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Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Jill.
Why isn't thal Joe?
I have a very personal question to ask you.
Well, we've known each other for a very long time, so there's not much left that we don't know, but go for it.
Well, I actually don't know the answer to this question. Have you ever baked anything?
Ah, not that much. I went through this. I'm just gonna the answer is basically no.
No, Wait, you were going to say something. You went through a phase one.
Time in high school. I got in this like weird, like experimental baking obsession with a friend of mine where we just sort of tried to relearn baking by first principles and see what works.
Oh my god, what does that mean?
Just like not eating any recipes, so not reading any recipes and just start figuring it out and then seeing like what cause things to rise and what tasted good without any starting principles or anything. We knew a few basic ingredients.
It's fun.
I should get back into bacon.
You should, It's really fun.
What do you, Tracy? We know this is just a setup. Because you want to talk about your bacon, why don't you just tell us what you like to bake.
Hey, look, I don't bake that much. Actually in my household, my husband bakes everything. So he does a really good bass cheesecake, really good chocolate chip cookies, things like that. But if you were doing first principle baking, I imagine you know how difficult it is and all the things that are involved in just making like a simple loaf of bread.
I am aware.
And the other thing is not only I understand that it's very complex, but beyond that, I'm always flabbergested at the idea of doing it at industrial scale or semi industrial scale, and how that even works. I have no idea, to be honest, honestly, industrial scale food preparation at all seems crazy to me, like steaks and everything, Like how do you do it over and over and over again and get a repeatable process? It is like a fascinating question to me.
Right, So that's really interesting in and of itself. But the other interesting thing about the baking business at industrial scale, as you just pointed out, is it's kind of a microcosm for the economy. You have all these commodity inputs, which obviously move around along with inflation. You have labor issues, you have to get bakers who want to get into work really really early in the morning, and obviously you
also have consumer demands. So it's really an interesting lens to kind of look through.
Well, one of our the favorite episodes that we've ever done, which I think was twenty twenty two or maybe twenty twenty.
One, long time ago, we.
Talked to a commercial baker in Chicago, and I've always wanted to do more. There was such a pivotal episode for us, and I was like, well, you know, we learned a lot about what was going on with commodity costs, we learned a lot what was going on with pricing, power, et cetera. Well, it's twenty twenty five now I would like to learn more about what's going on.
All right, So we're gonna dive back into baking, possibly not on a first principal basis, but we have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Andy Cayden.
He diden banking baking from first principles to be a really good that would be like a good name for a cookbook. All right, Sorry, keep going.
Good name for a baking podcast. Perhaps, Okay, we're going to be speaking with Andy Cayden. He is the owner of a bakery in LA that's called Bub and Grandma's. They do wholesale orders for a bunch of different LA restaurants, so industrial scale, as you mentioned, Joe, but they also have a retail restaurant that does sandwiches and they're in the process of opening a pizzerias.
So amazing all the.
Baked goods Andy, welcome to the show.
Really good to be here, Thanks for having me.
Shall we start out with where did your interest in bread actually come from? Was this like a COVID trope where everyone started doing their own sour dough and got really into carbohydrates.
Maybe I'm a little prot Covid in my obsession. I was a writer in advertising and TV for about a decade after school and learned fairly quickly after I got to Los Angeles about sixteen years ago that I hated it and hated myself for contributing to sort of the advertising culture, so to speak, and I needed to escape and always had an obsession with cooking and eating and decided to focus on something that I saw missing from the Los Angeles landscape. After I moved here from the
East Coast. I grew up in New Jersey kind of in Italian Jewish sandwich mecca, and saw that there was sort of a glaring absence of those style of kind of walk into it and have a great sandwich kind of experience in Los Angeles. There are a few notable spots, but they aren't everywhere like they are in New York
and New Jersey. I decided to start writing some business plans and figure out how to open a sandwich shop here, and you know, started working at sandwich hoop in Hollywood called Potato Chips for free on the weekends, staging at a variety of bakeries, just to try and figure out
how bread worked. And in that process of trying to figure out how bread works, simply just to talk to bakers about what I wanted, I started baking daily at home and got into that pseudo Covid rhythm of daily baking and the obsession of that comes from falling into it, you know, into its grasp, and you know, started giving away all the bread I was making, and it found its way to a friend of mine who worked at a local restaurant and the owner called me out of
the blue and asked if I could make bread for him daily. I said yes, and hasn't stopped for ten years.
