questions. I think it goes back to when we were talking about having a solution for a customer. No, we can’t do this, but here’s what we can do. It’s the same thing. Why are we doing this? And why don’t we try this as opposed to just questioning something? Why do we do it this way? Let’s question it, and then provide some kind of solution and create some kind of brainstorming.

We have what we call here “huddles” on a regular basis throughout the day: small groups of people that get together to sort of do a status update and say, “Okay, here’s what’s coming down the pipeline. Here’s the next three days running. Here’s what’s happening in the mixing area. Here’s what’s happening in the in the various stations across the bakery,” and in those huddles we’ll ask those questions. You’ll get a really diverse group of people who will throw different ideas around on maybe a way to solve it. The nice thing is, is in that situation, you can say, “Okay, well, I got that that particular dose coming down the pipeline again in two hours. Let’s try it in two hours and see what happens,” and then we report back in the next huddle. Here’s what the results were. So we can do that series of little experimentations and little tries all throughout the day, all throughout the week. And those add up to, again, building that credibility, recognizing that it’s vulnerable to come to the table and have an idea. I think that’s really terrific.

Spencer: So we talked about the yes, and I noticed the “why” and the “why not.” So you have the “yes and” principle, but I can also see there’s the “no but” principle, which I think also kind of falls in line with improv, right?

Allen: If there’s anybody with any real improv experience, I don’t think you’re supposed to say no, ever. But certainly, the idea has adapted for us. “No but” is I guess how you’d talk about it, right? Like, it’s “No, we can’t do this, but here’s what we can do” and maybe there’s a way to change it around to say, “Yes, we can take that order, but it’s gonna be on this day and not that day.” So I guess you’re not saying no, in that instance, we’re saying yes to the order, but we need to put a caveat in terms of when we can actually fill that order. Or, “Yes, we love to make that bun for you, but we’re not able to slice it.”

I think there’s ways to do it. And maybe “yes but” is maybe the perfect mix between the two, because we need to be able to control that. Again, I think it goes back to not over-promising or not getting ourselves into trouble with something that we just can’t do, and at the same time figuring out ways to say yes to the customer and yes to the opportunity so that we give ourselves time to know whether it makes sense or not. As long as we’re not hyper-focused on short-term profitability, it gives us that freedom to take a crack at something.

So I’m going to get bread to Columbia, MO, to this grocery store because I’ve read a little bit about him and I think they’re getting ready to grow their business. This might be a great opportunity, so let’s get it. They’re not worried about whether we make any money in the next week or two and see what that opportunity presents itself. And if they would have said, “Hey, we want you to keep delivering fresh every day and we’re going to take our national business through this manufacturer, but he or she just can’t to Columbia.” Maybe we would have said “Okay, that’s terrific. We’ll do it for another week or two, but this isn’t a real viable thing for us to deliver fresh bread two and a half hours away,” and that might have been the end of it. But I think because we said yes and we’re willing to just go out on a limb and just get him through their issue, they were then willing to talk to us and say, “Well, what would it take for you to be that national distributor for us?”

So again, it’s it goes back to that kind of trust and credibility and vulnerability and all of that. People still do business with people. People still want to help somebody in need. And they as long as you’re honest with where you sit most of the time, you can work together to find a solution.

Spencer: Yeah, you’ve used this word several times throughout the conversation, and that’s vulnerability. I really like how you use vulnerability as a strength.

Allen: Maybe that goes back to Brene Brown, who I listen to too much, the author who’s terrific, but yeah. It’s worked in my marital relationship with my wife. It’s worked with my kids. It’s super important for folks to know what you’re not capable of doing, what hurts, what’s not working. And look, we’ve had a handful of failed businesses in the history of Companion. We had a business and opened a manufacturing facility in Kansas City. We opened two cafes that we’ve since closed. I mean, we’ve closed some businesses. We took some shots that didn’t work. The courage to cut those off quick enough, before they took down the whole company or before they bled other areas of the business, it was hard to do that. It was hard to not want to just keep throwing everything we had at a business that really in the end wasn’t going to make it. But the courageous thing to do sometimes is to put an end to something and/or call for help. I think we’ve learned that through our handful of failures over the years. That certainly makes it easier. You know, when things are going swimmingly all the time, it’s certainly hard to be vulnerable, because you feel a sense of invincibility. We have no pretense of invincibility here, especially coming out of two years of the pandemic. We recognize that it all could go away in a minute … and then it can come back and then it can go away again.

So that’s the silver lining, I guess, of what we’ve been dealing with: We are much more willing to talk internally and externally about this is working, this is not working. And let’s figure out a way together to make it work.

Spencer: Now, do you think in those huddles that you have, that companions have a good opportunity to say, “Hey, I see places where things aren’t working well, or working as well as they could be? Let’s try this approach”?

