Welcome to the sixth season of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, visits with various members of the team at New Haven, CT-based Chabaso Bakery. Hear about their journey to becoming a Certified B Corporation and building a business as a force for good. Sponsored by JLS Automation.

In this first episode, you’ll meet Charles Negaro, Jr., CEO of Chabaso Bakery, as we delve into Chabaso’s values and practices.

Learn more about this season here, and listen to Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple, Spotify, Google and Stitcher.

Joanie Spencer: Hi, Charles! Well, can I call you Charlie?

Charlie Negaro: Yes, please do.

Spencer: How are you, Charlie?

Negaro: I’m good, Joanie! How are you doing?

Spencer: I am great. Thank you so much for joining me for this season of our podcast. I’m really excited to take our listeners through this journey.

Negaro: Well, thanks for having us. We’re really excited to talk about it.

Spencer: I think the first thing we need to do is talk about what a B Corp is. I just have a quick little definition, Certified B Corporations are for profit businesses that have met the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. They’re certified through B Lab, which is the governing body of B Corp certification. Before we really get into how you became B Corp certified, I want to take this episode to get to know you and your bakery. Because the truth is, and correct me if I’m wrong, but a company doesn’t just wake up one morning and decide to become a B Corp certified company and then figure out how to make it happen from there, right?

Negaro: Yeah, totally. It’s been kind of a 15 year process for us.

Spencer: Exactly. The first thing I want to do is take a look back at the history of Chabaso’s core values and practices to see how you were operating with these values that align with B corps. Then see how the certification process flowed from there. Let’s take a step way back in history and talk about how Chabaso Bakery was born from Atticus, and how it has grown into the company it is today.

Negaro: Sure, totally. My dad started this business or businesses in 1975. My dad was a lawyer, who there are probably many people who are more mismatched for that profession than there are my father. It took him I think most of his adult life to figure out that he was really an entrepreneur. And he ended up buying a used bookstore for basically the price of like the inventory that was going out of business. And it was called Atticus. The name Atticus actually comes from the first publisher, first Greek publisher that published the works of Cicero. It’s actually not Atticus Finch, first fun fact. And the the used book business was a great thing to be in, in the 70s and early 80s, used books, not even new books. And in 1981, they opened a Bookstore Cafe in downtown New Haven, inside the British Art Center, which is a Yale building. And that was the first building in downtown New Haven that kind of started to transform the city. It’s also a concrete box. It’s a museum, so it doesn’t have any kind of fit outs for like baked goods or kitchen, no hoods. So to make this thing possible, we always had to have this like little off site kitchen that was staffed with Yale art students or spouses or partners of Yale students or Yale professors. We’ve relied on this creative energy of all these people. And that really was this foundation for Atticus. And then that turned into Chabaso in about 1996. Because we were baking bread for our retail stores and my dad had the idea of wholesaling it. Chabaso is the combination of the names of me and my two sisters, it’s Charlie, Abby and Sophia.

Spencer: Love that.

Negaro: Yes, still remember this day in 1990 something, where we sat in our kitchen and my dad said, “I want to name this after my three kids.” We all figured out the name and it all just kind of came together. It was a fun little collaborative family moment.

Spencer: That was so awesome. And, I did always assume that that Atticus was named after Atticus Finch. Already I’ve learned something right out of the gate.

Negaro: Yeah, we’ll come up with t shirts or something.

Spencer: You should have it says Atticus, not as an Finch.

Spencer: So Charlie, you have a lifelong experience in this family business with both Atticus and Chabaso. I met you a few years ago. And I remember when I visited Chabaso, at that time, your main involvement, I think you were the owner of Atticus. The day I met you, you were doing some R&D and tinkering around with some Atticus bread in Chabaso Bakery. I remember there was this little mini R&D space inside of the plant. From a baking standpoint, how did you get involved in the business? And how have you kind of grown that because I think you have a really interesting story to tell.