Wait, so initially were you just baking bread at scale in your kitchen.
I started as just for me, just as an experiment, but very quickly kind of once I had that first account, which was maybe six months after I started baking, six months to a year, the attention came quickly and I started needing to level up over and over and over again. So the first place that I would mix the bread in my house and ferment it there, and then shape it and take it to a pizza place around the
corner and bake it in there pizza oven. It was a variety of these acts together, baking in other bakeries off hours to get things done, and as the demand grew very quickly, I quickly had to figure out how to run a business, not just bake a few loaves of bread out of my house, and moved into a semi legitimate space at about a year and a half.
Flash forward to today, zooming out, why don't you tell us about the size and scope of your businesses? What do you have right now just in terms of a volume and number of employees stuff like that.
The wholesale bakery, which is what that story evolved into, is now a fifty person business. We have a sixty five hundred square foot facility that produces bread, just bread, not pastry, for about one hundred and eighty restaurants in Los Angeles. It's a pretty wide distribution, and we are still trying to grow. We're kind of wall to wall in that space and need to move in the next two years, so we're starting to investigate what that would
look like. We also opened a retail restaurant almost three years ago, which is insane how quickly that three years has passed in our weird time vortex that we live within now, and that is another almost fifty person business in the Glassow Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. We are in the process of opening a pizza place in Highland Park, a neighboring neighborhood, that will be open, hopefully in the next four to five weeks, so that'll be another thirty employees, growing to fifty over time.
Why did you decide to do the retail sandwich shop, because I imagine wholesale actually sounds kind of nice because you're still making a product, but you're divorced from face to face interact with customers, which sounds nice to me, but obviously you have a different opinion.
No, I don't. I mean, we started with wholesale. We started in this less sexy, less customer facing environment for the first say, five years of the business before we you know, changed gears to open the retail restaurant. The wholesale business is a much more steady ship. I sort of describe it as you have this big ship. It's moving up and down in the water, but ultimately as
forward moving. It's harder to capsize. It's harder to knock off course, and that makes it a little bit, let's say, less crazy the restaurant business, which was what I wanted to get into in the first place. Had I known what it would be like at the now that I'm there, you know, maybe a wholesale would have been better. To stay out. It's so much harder. It's much more dynamic, everything is changing all the time, much more difficult to
isolate the variables. There's far more variable to consider in the restaurant, especially when you bring in customer customer behaviors and how things really just consistently fluctuate across the board.
One of the themes that comes up in a range of topics that we talk about is distribution, and actually well distribution in terms of sales, but also the physical distribution. How does it work in Los Angeles? Do you have your own vans? Are there third parties that drop off the bread to the restaurants?
Like?
Talk about how you like built up that network and how the bread physically gets from your commercial bakery into the restaurant.
Sure, yeah, we have. Currently we have six vans that are either leased or owned, and it's been a bit of an excruciating endeavor building out this whole network because it is a major, major part of what we do, especially because we're wall to wall. When I say wal to wall, it basically means there is literally no more ovens based per hour available for new loaves of bread
to increase our productions. So if you start baking at two thirty in the morning and you need to get bread to all of these accounts before they open at eight am, you have a very narrow window to cool that bread, pack that bread, get it into the vans,
and get it out to these accounts. So our ops team at the bakery are true geniuses and building out these roots because you have only had this very narrow gap to hit, and if there's famous La traffic or anything else that gets backed up in the baking process, you are scrambling to try and make sure that you take care of these accounts in a way where they
can still do their jobs. So we have to do our job, not only just the baking job, but the distribution job before they show up, before anybody else from our accounts show up to work. Also, the vans themselves are you know, deeply problematic. They are the number one thing that breaks needs service, needs attention, you know, more, even more so than our ovens, which are in near
constant use. And we have explored a number of different options, especially for when we potentially move to a bigger space
about outsourcing our distribution. There are a lot of upstart wholesale distribution companies, some of which are based in La a lot more in San Francisco that are sort of taking the Uber approach and outsourcing their drivers or having a dedicated pool of drivers who work with a variety of different accounts as opposed to one to one so that, you know, one of the major issues with our business is the you know, fluctuating repair and maintenance numbers for
our vans. If we can offload that to someone else, that is something that we have certainly looked into. But when we get into the mix with these conversations, we always kind of end in the same place where, yes, we are not a customer you know, a consumer facing company, but our business relies on that single interaction between the chefs and our drivers. They are our point of contact
with our customers. And if that is not an authentic connection, and if that is not something our employees are connecting with our customers, there's a potential for things to go wrong and a potential for that relationship to be sour. So we've ultimately stuck with our own employees and our own vans for now.