Allen: Oh, absolutely. I think in the metrics that we look at, it’s sort of built in that way, right? Obviously, we talked about the trash, but if we mentioned sales per complaint, and if we start to see complaints coming in, usually they come in bunches from the same customer, right? If we make cookie pucks for somebody, and we were having an issue consistently with that, maybe there’s an issue with the cookie mixer or the way that we’re scaling ingredients or the makeup equipment that we’re using. And then we can get a group of people who participate in that to say, “Yeah, I’m noticing that and here’s what I think we can do to to improve that,” or “Okay, that’s causing a problem. I didn’t realize that was causing a problem. But here’s something that changed slightly that now I should be bringing to your attention.” If we didn’t talk about the complaints and start to mention where those were coming from and how they impacted that metric, maybe that never would have surfaced or popped up. It opens up those opportunities because we’re looking at some things differently. And then folks can have those ideas.

We are constantly asking on the floor: What could we do differently? Is this the most efficient way? Does this make sense? Why do we do this when we could be doing that? And people ask all the time, and then we try to celebrate when we make a change to something and that then reinforces it. Like Joanie had a great idea at the end of the makeup line to change the pans from vertical to horizontal orientation, because it’s easier to load or it’s less heavy to pick up. Hey, it’s we made this change and it’s going this much faster, or we’ve had less injuries down there, whatever the result has been, you know, let’s give Joanie a round of applause. And then we ask if anybody else have any ideas. So people want to be called out, people want to be seen and recognized. It doesn’t even have to be anything more than recognition. But if we can do that regularly, then it starts to open up that avenue for folks to come forward. Because it’s the people at the end of the line, at the oven, in the packing area … they’re the ones that have the right ideas, they do it every day. I mean, it’s not me walking around and coming up with these brilliant ideas just by spending a couple minutes at a station. It comes from working in that station all the time and recognizing the inefficiencies or just asking the question. Sometimes just asking ourselves “Why do we do it that way?” makes us answer with, “I have no idea. That’s how we’ve always done it like.”

Spencer: Exactly. And you know, honestly, that is something I think we are on the cusp of change in this industry. Because the product that you make is made by doing what’s repeatable and getting measurable results. So it’s all based on doing things the same way, the way we’ve always done them. The industry tends to default to that in their innovation mindset: We’ve always done it this way,

Allen: Right. And some facilities and the manufacturing has been set up, and it’s hard to change that. Like it’s not easy to change that when automation is a certain way or a line is set up a certain way or oriented a certain way in a business. Those changes are not easy. It doesn’t matter how big you are. The longer you’ve been around, it’s still a big boat to turn when you want to make a change, because it might be trying to turn a whole ton of tenured people in a different direction. Sometimes people are harder to change the machine.

I think that’s absolutely the case. And it’s one of the positive things about having so many new people, there are a lot of things that are challenging, like having a lot of new people in the business, but one of those things is if we talk about the vulnerability and the trust and coming up with ideas, when you have a lot of new people who really don’t have a lot of experience, they’re going to question a lot of stuff. We’ve learned a lot through that process and some of the things we just have to answer, you know, because there is a reason we’ve been doing it this way for a long time. Because that’s the safest way to do it, that’s what yields us the best product, or whatever it is. But there are a lot of things that — to your point — have grown out of happenstance and those they should be looked at differently. We talked about safety and loading the oven with no gloves. Obviously we take it out with gloves for a reason, but when we loaded it, you know, bakers who have been around for a while don’t want to put gloves on to put bread in the oven. But they were still burning themselves because the rack or the wheel would get jammed. And then all of a sudden you’re trying to move things around and your hand slapped up against the door, against the inside of the oven. So I want you to wear gloves, maybe we can solve that. And it wasn’t only because we have so many new people that were seeing the issue that we just think, wow, that would work for everybody. That would make sense for everybody to do that. So we’re learning a lot every day, thankfully.

Spencer: So I guess the last thing that I want to ask is with this culture of yes — and it’s a sort of an “in summary” question, because it’s what we’ve been talking about this entire time — but what kind of impact can this mindset have on innovation for our industry?

Allen: That’s a terrific question. One, I think it brings an element of fun to the business, because a lot of times you’ll tend to go out on a limb with things that you weren’t willing to do before. That’s something that we don’t do, whether that’s the industry or the individual bakery. And I think the industry’s willingness to look at things differently and have to respond to things differently, it’s just part of it. I think packaging is a big piece that needs to be talked about and continues to be talked about. With the pandemic, there’s a push for individually packaged things and fully packaged things, we’re seeing less bread sold in paper bags, and there is a change coming, right? There’s going to be more and more product that’s delivered from the grocery store to the person’s house. And people want things that are packaged, if it’s going into somebody else’s car or somebody else’s van and they’re not controlling that distribution. Now, it’s not just from the shelf to your home that you’re controlling, now you’re looking for some control or sanitation or sense of trust with that product all the way to your door. So those things are different, and it’s forcing the hand on all of us in the industry to think differently about: How can we still create a great product in bread, for instance? How can we educate the consumers to be able to have a great experience with bread that sold in plastic versus paper? And I think that’s just one example.

Multipack sizes and things like that, you know, if the bins are going to start to go away, and folks aren’t going to want to put their hand into a bulk bin or grab the tongs and build their own bins, then what are those packs? What do people want? Is it 4-packs, 6-packs, 8-packs, 12-packs? I know the store struggled with donuts with that, right? With the pandemic, people wanted to buy pre-packaged doughnuts. But how many donuts did you put in the box? What size box did you have? Is it a 2-pack, is it a single pack? And we’ve got to learn that and we got to talk about that. And then we have to be able to educate the consumer to what the expectations are differently when it’s packaged that way. The donut doesn’t have the same taste and texture necessarily when it’s been packaged the whole time than when it’s been allowed to breathe in a larger case. Bread is the same way, and buns and rolls are the same way.