Negaro: Yeah, it’s like, there’s this giant rubber band attached to me. As hard as I’ve tried to run away from the family business and New Haven, the further I’ve gone, the harder it snaps me back. My sisters love to remind me of that. I had done summers making bread. And even now it’s hard, but like back then it was like really hard. I kind of liked the flow that comes with doing something hard all day. But it took me a long time to actually fall in love with bread, probably because I grew up with it. I started working in the family business in 2006, I did the Chabaso thing from 2006 to 2016. from production to COO. I had this experience of going to the bread lab out in Washington. I remember kind of going out there with this thought in the back of my mind of like you can’t change the world by baking bread. Then seeing all these people out there who are like actively changing the world by baking bread, I think the first kind of like a moment you could call an epiphany was like actually standing in a wheat field. And never having done that even though going through like 25,000 pounds of white flour a day. I didn’t even know what the wheat plant looked like or what milling was. That kind of shocked me a bit. And that, among other things led me to think back to all these wonderful things that I grew up with that Atticus, that all the creative energy was producing. And that had all kind of gone away and spent three or four years from 2016 to 2019. Just working over at Atticus just the retail store in New Haven and had the opportunity to try to kind of bring that stuff back while layering in this newfangled idea of fresh milling specialty grains and maybe even trying to grow them in Connecticut. Then in 2019, I had the opportunity to start to run both of those businesses. I think that’s probably right when we met each other, which seems like yesterday and 10 years ago.

Spencer: I just love that story. I’m glad you talked about your experience in the bread lab, because I knew that was a pivotal moment for you. I remember you telling me that story. I think it’s really important to put it into context with how Chabaso makes bread and goes to market. So this bakery, Chabaso started with this mission to make good bread in a town that’s known not only for its intellectual culture, with Yale, but also food culture. How did that lay a foundation for the principles of quality bread that you still live by today?

Negaro: Yeah, we always get the question, because New Haven is famous for pizza. And to some degree Lenders Bagels started in and around New Haven.

Spencer: Yeah, that’s right.

Negaro: And I grew up eating Lender’s Bagels, and everybody asks us, is there something special in the water that makes New Haven pizza, “New Haven pizza”. I think that’s like part of the background. And New Haven is very fortunate that it has Yale in the backyard. The amount of different people from different backgrounds and different cultures and countries that it brings here. It is a melting pot.

Spencer: I feel like being located in a highly intellectual community has to sort of help feed your desire to create something that’s a little bit more complex than just were making loaves of bread and selling it. There’s just sort of higher standards in the area of where you are. Do you feel like just from a culture standpoint, it helps your perspective in how you want to change the world by making bread?

Negaro: Wow, that’s a great question. Yeah, there’s definitely like when you have other people around you doing incredible things. It raises the bar significantly, when you go to school with people who are children of relative geniuses, it raises the bar quite a bit. And then there’s just an expectation of when you have a multicultural, extremely international group of customers, like people move here from San Francisco and live here and they expect a certain thing. I think there’s a lot of incredible creative influences. And then just an expectation.

Spencer: Yeah. I mean what you’re making is definitely artisan bread. But the definition of artisan and can be highly subjective. And my visit to Chabaso was one of my first lessons. I remember the story I wrote, and I think I even opened it with “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and artisan is in the eye of the breadmaker.” Because there are so many factors that go into what makes an artisan loaf. For Chabaso, one of those factors is the people and the principles behind your bread making process. How do those support your definition of artisan bread?

Negaro: Yeah, totally. We’ve had to come up with our definition of that, for a buyer or somebody, when we’re getting a tour or trying to do that whole, “this is why this is worth this amount of money, like this is the value in this” sales pitch. We’ve had to define artisan and some simple words. But like you’re mentioning, it’s not simple. On the manufacturing side, it’s the differentiation between like the time and temperature between what we do and what you call kind of like a no time dough. We’re using a lot of prefermented doughs, we have long bulk fermentation times. And that’s very challenging, in terms of getting extremely high throughput, finding machines that work with this process. Since the beginning in the 90s, putting in machines, for some level of automation has always been, like this kind of works, so let’s put this thing together with this thing. And you have enjoy that process. And then the day to day operations of it, and how it interacts with the staff is just everything. If your team doesn’t understand that every day, things are gonna be a little different. And the desired outcome is collectively making something that’s special, it’s just not going to work. They have to get that this thing is a challenge. And there’s some creativity involved. But it’s also a very well defined process. And to get your team really believing that you have to value them and respect them. And this might sound kind of like, “duh”, but you really have to listen to them. It can’t just be this is how we do things. That fundamental collaborative approach starts so many conversations between you, as a leader or any leader in the organization and the team that it creates a culture. I guess, in some part, probably, when we first heard about B corps, 15 years ago, it was like, “Oh, this makes a lot of sense.”

Spencer: I loved your transition from automation to how the people are still important in your in an automated process. So you’re doing it a very specific way. And you’re doing it the same every time and an artisan bread, like you have to have certain parameters for the process to get the finish love the way it’s supposed to be. But what are some of those times where you’ve been able to sort of brainstorm with the staff and give them a voice of I think we could do it better if we did it this way.