Tracy, I'm just thinking about how crazy it must be like have an interest in bread such as yourself, and then suddenly like you're in the.
Break become a mechanic.
Oh, you're in the break prayer business too, and you got to take that into account.
Now.
I was thinking the same thing, and it's something that I guess when people envision a bakery you don't necessarily think about the transportation and delivery aspect of it. But Andy, you mentioned two thirty am just then and the narrow window for delivery, and I have to ask, what's it like getting actual workers in the door? Who who want to I guess wake up at like one am in the morning and go bake bread.
Yeah, it's it's tricky, you know. You first of all, you have to love it. You have to love the process. And I mean the two thirds the aspect is, you know, very very early and a very very different lifestyle in a literal way. You are falling asleep at five thirty pm, and that means that your you know, connection with your family or connection with your friends. You're operating on a completely different time zone than they are, and it makes things complicated if folks are not operating on the same
schedule as you. But you know, the it's that was the last baking ship that that I did was the Sunday morning two thirty am bake for the Hollywood Farmer's Market. I would, you know, get up at two roll down to the bakery. It would be just me in the dark, a lot of people returning from their various parties, on Saturday night, which made driving there a little bit sketchy, but always you know, being careful and then you know, finish the bake, pack it up, put it in my truck,
and go to the farmer's market and sell it. And then the day would wrap up around two thirty, so it would be this twelve hour kind of sprint and then sale and then come back. And you know, at a certain point it was the only bake shift that I was doing because I had to manage the business during the other days of the week that I was
not doing that. And when you just bake one day a week at two thirty in the morning, it scrambles your mind so wildly and your sleep schedule that I had to eventually abandon it just because I needed more time to manage the businesses. But you really have to subscribe to the lifestyle if you try and push the edge, you know, especially when I was baking and managing five days, baking five days a week and still trying to manage
the business, it was getting sick a lot. It was very difficult to stay healthy when you're operating across two you know, time zones. Really you're living in this kind of Oh my wife and my friends are all living in this time zone, and my business is living in this time zone, and I need both. I need to be there for both. Those were far more complicated times for my own health. But we're on the other side of that now.
We mentioned in the beginning, you know, we like this topic because it's sort of a lends into everything. But what are you seeing today in terms of you know, if you compare now to when you started, how do you think or versus the peak of the inflation whatever was, how do things look today when it comes to both hiring availability and also raw commodity cost ingredient costs.
Hiring availability is unique for us. Obviously, we are looking for a very specialized group of people. So the skills that they hopefully already have are in rare supply in Los Angeles, and that makes hiring complicated far more so for the wholesale bakery than for the restaurant. The restaurant has a lot of over the pool is much wider, and we have very little trouble hiring at the restaurant the bakery.
Would you have said this same thing in twenty twenty two or twenty twenty three, or does it feel easier today than it would have back then at the at the retail level, because that's where that's where like all the complaints were, right, everyone, all the restaurants in the service entities were complaining about how impossible it was.
I think that it's I think that it's impossible if you don't already have a name that people know. And I think for us, we've spent a lot of our efforts making sure that our employees are well taken care of and supported and treated like the human beings that they are. And I think that when we open the restaurant after the bakery, that was already somewhat established in the in the public eye, so that helps us to
kind of make this place. I mean, this is the point of it all is we want to make this a desirable place, uh for for people to work, so that when they come here, they have a good time, they're well supported, they get fed, they get treated well,
they have health care. And you know, we really built this thing on that it's becoming harder and harder to have a functional business including all of those things, which is you know, the real issue at hand here is that the expenses are enumerting and the you know, sales remain the same. So when we talk about raw materials, there's been there's were actually in a much better place than we were, say a year ago or even a year before that. The bakery goes by one ingredient, it's flour.