So I think that culture of yes is what’s coming. We have to say yes to the consumer as it relates to the change in the way that they’re going to get their product to their house and the way in which they want it packaged. We can’t just say, “Well, look, we’ve always done it this way. Bread is always sold in paper and that’s just how it’s going to be,” because the consumer is going to find another way to get the product that they want. It’s just not going to work through Instacart or Amazon Prime that way. Like all industries, we need to continue to grow and evolve and stay in touch with our consumers and make sure we’re delivering not only delivering them the product they want, but delivering the product they want in the way that they want it.

Spencer: Yeah. I mean, consumers are asking “why” all the time and asking “why not,” so bakeries have got to keep up. I think that’s a really good note to end on this week, and it’s a good segue into next week when we talk about the definition of artisan and its relativity to how products are consumed and used.

Allen: Yes, absolutely. I’m looking forward to that conversation.

Spencer: I am too. I know you’ve got some really impactful views on that. I’ve had your products and you know what you’re talking about. So I will talk to you next week, Josh!

Welcome to the third season of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Josh Allen, award-winning artisan baker and founder of Companion Baking in St. Louis, is redefining ways to think about artisan bread production. In this episode, he outlines ways that bakers can think outside-the-box to baseline efficiencies and streamline productivity.

Listen to Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple, Spotify or Google. Hosted by Joanie Spencer, Commercial Baking editor-in-chief. Sponsored by AB Mauri North America.

Joanie Spencer: So last week, we had a really interesting discussion about how fixing the trash at your bakery really changed how you operate. So first, I’d love to just quickly recap the impact that made on the business and how your waste management practices have become a baseline for productivity.

Josh Allen: Yeah, I think we talked last week about the big measurement that we look at. We look at two things relative to waste.

First, we look at real pounds and then a kind of a trailing, 12-month look at how many pounds are we generating on an annual basis in terms of waste, and that’s a combination of both waste for landfill and also composting. So both of our partners/vendors in that do weigh what they take away from us and send us a report monthly to give us a weight. So it’s not a number that we can manipulate here.

And then we also look at trash in what we call trash efficiency, which is our sales divided by pounds of trash. And obviously, as we retract our business as we did during the pandemic, or as we grow our business, we just want to be more efficient with our waste creation. And obviously, we’re looking to eliminate it completely. But that’s maybe not realistic in a manufacturing environment. But relative to sales, we want that number to continue to climb. And obviously the weight, the real pound number is going to go down. I don’t like looking at charts that go down. They’re not really like psychologically motivating to me. So turning it on its head and looking at trash efficiency as that’s the number that we want to see go up. And the sales per pound of trash for us, it’s relative; everybody’s business is different. But as an example, when we started that metric, I believe we were at about $5.80 in sales for every pound of trash generated. And we’ve gotten that number up to almost $13 on an annualized basis.

You know, at almost 2.5-times where we started, it’s had a huge impact. It’s had the impact where you would expect it to — in gross margin and labor savings, because we’re not producing all this product that’s never making it to the customer in ingredient savings for the same reason, obviously — but also just the real trash hauling savings has been pretty dramatic. And we’ve seen that snowball throughout the bakery. We’ve seen it in office supplies, because we used to print multiple copies of every invoice that went out. We would ask the question of ourselves, what do we do with that additional copy of that invoice, and we realized that if the customers didn’t require proof of signature, that we were just discarding those invoices and those POC slips when they came back to the bakery. So we realized that if we’d just printed one copy and left it with the customer, that’s all that we needed. Except for that there were maybe four or five deliveries on a daily basis, out of a couple hundred, that they required us to be able to prove that they signed for the product. So we’d bring those back and keep those, but the rest of them… That was reams and reams of paper on a weekly basis that we weren’t recycling or throwing away or whatever is happening. So we tried to trickle that down everywhere that we could. And in all of those different places, we found that composting was less expensive than sending trash to landfill. And so just everywhere that we’ve been able to look, the waste measurements have had a profound financial impact. It took the bank off of our back, and thankfully. I love the bank, they’ve been a huge supporter of ours, but it’s no fun when they’re looking over your shoulder as aggressively as certainly as they were for us.

Spencer: I can only imagine that it’s quite a motivator when the bank says, “We’re going to come have a conversation.”

Allen: Yeah, because they bring a team of people that you’ve never met before. They bring that kind of, I don’t know, emergency turnaround team or whatever they call themselves. And yeah, it’s not a fun time around the conference table.

Spencer: Okay, so you said something that I thought was really interesting: how you don’t like looking at charts that are trending downward. So you kind of look at them in a different way to see what you’re doing right and improve on that. I think that’s a really interesting mindset to have because it can be a little bit different, realizing when you’re looking at what’s going wrong.

