The Toufayan family way

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15 Nov 2022

Joanie Spencer

Since 2008, Joanie Spencer has covered the retail and wholesale sides of the baking industry.
Serving associations such as the American Society of Baking (ASB) and BEMA, Joanie is also in demand as an industry presenter on bakery operations and trends. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from Rockhurst University and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.

When she’s not running or playing soccer, Joanie spends her time with her husband and 11-year-old son.

RIDGEFIELD, NJ — Ridgefield, NJ-based Toufayan Bakeries knows how to get things done. Whether it’s adding a whole new product to the portfolio or taking on a new expansion, the Toufayan family values are always at the foundation.

Take Toufayan Bakeries’ Plant City, FL operation, the company’s third bakery location and site of its most recent expansion. With a new bagel line and a 160,000-sq.-ft. greenfield warehouse addition, the bakery embodies the principles instilled by the family’s patriarch and company chairman, Harry Toufayan.

At first glance, these projects are simply the result of hard work, customer focus and a commitment to reinvest in the business. Then again, tracing back how those values have built this company reads like a movie script depicting the classic mid-century American dream.

By the time Harry started selling pita bread to supermarket bakeries in the early ’70s, his family had been baking for about four decades. The business began as an Armenian bake shop in Egypt before Harry’s parents immigrated to the US, eventually operating a small bakerygrocery below their apartment in West New York, NJ.

A 2021 Baking Hall of Fame inductee, Harry blazed a trail in the industry as one of the first suppliers of traditional pita bread into supermarket delis. If Harry had an idea, it almost assuredly came to fruition.

“My dad is a very smart man,” said Karen Toufayan, Harry’s daughter and VP of marketing and sales. “He was in a supermarket waiting for his deli meats and thought to himself, ‘This would be a great place to have my breads. While a customer is waiting for their deli meat to be sliced, they could just grab a package of bread.’ And it just grew from there.”

But Harry also had the foresight and work ethic to execute on those ideas, even the risky ones, and the company has operated that way ever since. In fact, nearing 82 years old, Harry still reports to work at 5 a.m. every day in the Ridgefield bakery.

“When I think about how the company culture reflects the foundation that Harry started, I would say first and foremost, it’s hard work,” said Greg Toufayan, Harry’s son and Toufayan Bakeries’ current owner. “Nothing happens in a bakery without having people willing to put their boots on the ground, who care about what they’re doing and want to make the bread the right way.”

That ethos is what built the company’s reputation as a top flatbread and bagel brand and a marquee co-manufacturer of bread, bagels, cookies and more, with a portfolio topping 100 SKUs in total.

In Florida, Toufayan entered the world of contract manufacturing through a handshake agreement with a major snack brand. While the Orlando facility was deep in its pita and flatbread production, it began producing breadsticks for this new partnership, which skyrocketed the business and expanded the Orlando operation from 50,000-sq.-ft. to its current 230,000.

“When I think about how the company culture reflects the foundation that Harry started, I would say first and foremost, it’s hard work. Nothing happens in a bakery without having people willing to put their boots on the ground, who care about what they’re doing and want to make the bread the right way.” —Greg Toufayan| current owner | Toufayan Bakeries

“We take a lot of pride in our contract manufacturing,” said Kristine Toufayan, Harry’s daughter and head of finance for the company. “Without a doubt, the attention that we put into that side of the business is just as important as what we do for our own brand. It comes full circle; we wouldn’t have had the money to reinvest into the bakeries and our own product line if it hadn’t been for that business.”

After significant growth in New Jersey and Florida, the Orlando bakery was at capacity by 2005 producing bagels, buns, pita and breadsticks. About an hour down the road, an old Archway plant was about to be shuttered. Harry scooped up the facility with a plan to ease capacity in Orlando by shifting bun production to the newly acquired Plant City bakery, freeing Orlando to focus on flatbread, pita and bagels.

But Harry had another idea. Rather than replacing the Baker Perkins and Reading Bakery Systems cookie lines, he decided it was time to get into the cookie game.

“He looked at the cookie lines and said, ‘We’re going to sell cookies now,’” Karen recalled. “Greg tried to tell him, ‘No, we’re replacing the cookie lines with bun lines,’ but my dad knew this was good equipment. He came to me and said, ‘We’re going to sell cookies. But don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.’”

Since then, the company has picked up co-manufacturing business for cookies, just as Harry predicted, and it also began manufacturing its own high-end cookie brand, Goodie Girl, at the Plant City bakery.

“[Goodie Girl] is a great brand,” Karen said. “We invested in producing a high-quality product, and it’s paid off. This brand has done really well in the market.”

The operation also added a bun line to ease that pressure in Orlando before the most recent expansion. But as cookie and bun manufacturing hummed along in Plant City, bagel business boomed in Orlando, and the bakery needed more help with capacity. In the spirit of reinvestment, it was time to make room for a new bagel line in Plant City to ease that pressure.

“Orlando’s success with our largest co-manufacturing contract for bagels created this demand that they continuously needed to fill,” said Greg Royal, VP of sales and operations. “They were absolutely at capacity, so the idea of a bagel line in Plant City was so that we could keep that business and build on those customer requests to make more bagels every week or even every day. We had the luxury of being able to start a new line because of that very solid base of business.”

This location always had more expansion in its future, so the time was right to not only install a new line but also add another building on the 30-acre lot.

“When this property was bought, there was additional space that was unoccupied at the time,” Royal said. “There was an idea that we would outgrow the original building after expanding a couple times, knowing that there was this nice piece of land that could be developed. We needed to add more space, specifically for warehousing, with the bagel line that was coming.”

Both projects kicked off in April 2020. While most consumers were in COVID lockdowns and bakeries were in hyperdrive to keep products on store shelves, the Plant City team was also gearing up to commission the bagel line and start warehouse construction on the other side of the property.

“When we first started talking about this, there was no COVID,” recalled David Van Vugt, corporate engineer, who spearheaded both projects. “All we had was a great idea of adding a building so we could put a bagel line in. And the next thing we knew, COVID hit.”

Looking back on a two-year project, the pandemic may well have been the easy part. With construction jobs waning in 2020, the team was able to lock in much of its pricing prior to the raw material shortages stemming from supply chain disruption.

“We got the quotes for the warehouse in January or February, and we were still a little bit hesitant,” Greg recalled. “And then in April, I just said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Constructing a greenfield building, commissioning a new line and running the four other lines to keep up with unprecedented demand required the kind of commitment and dogged determination that comes from the very Toufayan foundation the company was built on. And leading that charge, Van Vugt was cut from the same cloth.

This story has been adapted from the October | Q4 2022 issue of Commercial Baking. Read the full story in the digital edition here.

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