Flour is wheat, and wheat is you know, a global commodity that has a lot of fluctuations. It's usually compared to others, fairly steady. But for example, when the Russia Ukraine War broke out there Russia was not allowing Ukraine's wheat to leave the country. Ukraine is the sort of bread basket provider of wheat for Europe, and when that happens,
there's much more demand coming from the United States. Prices go up, and the American users of American wheat are the ones who end up paying more so that those products end up in Europe cover for the loss of supply. So we saw maybe a ten percent increase in flour pricing. It caused us to have to drive our prices up for the first time in a long time bread wise.
Now it has settled back down, but in the meantime, everything else has gotten more expensive, and you know, there's there's a you know, massive wave of restaurant closures in Los Angeles right now, including yesterday, Coal's one hundred and seventeen year old restaurant announced that it's closing. The pantry, which has been around for one hundred years closed. It's a very very very very difficult time for restaurants to thrive, let you know, survive, let alone thrive in this town.
So interesting times for sure.
Just on the commodities front, how does it work in terms of actually sourcing things like flower Do you sign you know, forward agreement with suppliers at a certain price and I guess, like how long term are those prices set.
Yeah, it's depends very much on volume. And we are in this very unique sort of middle ground where we are not a giant twenty five thousand square foot bakery and we are not one of the sort of more retail oriented two thousand square feet bakeries. We are in the middle looking to make this leap to where we can buy directly from our purveyors, and when we can like purveyors as in non distributors, directly from King Arthur, directly from Camus Country Mill, directly from a variety of
other flour purveyors. And when we can do those types of things that buy at scale, say seventeen to twenty pallets of flour at a time, we can lock in forward pricing with King Arthur, with some of the other ones.
But in the moment now where we're operating through distributors, we are subject to their markup and they are fluctuating what they're doing based on whatever algorithms they're using to calculate proper pricing, not only us from what they're getting charged from the you know, the actual producer, but also however their business is doing, and whatever you know markup
they need to include. So what we do in that circumstance, and what most restaurants do is regularly pit distributors against each other for our business, especially because we have a lot of leverage with our flower orders. It's it's a fairly significant regular order. So even if they're making a very small amount on that on each bag, there there's a large volume and a large frequency that has those
purveyors kind of jockeying for the lower price. And that's there's no service, there's no anything else that really matters in that relationship. It's just if you can get us the price we will order from you this week, and they know that and they fight, and it's a weekly price. It's it's more frequent than week weekly. At the moment, there's a little bit of flux June June, you know.
And I just have regular conversations with King Arthur, who's our main brand flower supplier, who are one of the most wonderful businesses in the country and just good people and always you know, driven to help their clients. They always are monitoring, you know, the commodity future futures and
how things are looking going forward. And I will sometimes reach out to them to find out, you know, how how they are pricing things relative to who they're selling to the distributors, so that I can see if the increases in price are coming via the distributor or via King Arthur, and then I'll know whether I have some leverage to kind of push down a little bit further
to try and fight for cheaper prices. But there was a big spy, you know, things have been trending downward in price that the war, you know, the embargo opened up or whatever it was that opened up and allowed the wheat to leave Ukraine. So prices in the state settled back down because there's less exports, and it's a you know, something that if you're constantly monitoring, it is
changing very often in minor increments. But if you do that across an entire batch of milled wheat, that's that's hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So how does that actually feed into your prices for bread? And how dynamic are they If you get a price increase one day, do you immediately pass that through to the customer?
