What an LA Bakery Says About the Economy Right Now

Bakeries are great microcosms of the economy. There's lots of labor involved. You need commodities like flours and eggs, plus energy for your ovens. You need capital investment to get the ovens in the first place, and you need sustained consumer demand to keep you in business. Put it all together and you have a business that tells you a lot about what's going on right now. In this episode, we speak with Andy Kadin, who is the owner of the Los Angeles-based bakery Bub & Grandma's, as well as a sandwich shop and a soon-to-open pizzeria. We talk about what the bread business entails, how much money people are spending right now, and the impact of Trump's tariffs on food costs. Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox - now delivered every weekday - plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 0:58Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

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• 3:07Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alockway.

• 3:11Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 3:12Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, I have a very personal question to ask you.

• 3:16Joe Weisenthal?

  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.

• 3:21Tracy Alloway?

  Well, I actually don't know the answer to this question. Have you ever baked anything?

• 3:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Ah, not that much. I went through this like, I'm just gonna, the answer is basically no.

• 3:32Tracy Alloway?

  Okay.

• 3:33Joe Weisenthal?

  No.

• 3:33Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, you were gonna say something. You went through a phase?

• 3:35Joe Weisenthal?

  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 worked.

• 3:45Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, my God. What does that mean?

• 3:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Just like not reading any recipe. So not reading any recipes and just start experimenting.

• 3:52Tracy Alloway?

  Figuring it out yourself.

• 3:53Joe Weisenthal?

  And then seeing like what caused 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 baking.

• 4:01Tracy Alloway?

  You should. It's really fun.

• 4:03Joe Weisenthal?

  What do you, Tracy, we know this is just a setup because you want to talk about your baking. So why don't you just, why don't you just tell us what you like to bake?

• 4:09Tracy Alloway?

  Hey, look, I don't bake that much. Actually, in my household, my husband bakes everything. So he does a really good Basque 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.

• 4:31Joe Weisenthal?

  I am aware. And the other thing is, not only I understand that it's very complex, but beyond that, I'm always flabbergasted 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's like a fascinating question to me.

• 4:58Tracy Alloway?

  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.

• 5:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 5:08Tracy Alloway?

  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.

• 5:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 5:20Tracy Alloway?

  And obviously, you also have consumer demand. So it's really an interesting lens to kind of look through.

• 5:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, one of our, one of our, the favorite episodes that we've ever done, which I think was 2022, or maybe 2021.

• 5:33Tracy Alloway?

  Long time ago.

• 5:34Joe Weisenthal?

  We talked to a commercial baker in Chicago, and I've always wanted to do more. That 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 2025 now. I would like to learn more about what's going on.

• 5:53Tracy Alloway?

  All right. So we're going to dive back into baking, possibly not on a first principle basis, but we have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Andy Kadin.

• 6:02Joe Weisenthal?

  What if baking, baking from first principles would be a really good, that would be, that would be like a good name for a cookbook. All right. Sorry. Keep going.

• 6:09Tracy Alloway?

  Good name for a baking podcast, perhaps. Okay. We're going to be speaking with Andy Kadin. 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 pizzeria. So

• 6:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Amazing.

• 6:32Tracy Alloway?

  All the baked goods. Andy, welcome to the show.

• 6:36Speaker 07

  Really good to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 6:39Tracy Alloway?

  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 sourdough and got really into carbohydrates?

• 6:52Speaker 07

  Or maybe I'm a little proto-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 16 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 an Italian Jewish sandwich mecca.

• 7:33Speaker 07

  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. So I decided to start writing some business plans and figure out how to open a sandwich shop here.

• 7:55Speaker 07

  And, you know, started working at a sandwich shop 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 worked, 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 that comes from falling into its, 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. And I said, yes, and it hasn't stopped for 10 years.

• 8:39Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, so initially, were you just baking bread at scale in your kitchen?

• 8:44Speaker 07

  I started as just for me, just as an experiment, um, 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, it, the, the attention came quickly and I started needing to level up over and over and over again. So the first place that I, 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 their pizza oven. It was a variety of these hacked together, baking in other bakeries off hours to get, to get things done. And as the, the demand grew very quickly, I, I quickly had to figure out how to run a business, not just bake a few loaves of bread out of

• 9:28Speaker 07

  my house, um, and moved into a semi, semi legitimate space at about a year and a half.