Allen: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And we have a QA metric here that we do, we haven’t really landed on a name yet. But essentially, it’s sales per complaint. Our QA department obviously logs complaints that come in from distributors and customers. If there’s a product out of spec, if it’s underweight, overweight, a baking problem, a packing issue, a labeling issue, whatever that might be, we log all of those complaints and we try to resolve them. But we were just tracking that number. And that’s the same kind of thing, like with real pounds of trash: You want the complaint number to go down, right? But then you’re looking at a chart that’s going the wrong direction.

So again, sort of flipping it on its head and saying, “Look, as we grow our business, as long as we can keep our complaints less than where we were previously, as we continue to grow, then we’re going to be more efficient, and it’s going to be less energy. It means we’re producing a better quality, it means we’re creating better credibility.” So we look at that same number, which is sales dollars per complaint, and establish some goals for that, and some baselines for that as we move forward. That’s another terrific thing, because it’s a great balance against the waste number. I do believe that what gets measured gets managed. And there’s a tendency when you’re managing trash for folks to want to push product through the system. Because “Okay, I know, Josh doesn’t want us throwing anything away. So this product may be sort of on the cusp, but let’s get it out the door, because maybe it’s okay.” And what we don’t want to do is inadvertently incentivize our teams to send out bad product in an effort to generate less waste, right? So we’ve got to make sure we have some balancing metrics to do that.

The trash efficiency is one we’ll do over time, because if you can’t grow your business or because you’re producing poor quality product, eventually it’ll catch up with you in the trash efficiency. But it’ll catch up with you faster in the sales per complaint. So if we’re logging a ton of complaints and a ton of issues, then we can look at that in conjunction with the trash efficiency and say, “Okay, it’s great that the trash numbers are getting better. But we’re sending out poor product. And we got to fix that first. And so we try to have those kind of balances and the sales per complaint. One is a great check on quality. And another great one to celebrate vs. celebrating the number of complaints, right? Like nobody wants to talk about that, as much as it’s important to pay attention to it.

Spencer: I really love this. This is incredibly fascinating because I haven’t really heard of a bakery using customer complaints as a metric. That’s incredible. And I love how you use it in conjunction with fixing the trash, because you’re right, that can inherently become a risk. I heard some really good advice once: Solving a problem by creating another problem is not a solution.

Allen: Absolutely. Yes, that’s actually the case.

Spencer: It’s like an extension of the waste management. So are we truly solving the waste problem? Or are we creating a problem elsewhere? Like you’re taking it to the next step. And then I also like that you’re using it as a positive to say, “Here’s how we’re celebrating how we’re fixing those customer complaints.” That’s incredible.

Allen: If the pandemic has taught us anything — or has taught me anything, I won’t put words in anybody else — what I’ve learned through the pandemic is that it’s really difficult to motivate people to line my pockets with more money. Like to go out on the floor and say, “Okay, let’s really drive this gross margin,” or “Let’s really knock this operating income out of the out of the park.”

You know, a sustainable business needs to generate income to be able to take care of all the things that it wants to take care of. And I certainly believe that, but I do believe there are ways in which we can measure success and find ways to celebrate things that in the end will create a very viable, sustainable business without necessarily having to talk directly about the reduction of labor costs or ingredient cost as a percentage of sales. We’re paying attention to those things, don’t get me wrong, but when we talk about like a scorecard for our business, and the transparency of inviting everybody into that process and doing our best to make sure everybody on the floor and in the dish room and in the sanitation team are involved, and all of that really understands if we’re doing a good job or not… Then that’s not a huge motivating factor, at least currently in the marketplace that we’re seeing.

We need to create some metrics that people can get excited about. And people have gotten excited about trash and its reduction. They have gotten excited about, you know, we’re really talking about taking care of the customer, then if we can sell more stuff per every time the customer finds a problem with us, then we’re doing a good job. In the end, we know that yields better profitability. That’s just kind of intuitive, but we don’t have to talk about it that way. We can talk about it in other terms. Everybody calls a customer service desk when they have a problem. everybody complains to a manager or writes a Yelp review when they have a problem, so they understand complaints. It’s an easy thing to talk about. So how do we reduce complaints? This is what this product is supposed to look like, this is how many are supposed to go in the box, this is what we’re trying to do to take care of our customer. Let’s do that and get less of those complaints. It’s a really easy thing for everybody here to get their arms around and understand.

Spencer: I like the concept of looking at these metrics from the point of view of every aspect of the bakery, because you’re right, if someone is coming in for a certain amount of hours a day and they’re in maintenance, or they’re in sanitation, they’re not thinking about metrics and the success of the company in the same way someone in R&D would be thinking about it, or someone on the sales side or in accounting. So I think that’s great that you’re really looking at it holistically.

And when you said that, you mentioned a scorecard. So if you were to sketch out a scorecard of your metrics and business success, what would that scorecard look like after you’ve got the trash and you’ve got the complaints? What are some other line items that would be on that scorecard?

Allen: Well, we’ve talked in episode one before about our four C’s. The first C in our four C’s is our companions. So if we believe that our first obligation is to take care of our own folks, then safety has to be on there. So safety is on there for us. We track safety through injury frequency rate, which is a fairly common metric. The formula the simple. It starts with accidents, and we use lost time accidents, which is an accident that would keep somebody from being able to finish a shift or come the next day to their shift or multiple shifts, as opposed to somebody who cuts their finger and puts a Band-Aid on it comes back on the floor. So it’s lost time incidents times 200,000 divided by the hours worked in the bakery. What that basically gives us is for every 100 people — because 200,000 is roughly what 100 people would work full-time in a year — for every 100 people, how many injuries we’re having on an annual basis.