Almost never? And that's you know, the increases and decreases are fairly minor at the moment. They are in flux, but they are staying in the general vicinity. You know, if we're talking specifics, we're talking about somewhere between fifteen and seventeen fifty for one fifty pound bag of bread flour, and that fluctuation, it stays in that zone. Maybe a
year ago it was up at twenty three. And if you think about that, if we're ordering let's say five thousand pounds a week of flour, it's actually more than that. I think it's closer to sixty five hundred pounds. And we're talking about a fl fluctuation of a dollar that is a massive change in our end of year, you know, bottom line. So it's the kind of thing where if there are any changes whatsoever within that zone, they're multiplied over a large number of bags and end up changing
things fairly significantly. So we really have to even if it's within that fifteen to seventeen range as opposed to going all the way up to twenty three dollars a bag, that is, it's crucial for us to stay on top of it. But in terms of passing the pricing on, we've given ourselves a pretty wide range to stay within it. That makes our pricing valid and we're constantly staying on
top of it. But bread, in general, the food cost is not the main issue unless you're talking about a jump from fifteen dollars a bag to twenty three dollars a bag. The main issue is labor because cogs typically with bread are in the ten to fifteen percent range, which is the cheapest food product you can possibly make, even if we're using like really fantastic ingredients like we are. The thing is is it just takes a lot of human beings and a lot of skilled human beings to
execute production. So if we're talking about the traditional model where you see like thirty percent for labor, we're looking at more forty two percent for labor and twelve percent for cogs, where cogs typically in a restaurant food business environment is somewhere to twenty five to thirty if you're doing okay, we're at fourteen, So they the model is a little bit different in the wholesale universe than it is in the retail restaurant and that that is, you know,
we're able to have those extra bodies to get things done because the cost of goods are sold low.
This is fascinating. Let's continue on this. But you're talking about your wholesale distribution bakery, when you're talking about the restaurant. How do you think that generally about the strategy of price increases because obviously you know you're not going to be sensitive to the day to day or the month to month. My guess is many most companies want to pass some sort of price increase on on a semi
regular basis, maybe once a year or something. But generally, like talk about like how frequently you make those decisions to increase prices and when.
Yeah, I would say that we are less on a schedule than is typical for a larger bakery. I think when you get to scale like us or larger, there's an inclination just from the operation side of things to make these these changes regular, and for us, it's more about making sure that our accounts are getting what they expect and are not being pushed further when it's no real issue for us relative to cogs to float a little bit of that within a range. It's also even
more relevant to monitor our competitors pricing. Our products are not entirely apples to apples, talking about two different basic what we call a house loaf, but most places call a country loaf basic sour tow loaf of bread, which you know we charge six dollars for wholesale and a lot of other places I charge seven to fifty, but their loaf is two hundred and fifty grams heavier than ours,
or some other difference. So it's difficult to track. But in terms of what the bottom line is for our customers, we have to stay within a range. We are a higher end wholesale product, which makes us unique as well, but at the same time that doesn't mean that we're not competing with those who are making some more, you know, sort of commercially mechanized loaves of bread. So we have to be very mindful of our competitors' prices, and I would say that reality mixed with some of the increases
in hogs, are what drive our price increases. I'd say we've raised prices maybe twice in the last four years. You know, I think we had no choice when bags were all the way up at eight dollars more per than they are now. And by the time we were able to bring that price back down, which I think I would say, you know, was around May of this year. So it's a really long time of these elevated prices.
Other expenses like labor and outside things have increased to the point where we can't lower the prices back down. It's just the way that it goes. As much as I'd like to, because I feel the benefit very you know, I feel the benefit from passing savings off to the to our accounts, but at a certain point you have to protect the business and that's where we're at.
So I mentioned at the beginning that you're in the process of opening a pizzeria, So congratulations on that on the expansion. But one thing we hear a lot about nowadays is the idea of, you know, regulation slowing down businesses, and there seems to be certainly a dereg bent in the Trump administration and a general sense that all these rules and bureaucracy really slow things down. So I'm curious, what's the process been like for you in opening the
pizza restaurant? How long have you been doing it? And I guess how much paperwork have you actually had to do? Well?
Los Angeles within the restaurant world, is fairly famous for the ineptitude of its governmental oversight agencies. We have to sort of deal with both the county and the city. There's building in safety and the health department. They don't talk to each other, but you're they're both kind of looking at the same thing, and they both point you in different directions, and it gets very complicated when the
inspectors starts showing up, which is throughout the process. The thing about the pizza place is that it was a second gen space. It was already a pizzeria that said we're, you know, stripping out all the equipment and rebuilding it. But that makes the process significantly faster. And if I, you know, I don't want to say anything or be an absolutist in any way, but I will never do a first gen space ever again because it's just excruciating.
