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Renaissance Baking Company
Sweet on Sourdough
Learning to bake sourdough bread wasn't too tough of a challenge for Steve Bern, owner of Renaissance Baking Company, Miami, Florida. Eleven years of experience baking natural Essene bread had taught him the tricks of working with living ingredients. What it didn't teach him - and what Bern never expected - was how much his new product focus would change everything about the way the bakery did business.
Bern went from making a frozen product that he shipped all over the country, to being a fresh baker supplying a strictly local clientele. It was a transformation that forced him to change how the bakery approached virtually every part of its business - from labor to scheduling to customer service.
Determined to make a difference
Bern had no intentions of becoming a baker when he graduated from Tufts University in Boston in the early eighties. Armed with an economics degree and a seemingly endless supply of youthful zeal, he headed south after college with simple goal: To do something good with his life.
"I wanted to make a positive mark in the world," Bern said. With his background in economics, Bern knew he wanted to start a business, and having worked in restaurants since he was 14, a food business seemed like the right direction. Then someone introduced him to Essene breadmaking - an ancient technique dating back to biblical times.
Essene bread is a dense, chewy, whole-grain product made from sprouted wheatberries. The earliest references to this type of bread are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The living sprouts were made into a mash and the loaves allowed to bake slowly in the sun. The slow process allowed the sugars in the sprouts to develop, creating a bread with a sweet, nutty character.
Intrigued by the natural ingredients and processes of Essene bread, and spurred by a growing market for health foods, Bern launched his baking career, opening a Miami business he named Sprout Delights. "It seemed like a way of getting back to my roots - to create something that was good for the body and good for the environment," he said. "I was really attracted to the idea of providing a product that was healthy and nutritious and life giving." Plus, baking drew on a conglomeration of Bern's interests and hobbies. "I took a lot of engineering classes in college, and I've always been interested in studying the effects of weather. Baking draws on all those disciplines to some extent."
Bern grew his own hydroponic sprouts and simulated the sun drying process by baking his bread for 12 to 14 hours in low-temperature ovens. Sometimes he added fruits or nuts. Then he froze the bread and shipped it to health food stores all over the country.
A shift in direction
As the industry consolidated in the early 90s, the natural foods market got tighter, leading Bern to explore new product opportunities. Sourdough bread was gaining popularity, and he'd gotten requests for it from several local customers, so he hired a consultant who brought him his first cultures and taught him the techniques of sourdough baking. "I was like a sponge, absorbing information," he said.
His experience working with living sprouts made the transition to working with living sourdough cultures an easy one. Bern already understood the basic premise that all artisan bakers must learn. "When you're working with living ingredients, there are interactions going on that are out of your control," Bern said. "You have to be able to work with the process. Sourdough is more subtle than regular yeast breads, because the smallest changes in the environment can affect how the culture performs. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the source of a problem. You might think you're mixing wrong, when really the temperature of the culture is off. Just a few degrees can make a difference."
After an intense month under the consultant's tutelage, Bern reopened his business in the summer of 1994 with a new name: Renaissance Baking Company. For the first month, he gave his bread away to residents of upscale North Miami, where the bakery is located. "We were practicing," Bern said, but it got people hooked on the bread and when the bakery actually offered its products to a paying public, it already had a customer base waiting to buy.
The bakery sold $10,000 the first week. Soon Bern started picking up some awards for his bread, and the competition found itself fighting to compete with a surprising new player who appeared to emerge from nowhere onto the local scene.
Reinventing business for a local market.
Bern chose the name Renaissance Baking Company because of the bakery's brand new product focus. Little did he know he would also face a renaissance in the way the bakery operated.
"We never really sold our Essene bread locally," he said. "When we gravitated to sourdough, we had to reinvent our whole business to serve a local market. We basically went from being a frozen food supplier to being a 24-hour-a-day bread hospital."
Renaissance Baking Company sells most of its breads wholesale, supplying signature products to Miami's hottest fine-dining and upscale casual restaurants, as well as numerous gourmet food markets within a 90-mile radius. Bern has found that unless he teaches his wholesale customers to use his breads properly, they will fail and ultimately blame him. He spends a great deal of time working with individual chefs to understand how they're using his products on their menus. Then he gives them practical advice on storing, slicing, warming and serving the breads so they maintain their freshness and character.
To meet the daily needs of his new clientele, Bern also found himself keeping longer hours and a more frantic pace. "With Essene bread, we could bake it, freeze it and ship orders the next day," Bern said. "With sourdough, it doesn't matter what day it is. It matters what time it is."
Life was a blur for Bern, who literally lived at the bakery for about 13 months, catching a few hours sleep here and there between answering phones, computerizing the business and baking all the bread. "I learned to pretend I was working on a shrimp boat because I had to be there all the time, being the perfectionist a baker has to be."
Bern also had to rethink his production processes to accommodate his larger product line. The bakery went from offering a few specialty products ("Sometimes I added fruits or nuts to the Essene bread," Bern said), to offering more than 200 items every day. "Our entire product line is custom; that's what gives us our competitive edge."
Bern found it challenging to discipline his people to slow down - to not rush the processes that are so critical to sourdough production. "It takes a lot of practice, and a certain calmness to work with the dough. It's that calmness you need to maintain in the bakery." It was most difficult in the beginning. "When we had fewer people, there was even more tendency for people to want to speed things up - especially on a Saturday when they had plans after work."
By the second year, sales reached $1.5 million, which helped Bern to stabilize both his labor and his processes. "As production grew, people fell into a steadier pace. There was no push or rush to go home early. Now, we're just a little beehive. Everyone works very hard." Today Steve finds himself with a new challenge, his latest venture is a consultancy called Baking Solutions.
Excellence has its rewards
Bern's diligence has paid off. One day, as he hovered over the oven, a customer came in to introduce her sister, Kristiina, who was visiting from Finland. Impressed with the quality of the bread, "Tiina" wanted to come back that evening to watch Bern make it. He agreed, and eventually he married her.
"I'm here working all the time, focused on nothing else except making the bread better. This was my reward," he said.
It turns out Tiina comes from a third-generation baking family that runs a large bakery in Finland. When the family first came to meet him, he let his bread do the introductions for him. Tiina's family decided that anyone who could make such good bread must be a good man - and gave the couple their blessings. Bern says that "a good loaf of hand-crafted bread will just change your view of bread." Now he knows it can change your life, too!