And there are metrics across all industries and across all spectrums, and across all sizes of companies that we can compare ourselves to, because we take it per 100 employees. And if you Google “injury frequency rate (IFR)”, you’ll see that sometimes they do it per million hours worked. We do it per 200,000 because as opposed to looking at 500, you know, it’s easier to talk about internally. We’re not quite at 100 people. But it’s easy to say, hey, if we had 100 people on the floor, this is how many injuries we would expect to have.

And look, if it’s about safety, we got to drive that number down, right? And we’ve got to help each other drive that number down. Going back to that idea of what gets measured gets managed, if we’re if we’re just thinking about it, the number comes down, because people are starting to look out for each other. Every month, Josh stops us and tells us what our IFR is. And we want it to be smaller, you know, we want that number to be better than it was before. And so I’m going to pay attention. I’m going to say, “Hey, these pans are stacked too high. Hey, that cart has got a bad wheel on it. Hey, there’s a little lip when you roll in and out of the oven that we ought to get fixed.” Things that maybe we weren’t thinking about before, that we’re now thinking about because we’re talking about it. There’s so many things that folks do in bakeries that you just sort of do because that’s the way you’ve always done it. And it’s interesting, we made one simple change a few months ago. It’s been 30 years we’ve been baking and we’ve always loaded a rack with no gloves on because everybody was comfortable doing it. You push the rack in, you turn the timer on, and when you come back, you put the gloves on, because obviously the rack is hot. Well, we had a handful of burns and somebody said, “Why don’t we just why don’t we just load the oven with the gloves on? Why don’t we just change that? We have so many new people who aren’t so comfortable pushing around a rack with strap pans that are heavy, or various things that can be kind of precarious. Let’s put the gloves on before we load the oven.” We haven’t had a burn since on the ovens. You know, burns are terrible, burns suck. They’re painful and they take a long time to heal. And you’re going to potentially miss work depending on how bad it is, especially when it’s on your hands. So that was an idea that came from just talking about safety more, you know, every day, every meeting or anything that we’re doing, we’re just we’re updating ourselves on what that safety is. And we’ve got to do that.

I believe that we’re going to see long term retention improve because we’re paying attention to safety. People come here and their families trust that they’re going to come back with 10 fingers and 10 toes. And that’s really it, right? Like if you trust the people that you work for, you’re apt to stay longer. And the trust comes from building that credibility. So what are the things that we’re doing? We actually stopped everybody the other day because unfortunately in the storm, last week, we had a slip and fall in the parking lot. We do everything we can inside the bakery. We have a service that comes in and ices, but it started to melt and then it refreezes overnight. Somebody hit a patch of ice and fell; they couldn’t even start their shift. And they’re going to be out for a few days. And that’s a reportable accident for us that we feel terrible about. We put a new policy in place about how we’re going to handle the overnight freeze and thaw issues. But then we also talked about it. And by bringing everybody together and saying, “Look, this is what happened.” We haven’t had another one because I think now people are getting out of their car and going, “Oh, wow, she had a slip and fall, maybe just I should just pay a little bit more attention.” But if we hadn’t talked about it, I don’t know that we wouldn’t had another one because maybe nobody else would have been paying attention getting out of their car. There’s so many opportunities for accidents to happen. So safety is No. 1 for us on our scorecard. It always needs to be and will continue to be.

We also track retention, just a typical management of retention and turnover. Obviously, it’s become a much greater issue in the last two years and will continue to be moving forward. And we look at it in a couple different ways. We look at just a pure turnover calculation, which is terminations divided by the number of active employees that we have on a regular basis. And then we also look at average tenure. So we take all of our active employees and take the average tenure of that group. What we’ve seen is that we’ve lost almost one and a quarter years of average tenure through the pandemic. So a combination of losing some long-term people for some various reasons through the pandemic, and then also, as we’ve rehired having so many people on staff that are so new, that’s a pretty big percentage. I think we went from seven and a half years down to like six and a quarter years. And that’s a big year. I mean, we know how long it takes to learn things. And we know how much people continue to learn in a bakery environment and how much knowledge they carry in their head and experience and comfortability, and just ease of operation and knowing what to bring back with you when you go put something down. So that year and a quarter has been costly.

We’ve got to continue to pay attention to that, you know, looking at average tenure forces us to not only pay attention to the new folks that are coming in to keep them here, but also looking at our long-term folks to make sure that we’re continuing to provide personal and professional development opportunities for them so that they stay. That’s a big one for us, too, as we look at our companions, and then from a company standpoint, our big thing has been — again, through the pandemic — has been fill rate. So for us, if customers place an order, you know how much of that order is making it out the door. And we’ve certainly struggled with that over the course of the pandemic at various times. So we look at it on like a trailing 52 week — so what’s the annualized fill rate number that we’re able to achieve? — and then on a shorter, more volatile trailing month four-week basis because that’s a hugely important number for us too. Because that’s about building credibility with our customer. We talk about it on the floor with our team, like, “Look, if you have a favorite restaurant that you go to, and you love the steak, if you go one week and you order the steak and they say, ‘Boy, we know it’s great, but we just don’t we ran out of steak this week. Do you want to try the chicken?’ You might try the chicken that week because you like them. And you’re forgiving of one week having that issue. But you know, two weeks later, you make a reservation, you go back and you order the steak, they’re like, ‘Yeah, well, sorry, we don’t have it again. You want to try the chicken?’ And you’re like, this is two weeks in a row. You’re starting to lose my trust. I might find another place to go get a steak.”