And you know, when we open the restaurant, we signed our lease in November of twenty nineteen, so taking obviously there's a pandemic to consider, but it took us three years to open. A lot of that was due to problems with the city. You know, a lot of it is very analog. They print up your application and it sits on a literal stack on someone's desk, and if you don't follow up with them incessantly, that stack just gets piled on top and your thing just disappears deep into
the you know, into the file. So it's it's a very very very difficult process. Do I think the exact opposite and just stripping down things to nothing is the is the answer? Definitely not. But you know, LA has a lot of red tape to navigate. It also is expensive red tape to navigate, so you're paying a ton for you know, sort of non service and making things
really complicated for you. You can get to the very very end of the finish line and you're you're ready to open, and the help inspector walks into the last day and says, this floor drain is not in the right place based on the plans that they approve, and you know, eight months ago from somebody else, and then you have no choice but to spend an extra eight thousand dollars re routing your plumbing and then getting plumbing inspection.
Again, sounds like you're speaking from personal experience on that one. That's a very specific example.
I mean, by the way, I looked at Cohle's, the restaurant you mentioned, and I'm reading the article and the quote litany of reasons for closing pandemic actor and writer strike, crime, labor costs, bureaucracy, et cetera. But just on this point, like I have never worked in our Actually I did work in actually worked you worked at a sandwich shop and I worked in a Nigerian restaurant in college, which
I never talked about. But is it like the bear Basically, that's all because when people hear all of this stuff about like, oh, you got to move the dream, what was there was like something with a balloon or something like that. I don't remember the exact sceme, But is it like that stressful where, like, you know, they come in and everyone is like on bated breath about whether they see something or not before you can.
Open the per The fear that has struck into the hearts of restaurant managers when someone with a hanging neck tag comes in from the city is overwhelming. The messages on slack go immediately out, and everyone springs into gear because a lot of the things that they require are
not logical, don't make sense. Are there for the purposes of checking some ridiculous box from nineteen sixty five that isn't applicable anymore, But no one wants to make the effort to change things with the state government or the county government, and you just kind of get locked into, you know, for someone who is so focused on logic and the logical approach to things and really reasoning things out and finding out the best way forward, it's just
excruciatingly frustrating to be put in this position where nothing is logical and the decisions of this individual largely have to do with their mood that day or whether they don't whether they like your place or whether they like you, or whatever's going on. It could be motivated not by anything on paper, but more about this sort of unknowable nuance, and it's excruciatingly frustrating. There are, you know, known inspectors that people fear, there are known inspectors that people hope for,
and you never know what you're going to get. There's I heard stories of so a lot of architecture companies have sort of sprung out to become expediters as well. So they basically are will take all of your paperwork and the ridiculous amount of stuff that you need to do. You pay them a fixed fee, and they're the ones who not only well if their architects design the restaurant, but then will run everything through all the necessary channels with the city and the county and the state. And
that costs an incredible amount. So that's another thing that gets you know, piled on top. But no one wants to do that anymore because it's so ludicrous that it just makes your you go crazy. I hear, I have no experience outside of Los Angeles that this this infrastructure is one of the worst out there.
So I listed a bunch of reasons that a restaurant might close earlier, but I would love to get your take on what exactly is causing restaurants to go out of business in LA And also one thing I've always wondered about, why do people still open restaurants, Because the thing you hear is always that like it's a tiny, tiny margin, it's really difficult, it's really competitive. You have to basically give your entire life over to this endeavor.
It sounds like a hard job, but new restaurants open all the time.
It's true. I think I'd say that the motivation to open most restaurants is a flawed motivation. It's usually based on ego or showing off cash, or trying to acquire digital fame, other things that will inevitably either lead to a short burst of successful by an immediate decline or just an immediate misfire. And that's why most restaurants close in the first year, because it's excruciatingly difficult to do this. And I think that the general view is that working
in a restaurant is easy. It's a cop out from some more corporate approach to living, and it's just not. It's so much less manageable, it's so much wilder than you know, a more corporate career that it makes it very, very hard to do. But there is, to answer your question, incredible joy in interfacing with people and making them happy and being connected to hospitality and the pleasure of taking care of people and giving them something that they get to do, you know, three times a day, but making
it something that brings them joy. You can see that, and that reverberates back to you in a way that feels far more authentic than it felt when I was writing and producing commercials trying to manipulate people into buying shit. It's about that authentic connection, and I don't want to have to feel bad for what I do for the rest of my life. I don't want to have to feel bad about it. And I did that for almost
a decade. And I think that this provides an authentic reality for me and the people that work here, despite all of the challenges of doing it. And I think the challenges are in place, because the challenges are always in place when you're trying to do something that's authentic and aside from the general flow of our sort of controlled existence that we have.