Negaro: Yeah. The funny part is, they come up with those things on their own. You just kind of have to stand there and watch how they’re doing something. And go, “Oh, how did you think of that?” Show me what you’re in a very unaccusatory way, which is really tough. It’s like, “Why are you doing it that way?” They’re like, “Because it works better.” It’s like, okay, but please tell me more. So I can like make sure everybody does it that way. The days where it comes out perfect, are almost worse than the days where it doesn’t come out. Because you’re like, “Wait, what did we do, right?” Because when you do it wrong, it’s real obvious. And we know what we did wrong. Like we forgot salt, we forgot yeast, we over proofed i. It was 85 degrees in the room today, the air conditioning failed. The points of failure are so much easier to identify than the points of success because perfection is the common I have like 10 different things going right at the same time. So those things come from your staff doing something on the line, or with a mixer or with an oven that you never would have thought of.

Spencer: I really saw that when I walked the plant floor. Those years ago, there is this element of collaboration in your bakery. I think that’s why Chabaso’s story is about way more than just the bread, and how it’s made and who it feeds. I’m going to kind of shift gears here for a second. Your dad, I remember, he told me a story. He told me lots of stories. That’s one of the greatest things about your dad. But he has always believed in doing good beyond just making good bread. And he’s always seen purpose in the breadmaking. And he told me that if he had three wishes for making the world better, one of them would be to have healthier kids. And to start that with how they’re fed. I feel like that’s sort of a defining element of Chabaso as a bread manufacturer. I think that is not a typical of bread manufacturers, because I think there are a lot of them who feel that way. But I think it’s very different than what a consumer would assume a company that makes bread in a factory, they would not assume that a company would feel that way. Can you tell me how it’s been that defining element as a manufacturer?

Negaro: Yeah, yeah. So my, my dad is, he started this business when he was 50, the bakery business. So he started a lot of things late in life, including a family and his brain is always thinking about how much he can kind of affect the things around him in his community, his family and sticking around to see as much of it as possible. So he’s always like I’m going to live for another 30 years. From the very beginning, we were really focused on like, not bringing in the wrong ingredients, you know, process of like, bringing in enzymes, like 10 years ago was like, “What are these? Do we want to do this? Does this change who we are?” Meaning like the business debated it. There’s these things that you’re actually kind of making me think about for the first time in a long time that were very foundational and who we are, and those enormous experiences, affected our day to day, and started to then turn into other projects and ideas my dad had for the community in the bakery. And my mom’s starting a garden out back where she just planted like 20 by 40 feet of tomatoes, and to deal with those consequences. That started New Haven farms, which ended up being a diabetes prevention program in cahoots with a local health clinic that would prescribe a share from the farm. Which was much more than our backyard at that point. And part of the prescription from the primary care physician would be you get vegetables every week, we’ll teach you how to cook. I remember, a local chef was like this is a kohlrabi … here’s how to cook it. And you had to show up you had to do some work on the farm, which was just a urban little thing. And you had to kind of get schooled on nutrition. Those little initiatives that my dad started turned into a lot of different things in around New Haven.

Spencer: Wow, the thing that’s so cool is that it wasn’t just your dad living out his values it has translated into the business and it’s grown. And it’s become something very organic, that now you are carrying on. Now I kind of want to shift the focus back to you, Charlie, you talked about that first time you stood in a wheat field and the impact that it had on you and how you’ve carried that through your passion for breadmaking. And now you’re pretty involved in local state and regional agriculture. Can you kind of talk about your journey, and how breadmaking is running much deeper than the production process from an agricultural standpoint and a community standpoint?

Negaro: Yeah, I know you asked about me, but to have a bakery, making bread successfully and profitably and also be mission driven is the job of many, many people. You know, without people like Reed and our VP of operations and supply chain Rich, and many, many others, it just isn’t possible. You can’t run a bakery with all that’s involved in that and kind of be off galavanting and wheatfields. And be like, look how amazing that is, it tastes so good. And I am like I am trying to make a truckload of bread right now. So it’s a work of so many to take that believe in it and carry it forward. It’s also a very interesting kind of journey and process to go from, like an operating role to a CEO role where you’re going from, that operating of a manufacturing plant to a here’s who we are, here’s what we do, here’s why we do it. And it’s fun and interesting shift that is super challenging. And again, impossible without the right people. The first thing that started me really down the path of growing interesting grains really clicked with me and with us was to actually taste better. That we are leaving, not just flavor on the table, but no pun intended, but leaving nutrition, and so many more aspects of things that we can be including in our food. Unfortunately, I am a lot like my father, so I tell a lot of stories. But there’s this moment after coming back from one of the trips from Bread Lab, and having gone with him to like a barley field and learning what barley was and learning what malt was. And that just the malt industry is just very singular and what it produces. And someone made this like specialty malts and put it in vanilla ice cream, and it tasted like all sorts of different things. And like, Wait, did you put pineapple on this? Like, nope, that’s the malt site. Okay, cool. So we’re definitely screwing up, we’re missing something. Why are we as a society, like accepting these flavors that people are giving us that just like aren’t that great? That’s really what gave us the mental support, confidence to come back and say, “Okay, we’re going to try to grow grains, especially grains in Connecticut and see how it goes.”