Spencer: Yeah.

Allen: And we can’t afford that. It’s too hard to get a customer, it’s too hard to keep a customer. God forbid, if they place an order, we got to figure out how to fill it. And that’s a combination from open communication upfront, like you place the order for two or three weeks from now, whatever it might be with our frozen business, we might need an extra week or let’s juggle this PO, maybe these products are going to be hard for us to make. But if we have that upfront communication and get the PO changed, or if we get the order changed so that we know we can be successful, then they know what they can anticipate. They change the PO and then we can fill what we told them we could do, but through the pandemic — and it’s happened to everybody; it certainly happened to us — we think everything’s fine and then two days before we have seven people call off sick and all of a sudden we couldn’t finish the order. Or we couldn’t get it packed. Or we had some issues with mixes or we had to cancel mixes because we didn’t have anybody at the end of the shift. Whatever happens. And it’s when we don’t have that transparency, that credibility starts to suffer.

So fill rates, something that even though it was not fun to look at through the pandemic, it’s been something that we’ve paid a lot more attention to. And it’s something that we can continue to celebrate as we get better. But it’s also a story to tell for new customers as we start to do better. So if our sales team can talk to somebody and say, “Look, we’re running a 92% fill rate for the last year even through a pretty difficult time of the pandemic, but in the last four to six weeks, we’ve been running 99% fill rate”… That starts to build credibility with those customers because they’re having issues with other vendors. And so if we can lead with that and make that part of the conversation, it becomes pretty powerful.

It’s not about price. And it’s not about some other things when we’re gonna get you what you need. It sort of changes the conversation. It’s no different if anybody’s tried to buy a car during the pandemic, right? Like you don’t get to negotiate on price anymore, you just hope that the car that you want is there. Or that you’re going to be able to get it in the next six months or whatever period of time that is. Price all of a sudden isn’t even relevant to the conversation. At least the dickering on price sort of goes away. It’s been really interesting. We’ve been able to arm our sales team with much more knowledge of that: of the logistics, of the supply chain. And they are going to come out stronger because of it, again, because we’re tracking it. And because it’s on our scorecard, it’s important.

And then the last one is just sort of a productivity we look at. We produce bread that goes into a case, so for us, it’s cases per man hour. Sotal cases sold divided by the number of hours that we worked the week previous. And we look at that number on a regular basis. A smaller bakery can do, you know, pounds per hour or loaves per hour or whatever metric works. But that productivity measurement, what I like about cases or pounds or loads or something is it takes the dollars out of the conversation. So it isn’t a function of telling a group of people, how many dollars in sales were generated against their hours of work, that it’s really about what it is that we make. And let’s see if we can get more efficient at making more of those things per hour worked. For us, we believe that sanitation needs to be in there because if the bakery’s not clean and the dishes aren’t clean, we’re not going to be able to be efficient. We believe that for our logistics team and our packers, and so we put everybody in the organization in that number because we believe that overall number is what we need to be able to drive. If we decide we need to hire another person in customer service, that’s going to affect our cases per man hour, so we got to make sure we have an increase in sales coming to justify the need to have a new person in customer service because they’re going to impact those productivity measurements.

Spencer: Okay, so I have a question to go back to the fill rate. When you have those metrics on the fill rate, how do you develop? And this may be an impossible question, considering just how unpredictable things are these days in the pandemic. But how do you develop an action plan if your fill rate drops or you see it start to drop? Where you’re like, “Okay, this is trending in the wrong direction.” How do you take those metrics and develop steps toward, like, what I guess is a contingency plan?

Allen: Well, I’ll tell you what we did during the pandemic, because we really struggled for people for an extended period of time. What we said to ourselves, we looked at it the same way, we use a lot of restaurant analogies here because many folks here have come from the industry. They just make sense in this business. So we look at a restaurant analogy, and we say, “Look at seven o’clock, there’s 50 seats in a restaurant and we can only seat 50 people. If we take reservations for 75 people, we’re gonna piss off 25 people. They’re not gonna have anywhere to sit, right? And the kitchen only has the ability to handle a certain velocity of people. We know what the average table turn is. Maybe we seat 25 at 7 p.m. and 25 more at 7:20.”

So really, the fill rate problems that we ran into could go all the way back to when we took the order. And if we could fix it at the order point, what we did was we looked at how many cases are we really capable of producing on a weekly basis right now given our labor challenges, and it wasn’t anything we ever had to think about because we used to just take whatever orders we could get. We could figure out how to make the bread and that went away in the pandemic with labor challenges. So we had a finite number of cases that we could ship, and anytime we took orders for more cases, then we just failed. So we just put a cap on it. We said, “I’m sorry, reservations for that week are full and here’s when I can get you your product.” It was difficult at first because they had never heard that from us. People had never heard “no” when it related to orders, but they appreciated the fact that if when we said “yes” that we were going to do better with it. So, “I’m sorry, I can’t get that to you on Tuesday. But if you come on Friday, I could have it. Or if you’re willing to come the following Monday, we can have that product produced for you.”