Right now, you mentioned digital fame. You're at the pizzeria, at the restaurant, do you feel like the need to have your equivalent of like, you know, the viral arawon smoothie, like something like is that an important thing you think about that this is a thing that could blow up on TikTok or whatever.
It is.
No, no, but I'm I'm unique in that way. I can't wait to remove us from social media. That is an intractable connection. Here's how I think about it now. Where the restaurant and the bakery are established, generally people must say lists know to some degree, or the people who are involved in food know who we are. If I were to seek new customers in this moment for our retail restaurant, they would be in authentic connections with
what we do. They might resonate with some with our blt that we just put out first when the tomatoes are good now in the summer, and they might come
to the restaurant on the weekend. But ultimately our bread and butter is going to be our regular return customers who have a relationship with the restaurant, And I don't want to ostracize them because they're the people who are going to keep us here for a decade, as opposed to the people who are going to make us famous in the moment, drive out our regular customers, and then move on to the next trendy thing. So for us,
trends are a business killer. You can get short, short success from a trend, but if you want to be here for a long time and build a customer base that's dedicated, you have to have an authentic relationship with those people. And that has to mean that whatever your product is, they are offically connecting with it because of their own desires, not because I'm forcing them to have an entertainment moment with our product by you know, creating a TikTok video that goes viral.
So that's yeah, Well, speaking of the moment, we're recording this on July eighth, and we still don't really know what's happening with the tariffs. But I imagine in the course of building out a pizzeria, you're probably ordering equipment from various places, giant pizza ovens and all that. Have you been impacted at all by the tariffs.
Yet very little. It's still very confusing from my vantage point as to what is happening or what is supposed to come down the road. And we were certainly anticipating, you know, our ovens are from Germany are you know, a variety of pieces of equipment are coming from international places, but I haven't seen any major increases. We did have some shipping increase. Is we make these coffee cans that we serve our rust to coffee and that come from China,
there was a massive tariff increase on our shipping. That's part of the process. But in terms of, you know, the pizzeria equipment, we haven't seen it. Really. I'm anticipating that potentially we're talking about a ten percent EU tariff they said, floating around. I just don't know what that means.
And if there's anticipatory price increases from the vendors who are in Italy selling us tomatoes or who are in a variety of other places in Europe where we buy some of our moral luxurious ingredients, we just haven't seen
those yet. I am in still anticipating that as a possibility for pizza because we need to anticipate that, and we are certainly testing tomatoes, California tomatoes to see if we can find something comparable, because the you know, Sammrazano's are truly the best and they do grow in California. But it's just a little bit of a different thing.
So we are anticipating the need to work with California tomatoes, but so far have not seen anything really in terms of tariffs increases reaching us on this side.
I just have one last question, and it gets back to Los Angeles. It feels like major American cities are always sort of dying and thriving at the same time. And obviously, yeah, Los Angeles, you know, you hear certainly hear about it in New York and Chicago, and Los Angeles has going through a lot or the fires, the recent ice raids and riots, and then you know, the people people, And I mentioned, you know, because it was in this article. I just looked up and reminded me.
You know, people are talking about Hollywood, could it become the next Detroit in terms of that industry gutting out. On the other hand, it's probably the nicest climate in the entire world, and people are always going to want to live in southern California. How do you feel about doing business in Los Angeles right now?