Spencer: And how is it going?

Negaro: It’s really hard. So this was like a prepandemic project that started, failed a couple times and then restarted. And the wonderful thing that we’ve experienced in the last five years of working together, Reed and I is we start these little projects. And someone usually goes, that’s a great idea. I’m gonna go do it. If we ended up being the instigator of one good thing for more than happy with it. Right before the pandemic in October of 2019. We did our own little bread thing out at Yale, called Brain Gab. It brought together a whole bunch of people. Again, Reed did all the work. And out of that someone else carried the torch and has started like a Northeast Grain Alliance. They had a mill they had a malt house that’s been growing. And if we had a tiny part in playing in, I would say incubating that but pushing it or nudging it along, we’re extremely happy to have that happen. We’d love for someone in Connecticut to start a mill so that we can continue it. Part of the process also with us with growing wheat in Connecticut was, Connecticut actually has a lot of farmland, and the primary output of that is actually flowers. Right behind that is feed corn for cattle that makes commodity dairy. If you’ve ever known a dairy farmer, you’ve known that they probably work 70 hours a week don’t get paid a lot of money and die young. There’s lots of farmers out there that are dying for something other than what they’re currently doing. They don’t know what to do and they’re relatively risk adverse because they’re right on the edge anyways, it worked pretty well for us. What we have learned is we really want to help support people who are already doing something and that’s where CT Food Launchpad has kind of come in.

Spencer: Let’s talk about that. I mean, I think the work you did with the Connecticut farming was sort of prepandemic but then CT Food Launchpad came after the pandemic right?

Negaro: Yeah, it happened when we went to go open our second retail location and then I give my dad like a lot flack for having like 42 ideas before breakfast. In retrospect, it’s like “Wow, I should probably stop making fun of him.”

Spencer: That’s why I’m sitting here giggling.

Negaro: Yeah, right before like March of 2020, we signed a lease for a second Atticus, in New Haven, it of itself was a crazy idea. But it meant that we had about like eight months to kind of like figure out what the heck we were gonna do with this 2500 square feet. And we’d been talking to the city in New Haven and the state of Connecticut. And they were they still are and very supportive of incubating food businesses and startups. One of the very popular ways to do that is a shared kitchen, or kitchen spaces that people can rent for a food truck or a small food business. And we thought, we’ll go and do that, we’ll make that part of this 2500 square foot, we’re also going to put a bakery in, we’re going to have like a big commercial kitchen and a grocery store. And we’re going to sell stuff, and we’re going to do coffee and so on. We needed to kind of evolve that idea. That pretty quickly flipped over to instead of renting our space to other people, we will help folks make something and get it to market and sell it for them. We started to make baked goods for sanctuary kitchen is a nonprofit in New Haven that helps refugee and immigrant women who cooked at home get a job now that they’ve landed in a new life.

Spencer: Wow.

Negaro: Yeah. They do that through catering. It’s a great model, it makes a lot of sense. We started making a bake good for them selling in our retail locations, and then giving them a percentage of those sales. So all they have to do is come and show us recipe, we’ll scale it up for them and make that happen. We’re like, this checks a lot of boxes, we don’t have to really do anything new. We’re just using our existing staff. We don’t have to, like manage outside groups. And that worked. Not hugely impactful, it’s not like all of a sudden you’re selling significant quantities of this to fund a profit. And then throughout this, we had other people coming to us and saying like, can you help me make not baked good? Like, can you’ve helped me copacker for a hot sauce? I’m like sure we’ll try. After that it evolved into, so there’s people who have market ready products that they’re selling at a farmers market, or through an online store or through their kitchen, and they want to take it to the next step. They want to take it to Whole Foods, they want to take it to another retailer. This is what we do all the time, we go to retailers and say like, here’s our stuff. Let’s do this. Having talked to these startups remembered that process of like, these are very different skill sets that you need to be developing as a person in your kitchen. It’s like you have to learn how to make this stuff. You need to learn how to package the stuff, you need to learn how to sell it and do accounting and do a business plan and then you need to learn how to like, go to a retailer and distribute it, sell it, make it and make it food safe. That’s something that we do all the time. So let’s try to help local businesses do that. They don’t have to learn it. Why have 10 local food startups go and learn this thing, when we already know how to do it, and we can just they can focus on what they do best. Make this really special hot sauce. That’s what CT foods Launchpad is now it seems like it’s that’s what it’s going to be for a while. Again, Reed has helped, there’s a Ghanaian hot sauce called Shito that with our help has gone through with two retailers and is now carried in Stop and Shop.

