Worker-owned bakery has recipe for success
Georgia Kelly | Special to The Sun
For many people, the idea of a worker-owned business sounds like a cross between a hippie pipe dream and a socialist utopia. So perhaps it’s fitting that the Bay Area is home to nearly 100 such companies, with one of the largest and most successful located here in Sonoma County.
Alvarado Street received the 2010 Green Jobs Award, the Bay Area Green Business Award, and is verified as a Non-GMO (genetically-modified organisms) business. With solar panels installed at their facility, the sun provides 40 percent of the energy used for baking.
It’s also coming off its most profitable quarter ever.
Alvarado Street Bakery (ASB) was founded 31 years ago by five members of the “Food for People, Not for Profit” movement that started in San Francisco in the 1970’s. In 1981, this quintet formed the bakery as a cooperative, in Petaluma. Today, the bakery has 110 worker-owners and is doing a thriving business.
In this business model, all the workers benefit. In the third quarter of 2011, the company best ever, ASB worker-owners received an additional $8,000 to their normal salary. The average salary at Alvarado Street is $63,000, a substantial living wage.
Added to that is medical insurance, a pension plan that the company pays into even if the worker-owner chooses not to do so and shares of quarterly profits.
Recently, Norman Solomon (candidate for the 6th congressional seat and author of “War Made Easy”) and I met with CEO Joseph Tuck. We sipped tea and chatted about the history and growth of Alvarado Street.
Tuck has been around since the beginning, and was one of the original bakers who came up with new recipes and ideas for healthy sprouted breads. Sprouting means that the breads are actually flourless. The sprouting process allows the vitamins and nutrients to be more readily absorbed by the body.
Today, all the breads contain sprouted organically grown grains. As noted in their brochure: “everything that passes through our ovens is Certified Organic.”
ASB ships bread all over the country, to small health food stores as well as large chain grocery stores. Each day, it ships 36,000 loaves of bread and 6,000 buns, rolls and bagels.
Doing so takes modern automated equipment and highly skilled worker-owners at every station.
The facility was squeaky clean on our visit. One room was designated for the sprouting of grains, another for mixing of ingredients. Conveyor belts circulated loaves of baked bread several times throughout the floor in order to cool the bread before wrapping it. The conveyance looked like an amusement park ride for bread. Watching the bread ride down the final stretch and drop into place where it was automatically packaged and twist-tied conjured up visuals of Willy Wonka’s factory. At the end of the production line, another quality control person was deciding which loaves were not up to their standards, and a shelf of rejected bread stood nearby.
For the bread that would be sent out of state, there was a large freezer room that kept the bread frozen until it landed at its destination. We saw a fleet of trucks lined up in the parking lot ready to carry bread to local destinations.
A thriving business that benefits from workers who have a direct stake in the success of their endeavors, Alvarado Street is a model for worker happiness and business success.
Georgia Kelly is the founder and director of Praxis Peace Institute, a peace education non-profit organization based in Sonoma. Her previous career was as a harpist, composer and recording artist.