• 9:34Joe Weisenthal?

  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 volume and number of employees, stuff like that?

• 9:45Speaker 07

  The wholesale bakery, which is what that story evolved into is now a 50 person business. We have a 6,500 square foot facility that produces bread, just bread, not pastry for about 180 restaurants in Los Angeles. So 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, um, in our weird time vortex that we live within now. And, uh, that is another almost 50 person business, um, in the Glassell Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. We are in the process of opening a pizza place in Highland Park and neighboring neighborhood,

• 10:30Speaker 07

  um, that will be open hopefully in the next four to five weeks. So that'll be another 30 employees growing to 50 over time.

• 10:37Tracy Alloway?

  Why did you decide to do the, uh, the retail sandwich shop? Cause I imagine wholesale actually sounds kind of nice because you're still making a product, but you're divorced from, uh, face to face interactions with customers, which sounds nice to me, but obviously you have a different opinion.

• 10:54Speaker 07

  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 in the water, but ultimately is 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 now that I'm there, you know, maybe wholesale would have been better to stay out.

• 11:40Speaker 07

  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 variables to consider in the restaurant, especially when you bring in customer customer behaviours and how things really just consistently fluctuate across the board.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Grease, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.

• 12:18Speaker 08

  We're seeing a lot of institutional players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing and folks who service institutional clients.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reese Merrick of Ripple says.

• 12:35Speaker 09

  A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.

• 12:54Speaker 00

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• 13:04Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume, so writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 13:46Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

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• 15:26Joe Weisenthal?

  One of the themes that comes up in a range of topics that we talk about is distribution and actually both 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?

• 15:49Speaker 07

  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 wall to wall, it basically means there is literally no more oven space per hour available for new loaves of bread to increase our production. So if you start baking at 2:30 in the morning and you need to get bread to all of these accounts before they open at 8:00 AM, you have a very narrow window to pool 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 in building out these routes

• 16:32Speaker 07

  because you have only have 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, 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

• 17:13Speaker 07

  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. 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,

• 17:57Speaker 07

  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, 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 soured. So we've ultimately stuck with our own employees and our own vans for now.

• 18:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, I'm just thinking about how crazy it must be to like have an interest in bread such as yourself. And then suddenly like you're in the break.

• 18:32Tracy Alloway?

  Become a mechanic.

• 18:33Joe Weisenthal?

  No, you're at the break pad repair business too, and you gotta take that into account.

• 18:36Tracy Alloway?

  No, 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 2:30 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, uh, who wanna, I guess, wake up at like 1 AM in the morning and go bake bread?

• 19:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's tricky, you know, you, first of all, you have to love it. Um, you have to love the process. And I mean, the 2:30 aspect is, is, you know, very, very early and a very, very different lifestyle.

• 19:20Speaker 07

  In a, in a literal way, you are falling asleep at 5:30 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, I, that was the last baking shift that I, that I did was the Sunday morning, two thirty a.m. Bake for the Hollywood Farmers 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, um, which made driving there a little bit sketchy, but always, you know, being careful.

• 20:02Speaker 07

  And then, you know, finish the bake, pack it up, put it in my truck and go to the farmer's market and, and sell it. Um, and then the day would wrap up around two thirty. So it would be this twelve hour kind of sprint and then sail 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 a bit more time to manage the businesses. But you really have to subscribe to the lifestyle. If you try and push the edge,

• 20:43Speaker 07

  you know, especially when I was baking and managing five days, baking five days a week and still trying to manage the business. It's getting sick a lot. It was very difficult to stay healthy when you're operating across two, you know, time zones, really. You're, you're living in this kind of, uh, 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, were far more complicated times for my own health. Uh, but we're on the other side of that now.

• 21:16Joe Weisenthal?

  We mentioned in the beginning, um, you know, we like this topic because it's sort of a lens into everything. But what are you seeing today in terms of, you know, if you compare now to when you started? How do things, or versus the peak of the inflation, whatever it was, how do things look today when it comes to both hiring availability and also, um, raw commodity cost, ingredient costs?

• 21:39Speaker 07

  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.