So really, being honest and recognizing and learning what we were capable of… And we still stumbled, don’t get me wrong. We’d lose a few more people or somebody else would get sick or, you know, our guesstimates of what we were capable of didn’t always hit those numbers. But we did much better by limiting that. And we’re only now starting to take the cap off some weeks. And as we start to move out of this — and that’s the hope obviously, that we don’t have to do that — but the lesson learned is still that on any regular basis, we know what we can produce. And if we have more orders than that, maybe we’re gonna have to hire so we’re starting to see those numbers trending higher, we’re going to have to figure something out. But really understanding: How many seats do you have? And how many seats can your kitchen handle at any one time? The way to fix it is that forward planning and the true understanding of who you are. Once you’ve taken the orders, and you’re just killing yourself, there’s really no fallback position at that point.

Spencer: Yeah. I heard you say, you’ll tell a customer, “I’m sorry, we can’t get that to you by Tuesday. But what we can do is we can get you this by Friday.” And I think that’s so important. You have to be able to come back with a solution. We can’t do this, and you can’t just put a period at the end of that statement, right? There has to be a follow up with a solution.

Allen: Oh, absolutely. You got to make sure that you’ve talked to the right teams inside the bakery to know what that solution is, before we make that call back. We all want to answer the customer as fast as we can, obviously, but we need to take that minute to take a breath and say, “Okay, it’s going to be no, but it’s going to be no with this solution and this option.” And I’ll tell you that in 99.5% of the time, they took the option. There were instances where somebody said, “Look, I’m going to panic, I can’t do it.” And we said, “Okay, how about if you cut the order in half? Like what do you really need? Yeah, you have 100 cases on order? What do you really have to have?” And they would be like, “Well, I need these 30 cases, because this customers out of product.” “Okay, we can get you the 30. And then we’ll worry about the rest of it later.” Or we could work through that with them.

It opened the door to that sort of communication that didn’t ever exist before. You know, it was easy for distributors to be like, “No, I’m placing this order.” And I mean, we have distributors that pre-pandemic, they’d have penalties against you if you filled less than 98% of the order. There’d be a chargeback. Like the expectation in the industry, as I think it should be is, I’m going to give you an order with whatever lead time you ask for and that you’re going to fill the order. That’s how it works. And it’s only in the last couple of years that we have so much volatility everywhere, that they backed off on that, thankfully. At the same time, it opened up the opportunities for conversation. And that’s all this is. It’s about the relationship. If we’re honest with people, people want to help, right? Like, if you say, “I’m in big trouble here, I’m really struggling. This is what I can do. Is that okay?” In almost every instance, they’ll say that’s okay. But most of us were too embarrassed to ask or afraid to ask or something like that. And so you kept saying, “sure, I’ll have it,” and then you put 25% of it on the truck, and then they get irritated. And that cost them money because they sent a truck or you ship the truck that’s only 25% full, like there’s so much inefficiencies in the lack of honesty.

Spencer: When you were talking about the average tenure of your employees, and with that fill rate, part of the factor in the struggles that you had with the fill rate was if you didn’t have the labor. You said that you’ve noticed in the past couple of years that you’ve lost about a year and a half off the average tenure of your employees, right?

Allen: Yes.

Spencer: Okay. And so I know you’re working to get that back up. But again, I have a journalism degree, so math is not my strong suit haha. So what is sort of the formula? And how long does it take, if you lose a year and a half off of the average tenure, to get that year and a half back?

Allen: I mean, that’s math. So it’s dependent on how many people you have and how many new people you add. So if you stopped hiring, and everybody stayed, then probably more quickly that number will start to go up, because everybody that’s here starts to have more tenure every month. But you know, with the natural course of things — and again, with the volatility and people making different kinds of decisions than they used to make, there’s still a fair bit of volatility both with long-term and short-term people — every time you hire somebody new, you’re starting with somebody with zero tenure. And so it depends if you’re hiring a ton of people, then that number is going to continue to go down for a while because you’re adding a lot of new people. It’s just a different way to look at that retention number and look at that workforce number.

So I guess the answer to a journalist would be: It depends. And even to somebody who pretends to know math, I think it still depends. And so I think, I guess my answer to that is that it’s going to take a while. Because we are growing as the pandemic is sort of starting to wane, we know that it’s not gone. And we’re going to deal with whatever we’re going to deal with. In this moment, we’re seeing growth, but we need more people in order to achieve that. So it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I think it’s definitely a lagging indicator of the pandemic, because that number will continue to go down as we hire new folks. But it’s still something to pay attention to over time and start to see if there’s a sweet spot or see if when it turns, do we see any changes.