Is the city It's excruciating. The city is, especially in the in the food business, is very very much struggling. I've never ever seen so many closures of restaurants, good ones that deserve to be open in my time, you know, let alone being a consumer, but being in the business, I think that there's a lot, an endless list of
factors that make Los Angeles complicated. It's expanse the reliance on Hollywood as a major motivator or a major provider for a large number of people in terms of income, and with that whole market shrinking, you know, you do see a lot less business happening in Hollywood proper. That said, it's a four hundred square miles city, you have. You know, where we are is about fifteen minutes from downtown, where some of the protests were happening, and a lot of
that stuff. But I don't see anything, you know, it's just a regular, small, small neighborhood experience over here. And you're really kind of like these neighborhoods have a very distinctly, you know, unique way of behaving. So as Hollywood is sort of shrinking down and moving east and west, you see a lot of development, and then you also see a lot of gentrification protests, You see a lot of things where folks are. There's a lot of expansion and
contraction in this really wide city. Part of it is exciting because it's a dynamic, but it's also just makes things very difficult because the city doesn't really have its own identity. The identity is defined by the neighborhood. So as downtown and Hollywood are contracting, you know, Highland Park and glass El Park, and this area of Glendale kind
of on the east side is expanding. Silver Lake and Echo Park and Los Pelas are kind of becoming like Hollywood once was and getting a little bit more corporate businesses in there, and they're all looking to capitalize on the growth of these neighborhoods. It's it's a very unique place, but it's very hard to work here. And you get a lot for choosing to be here and operating here and living here, but you're also very much behind the eight ball.
I got to ask one more question, but why is a San Marzano tomato grown in California considered subpar to San Marzano tomato grown in Italy.
I wouldn't say subpar. I wouldn't say subpar. The climate is vaguely different, slightly different, so you end up with a little bit of different result from what we've seen the San Marzano's from Italy end up being a little bit sweeter, a little bit more robust, and maybe that has to do with even more direct sunlight, more volcanic soil. Who knows. There's a variety of different, different reasons why the microclimates creates slightly different and results. It's just like wine.
It's sort of like, you know, you can grow the same grape in southern France and in northern California and end up with a distinctly different flavor based on the microclimate, the soil in the environment. So it's a it may just be our own projection, but we're working to try and find whatever the best possible option is for us.
All right, just a couple of seconds left. Give us one sandwich recommendation here on the East Coast that we should try.
Well, I would say, oh that's really hard. I mean's Defante is in Brooklyn is a special spot. But you know, the deli that I grew up with is in Milburn, New Jersey. It's the Melbourne Deli and has now become kind of like a famous deli somehow, which is crazy.
I'll check it out.
Yeah, all right, well, Andy, thank you so much for coming on odd lots. We're going to have to leave it there, but it was really fun to talk about the baking business here.
Yeah, that was great, Thanks so much, Andrew.
No, it's my pleasure.
Thanks guys, Joe. Have you ever been to.
It's in Soho.
It used to be literally across the street from where I lived. Best sandwiches ever. It blew my mind the first time I went there. They've expanded since then. The expanded store is not so.
Good, you know.
A shout out to our producer Dash, because didn't he like he did the tour where he tried every one of the hundred best sandwiches in New York. We got to get him on interview Dash at some point about New York City.
That'd be fun.
Yeah, okay.
But on a more serious note, there was lots of interesting stuff to pull out from there. But one of the things I'm thinking about, and this kind of came up in our Chicken series when we talked to the DOJ, But it's that idea of the tyranny of the middle man, right, and this idea that Okay, obviously you're buying flour from a flower producer, but then in between the producer and getting to you, there's the distributor which is charging a markup.
And then when you're setting up a new business nowadays you have to have like basically a red tape su to walk you through. That's another middle man. And then the shipping costs going up, I mean shipping not necessarily a middle man, but certainly the middle of the process. It seems like that's where the cost pressures are really coming in.
No, I think all that's super interesting. Also this idea that like you could have an uber for distribution, but then you lose that the bread bus, but then you lose that personal relationship and if that's important because you need to hear feedback from the chef at that restaurant, then you don't get it if you don't own the distribution.
And then just you know, La itself we should do at some point, we got to go back to La because it does I mean incredible place, but incredibly number of like sort of ranching things going on in that city. And opening a restaurant, as you mentioned, sort of seems crazy and the easiest of times, Like I feel like you have to have a little bit of brain damage to do that, and then to do it and there's a lot there that was very interesting.
I want to learn more about the pizza business as well. We're in New York.
We should do pizza.
We're gonna do a pizza episode.
All right, shall we leave it there.
Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy.
Alloway and I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our producers Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman armand dash albin At at Dashbot and Kilbrooks at Kilbrooks. And from our Odd Lots content. Go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, where you have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you can chet about these topics twenty four to seven in our discord discord dot gg slash oddlines.
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