• 22:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Just real quickly, is that, would you have said the same thing in 2022 or 2023? Or does it feel easier today than it would have back then at the, at the retail level? Cause that's where, that's where like all the complaints were, right? Everyone, all the restaurants and service entities were complaining about how impossible it was.

• 22:22Speaker 07

  I, 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 opened 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, the point of it all is we want to make this a desirable place 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 healthcare.

• 23:04Speaker 07

  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 enumerating and the, you know, sales remain the same. So when we talk about raw materials, there's been, there's, we're actually in a much better place than we were, say, a year ago, or even a year before that, the, the bakery goes by one ingredient, it's flour. 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.

• 23:49Speaker 07

  For example, when the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, Russia was not allowing Ukraine's wheat to leave the country. Ukraine is the sort of breadbasket provider of wheat for Europe, and when that happens, there's much more demand coming from the United States. Prices go up, and the Americans, users of American wheat are the ones who end up paying more so that those products end up in Europe to cover for the loss of supply. So we saw maybe a 10%, 10% 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 a, you

• 24:34Speaker 07

  know, massive wave of restaurant closures in Los Angeles right now, including yesterday, Kohl's, 117-year-old restaurant announced that it's closing. The pantry, which has been around for 100 years, closed. It's a very, very, very, very difficult time for restaurants to thrive, you know, survive, let alone thrive in this town. So, interesting times, for sure.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk, and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices, but according to recruiters,

• 25:49Speaker 01

  advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 26:27Speaker 10

  This podcast is brought to you by Navy Federal Credit Union. Kick off unforgettable travel journeys with Navy Federal's Flagship Premier Card. You'll get four times points on all travel. Yes, all travel. So if you book a hotel, you'll earn four times points. If you book a flight, you'll earn four times points. Even if you book a ride share, you'll earn four times points. Plus, you'll earn three times points on dining. And like other cards, it doesn't require you to use any booking portals and has no rewards limits. So earning points couldn't be easier. It's all the travel, none of the baggage. So whether your next journey takes you hiking through a national park, relaxing on the beach, staying at a resort, or visiting somewhere on your bucket list,

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• 27:26Speaker 11

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• 28:27Tracy Alloway?

  Just on the commodities front, how does it work in terms of actually sourcing things like flour? Do you sign, you know, forward agreements with suppliers at a certain price? And I guess like, how long term are those prices set?

• 28:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's, it's depends very much on volume and we are in this very unique sort of middle ground where we are not a giant 25,000 square foot bakery and we are not one of the sort of more retail oriented 2,000 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, you know, a variety of other flour purveyors. And when we can do those types of things and buy at scale, say 17 to 20 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,

• 29:25Speaker 07

  we are subject to their markup and they, they are fluctuating what they're doing based on whatever algorithms they're, they're using to calculate proper pricing. Not only just 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, 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 flour 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

• 30:10Speaker 07

  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.

• 30:23Joe Weisenthal?

  And it's a weekly price.

• 30:25Speaker 07

  It's it's more frequent than week weekly at the moment.

• 30:28Tracy Alloway?

  Wow.

• 30:28Speaker 07

  There's a little bit of flux. June, June, you know, and I just have regular conversations with King Arthur, who's our main bread flour supplier, who are one of the most wonderful businesses in the country and just good people and always, you know, driven to 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 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

• 31:13Speaker 07

  push down a little bit further to try and fight for cheaper prices. But there was a big spot, you know, things have been trending downward in in price. The 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 States 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 in minor increments. But if you do that across an entire batch of milled wheat, that's that's hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 31:47Tracy Alloway?

  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?

• 31:58Speaker 07

  Almost never. And that that's, you know, the the increases and decreases are fairly minor at the moment. They are in flux, but they are staying in the 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 fluctuation of a dollar. That is a massive

• 32:39Speaker 07

  change in our end of year, you know, bottom line. So it's 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. And 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

• 33:21Speaker 07

  bread are in the, you know, ten to fifteen percent range, which is the cheapest food product you can possibly make, even if you'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

• 34:05Speaker 07

  get things done because the cost of goods are so low.

• 34:09Joe Weisenthal?

  This 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 gonna 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?