To me, tracking all this stuff is interesting. But where it really gets interesting is when you can look at the curve of any of these sort of non-traditional metrics, and then put them up against gross margin or operating income or whatever it is, and start to see, okay, when we get safety to this number, or we get trash efficiency to this number, that’s when we start to really see and drive profitability. For the leadership of the organization, that’s what we’re trying to do. And we believe that these metrics on our scorecard will have a positive impact financially. But that’s just an assumption. Then we have to prove it. So we still talk about it internally, we talk about the scorecard with everybody on the floor. And then we got to start to weigh those scorecard metrics against the actual financial metrics, and make sure that those things are headed in the right direction because we may find that driving a certain number, in the end, doesn’t drive profitability. And then if what measured gets managed, we gotta stop measuring it, because it’s not the right thing to be looking at. Those mistakes certainly can happen. I still think they can be interesting and things to learn from, we can understand why and maybe it’s tweaking it or looking at it slightly differently, but all of that stuff is sort of important to look at in concert with the financial aspect of the business.

Spencer: And you know, that’s funny, I was gonna say, if you look at the scorecard and then you compare it against the financials, and it’s not there, my initial thought was, well, then what do you do? So I like how you said that you have to tweak it or find different metrics.

Allen: There are certain points, I will say, during the pandemic that with the depressed sales and the challenges of the pandemic, it was very difficult. It has been very difficult for us to make any money and to show any real level of profitability through what we’re dealing with. That being said, we can look at the velocity of things going the wrong way. And the financials slowing down, as we turn some of these metrics around, it might be later on that we can really marry them up. I mean, the last two years have been such an anomaly as it relates to so many different things. We have to believe that the metrics are the right thing. We’ve had enough experience pre-pandemic with a lot of these metrics to know that they work. So it’s still worth driving them. Even if our sales go down 60%, like they did for the first eight or 10 months of the year, it didn’t keep us from paying attention to trash, even when we weren’t gonna make any money with sales down that far. But that doesn’t mean that we stopped paying attention to trash.

Spencer: Right? So just kind of two thoughts that I had. One is there has to be a level of hypothesizing I guess, before you decide to dive into non traditional metrics, you can’t just think this is something cool that we should measure and then cross our fingers and hope that it supports the profitability, you really have to sit down and say, Okay, these are things that we should be measuring so that we can manage them, because we have a reason to believe that managing these specific aspects will lead to better profitability, right?

Allen: Yes, absolutely. And I think some of it comes with experience. Some of that comes from listening to other folks in the industry and what they’re doing. A lot of it comes from listening to folks in other industries, because in the end, we’re manufacturers and it’s not that different than making anything. We happen to we get a kick out of it because we make something that we love, and we like to eat what we make, and there’s there’s an element of bakery that’s special, but it’s not different. I think there are so many places you can turn to, to learn some of the stuff and pay attention to some of these things. The internet is a great resource for looking at non-conventional metrics and conventions and educational opportunities, and all that stuff exists. But at an end moment, you’re going to have to say, “Okay, I believe that paying attention to safety, for me, is going to be a metric that drives better retention. And it’s going to help our production because if we keep our people working and on the floor, as opposed to out because they’ve hurt themselves, you know, we’re going to make better product.” You got to believe all that stuff and think that there’s going to be an effect down the road.

Spencer: Mm hmm. This is my last observation, and I think it’s going to be a good closing thought. It goes back to one of the first things that you said in this conversation. And that is, you don’t want to have your companions have an assumption that it’s about lining your pockets. And would you say it’s a fair assumption that when you have these types of metrics, with the waste management and the companion safety, and the fill rate and the retention, it leads people to really be able to participate and feel like they have a hand in making these changes. So then when they do lead to profitability, it’s not Josh’s company is better, it’s our company is better because we participated in this.

Allen: I absolutely believe that. And I also believe that it’s a lot more fun to celebrate the success of a group than it is to celebrate the success of a business owner. It’s hard to think pre-pandemic, because it’s been so long, but what it has given us are things to celebrate. Even in the midst of a pandemic, as challenging as things were, we could celebrate our continued improvement in our trash efficiency. We could continue to celebrate an improvement in our sales dollars per complaint, even through the pandemic. And so, look, we didn’t have a lot of good news to share. Hey, we lost this customer, we lost this volume of business, we got this number of people sick, we got to wear masks all the time. All the things that we kept imposing on folks that weren’t positive pieces of news, but to be able to stop monthly and say, “Okay, that’s great. We got to be honest about what’s happening in the world. But we can also celebrate that we’re still going here, and we’re still getting better, and that we’re going to be better, even on the other side of this.” That means a lot to people and to continue to celebrate Companion of the Month and things that folks are doing to contribute positively to everything that’s happening here. And finding metrics that we could continue to celebrate even during financially challenging times I think is super important, because there wasn’t a lot of positive things to hold onto in or out of work. So we got to try to create those moments. We’re not trying to just manufacture those out of nothing for the sake of celebrating things. I mean, these are true things that we do believe long-term are going to have hugely positive impacts on the business. And so it’s been great to be able to celebrate those and continue to do so as we wind through this experience.

Spencer: I love that. And Josh, this was such an interesting conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your very unique philosophies on metrics and how you’re finding success and things to celebrate with the entire bakery team. It’s really cool. And I’m excited for next week because we are going to go in a totally different direction. We’re going to move away from those hard metrics to talking about how you learn some lessons from improv on how to create a successful business. I’m excited for that one, too. See you next week!