Spencer: This concept is amazing and that you’ve turned that space sort of into a training and education facility for startup food brands. Right?

Negaro: Yeah, this space is virtual, it’s Reed and I. Coaching might be a little self aggrandizing but act of listening to folks go through the things that we’ve gone through and telling them that it’s going to be okay, when they’re struggling with a growing business, and probably accidentally it has worked out perfectly because our new location is also a little micro grocery store. If I had my druthers, I would spend all day long shopping for small cool food items and merchandising them on our shelves. It fits perfectly with you know, identifying emerging products that we think we can help grow. It’s stuff that we sell that we believe in and then we can take to other people and hopefully help them expand.

Spencer: That’s amazing. And there is such an explosion of emerging brands right now. The space can get a little bit crowded for new brands. And so many of them, like you said, they don’t know sort of what they don’t know and need help getting kick started. I love Launchpad, it is such a perfect name. What a cool point of evolution for your company. Because when I looked at the CT Food Launchpad website, it does say that it’s powered by Atticus and Chabaso. It seems like you’re using both companies for good as you typically do.

Negaro: Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s like, you have to find things that you find are fulfilling for you, and for other people to really believe in them and make them part of your culture and make them stick. We’ve never been the best at putting like a sentence or two around, like”Who are we? What do we do? Why do we do this?” The vision mission kind of wordsmithing sessions of yesteryear are where I always found kind of like personality tests. It’s like this is gonna change tomorrow. But we’ve gotten there through our actions. And it’s also part of the reason why I loved B Corp. When I first heard about it 15 years ago at this like random seminar, I just happen to go to because it gives you the words and roadmap to make sure these things that you’re doing are clear to yourself and others and that they stick around.

Spencer: Yeah. I’ve heard that so many times. It’s kind of what we’ve started this conversation with that you don’t just wake up one day and go, “You know what, I think I want to be a B Corp. Let’s look and see what it takes to become that kind of company.” You learn about it. And then you look at that process and that checklist and realize, this is like how I’ve been living. This aligns with how my company operates. Is that how it was for you with Chabaso.

Negaro: Yeah, pretty much. I think there’s probably people who do want to utilize like the B Corp name and what it stands for, for aspirational growth, either honest, aspirational growth or non. But it really should be a tool that feels very familiar. It’s a 280 question process, where you have to go through and score a minimum of 80 points to qualify as a B Corp, even the most forward thinking companies who are already doing good, struggled to score 80. The questionnaire in and of itself is like part of the process to go, so here’s some things that I’m like, kind of doing but I need to do differently or more formally, to qualify us to get these points. You’re not going to make it through that process, the four or five times that we had to do it to get yourself to where you need to get to.

Spencer: Yeah, and you know what, that is exactly what we’re going to talk about next week, we’re going to really get into the nitty gritty of how you navigated the certification process and what exactly it took to get there. But I’ve loved this conversation, because I feel it was really important to let the audience know who you are. And just like you said, getting that certification, I mean, that questionnaire is long, and it takes a lot of self reflection, and you have to kind of already be moving in that direction. I’ve really loved just hearing this story of Chabaso and how it came to be and who you are as a company that fits into what it means to be a B Corp. And over the course of these five weeks, we’re going to look at the process to obtain certification. Then we’re going to talk about how you operationalize those values on the bakery floor. And then B Corp certification, you don’t get certified and then it’s done. You have to keep improving and get your recertification. I want to dive into plans for the future. And then finally, finish with what the secondary benefits are for being a B Corp. That’s kind of what the lay of the land is for the next few weeks. But next week, we’re going to talk about that process and bring read into the conversation to really hear those details. So I’m looking forward to that. But for now, thank you so much, Charlie for spending this time with me today.

Negaro: Well thanks, Joanie, for giving us the opportunity to talk about it. It’s been great.

Spencer: And I will talk to you next week.

Negaro: Talk to you next week.