• 34:40Speaker 07

  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 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.

• 35:20Speaker 07

  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 sourdough loaf of bread, which, you know, we charge $6 for wholesale and a lot of other places might charge $7.50, but their loaf is 250 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.

• 36:05Speaker 07

  So we have to be very mindful of our competitors' prices. And I would say that reality mixed with some of the increases in COGS 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 $8 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.

• 36:46Speaker 07

  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 our accounts, but at a certain point, you have to protect the business and that's where we're at.

• 37:01Tracy Alloway?

  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. And 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?

• 37:37Speaker 07

  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 and 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 start 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

• 38:20Speaker 07

  never do a first gen space ever again, because it's just excruciating. And, you know, when we opened the restaurant, we signed our lease in November of 2019. So taking, you know, 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?

• 39:03Speaker 07

  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. Um, 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 health inspector walks in on the last day and says this floor drain is not in the right place based on the plans that they approved and, you know, eight months ago from somebody else. Uh, and then you have no choice but to spend an extra $8,000 rerouting your plumbing and then getting plumbing inspection again.

• 39:48Tracy Alloway?

  It sounds like you're speaking from personal experience on that one. That's a very specific example.

• 39:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, no, I mean, uh, by the way, I, I looked at Kohl's, uh, the restaurant you mentioned, and I'm reading the article and it talked, the quote, "litany of reasons for closing, pandemic, actor and writer's strike, crime, labor costs, bureaucracy, et cetera." But just on this point, like, I have never worked in a, um, actually I did work in, well, actually I've worked in two.

• 40:12Tracy Alloway?

  You worked at a sandwich shop.

• 40:13Joe Weisenthal?

  And I, and I worked in a Nigerian restaurant in, uh, college, which I never talk about. But is it like the bear? Basically, that's all. Cause when people hear all of this stuff about like, oh, you gotta move the drain. What was there? It was like something with a balloon or something like that? I don't remember the exact scene. But is it like that stressful where like, you know, they come in and everyone's like on bated breath about whether they see something or not before you can open the door?

• 40:33Speaker 07

  A hundred percent, a hundred percent. The, the, the fear that has struck into the hearts of restaurant managers when, uh, 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 1965 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 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,

• 41:17Speaker 07

  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. Uh, 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 gonna get. There's, I I heard stories of, so a lot of architecture companies have sort of sprung out into become expeditors as well.

• 41:58Speaker 07

  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 they're architects, design the restaurant, but then will run everything through all the necessary channels with the city and the county, um, 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 you go crazy. I hear, I have no experience outside of Los Angeles, that this, this infrastructure is one of the the worst out there.

• 42:35Tracy Alloway?

  So Joe, uh, 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.

• 43:07Speaker 07

  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 success followed 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.

• 43:48Speaker 07

  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.

• 44:32Speaker 07

  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 a 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.

• 45:03Joe Weisenthal?

  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 Erawan 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?

• 45:20Speaker 07

  No. No, but I'm I'm unique in that way. I can't wait to remove us from social media. That is a intractable connection. Here's how I think about it now, where the restaurant and the bakery are established. Generally, people in Los Angeles 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 inauthentic 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 at the restaurant.

• 46:06Speaker 07

  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 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 authentically 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.

• 46:50Tracy Alloway?

  Well, speaking of the moment, we're recording this on July 8th, and we 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?

• 47:11Speaker 07

  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, our, 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 increases. We make these coffee cans that we serve our roasted coffee in 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 10% EU tariff, they said,

• 47:56Speaker 07

  floating around. I just don't know what that means. And if there's anticipatory price increases from the vendors who are in Italy, say, selling us tomatoes, or who are in a variety of other places in Europe where we buy some of our more luxurious ingredients, we just haven't seen those yet. I am 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, Samozanos 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,

• 48:36Speaker 07

  but so far have not seen anything really in terms of tariffs increases reaching us on this side.

• 48:44Joe Weisenthal?

  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, Los Angeles, you know, you hear, certainly hear about it, New York and Chicago, and Los Angeles is going through a lot, or the fires, the recent ICE raids and riots. And then, you know, the 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 getting 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 as a city?

• 49:29Speaker 07

  It's excruciating. Um, this city is, is, uh, especially in the, in the food businesses is very, very much struggling. Um, I've never, ever seen so many closures of restaurants, good ones that deserve to be open. Um, in my time, you know, let alone being a consumer, but being in the business. Um, I think that, uh, there was a, an endless list of factors that make Los Angeles complicated. It's expanse, the reliance on Hollywood as a major, you know, motivator for, 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.

• 50:14Speaker 07

  That said, it's a 400 square miles city. You have, you know, where, where we are is about 15 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. Um, 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, uh, there's a lot of expansion and contraction in this really wide city.

• 50:59Speaker 07

  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 Glassell Park and this area of Glendale kind of on the east side is expanding. Silver Lake and Echo Park and Los Feliz 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 and it, but it's, it's very hard to work here. And you, you get a lot for choosing to be here and operating here and living here.

• 51:43Speaker 07

  But you're also very much, uh, behind the eight ball.

• 51:46Tracy Alloway?

  I gotta ask one more question, but why is the San Marzano tomato grown in California considered subpar to San Marzano tomato grown in Italy?

• 51:58Speaker 07

  Shouldn't they be the same? I wouldn't say subpar. I wouldn't say subpar. The climate is vaguely different. Okay. 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 create slightly different res- 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 and the environment. So it's a, it,

• 52:40Speaker 07

  it may just be our own projection, but we're working to try and find whatever the, the best possible option is for us.

• 52:46Joe Weisenthal?

  All right. Just a couple of seconds left. Give us one sandwich recommendation here on the East Coast that we should try.

• 52:52Speaker 07

  Well, I would say, oh, that's really hard.

• 52:55Joe Weisenthal?

  I know. You're gonna.

• 52:56Speaker 07

  I mean, DeFanti's, DeFanti's in Brooklyn is, is a special spot. But, you know, the, the deli that I grew up with is in Milburn, New Jersey. It's the Milburn Deli.

• 53:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 53:05Speaker 07

  And has now become kind of like a famous deli somehow, which is crazy.

• 53:09Joe Weisenthal?

  I'll check it out.

• 53:09Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 53:10Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Well, Andy, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. We're gonna have to leave it there, but it was really fun to talk about the baking business.

• 53:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that was great. Thanks so much, Andy.

• 53:20Speaker 07

  That's my pleasure. Thanks, guys.

• 53:35Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, have you ever been to Aladoro's?

• 53:37Joe Weisenthal?

  No.

• 53:37Tracy Alloway?

  In Soho?

• 53:38Joe Weisenthal?

  No.

• 53:39Tracy Alloway?

  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.

• 53:50Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, shout out to our producer, Dash, because didn't he like, he did that tour where he like tried every one of the 100 best sandwiches in New York City.

• 53:57Tracy Alloway?

  That's right.

• 53:58Joe Weisenthal?

  We gotta get him on.

• 53:59Tracy Alloway?

  We should interview Dash about the best sandwich.

• 54:00Joe Weisenthal?

  We should do a lot more with Dash at some point about New York City sandwiches.

• 54:03Tracy Alloway?

  That'd be fun.

• 54:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 54:04Tracy Alloway?

  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.

• 54:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Tracy Alloway?

  When we talked to the DOJ, but it's that idea of the tyranny of the middleman.

• 54:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:19Tracy Alloway?

  Right? And this idea that, okay. Obviously, you're buying flour from a flour producer, but then in between the producer and it 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 sherpa to walk you through. That's another middleman. And then the shipping costs going up, I mean, shipping, not necessarily a middleman, but certainly the middle of the process. It seems like that's where the cost pressures are really coming in.

• 54:48Joe Weisenthal?

  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-

• 54:54Tracy Alloway?

  A bread bus.

• 54:55Joe Weisenthal?

  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 wrenching things going on in that city. And opening a restaurant, as you mentioned, sort of seems crazy in 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.

• 55:26Tracy Alloway?

  I want to learn more about the pizza business as well. We're in New York. We should do pizza.

• 55:30Joe Weisenthal?

  We're going to do a pizza episode.

• 55:32Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Shall we leave it there?

• 55:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 55:34Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 55:39Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at TheStalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashobin at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at KaleBrooks. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where you have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 55:59Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about baked goods, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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