Baking & Snack - May 2016 - 12

Mastering a new mindset

When I first met Gary Gottenbusch five years ago, he
was a winner, actually a champion. He won the top
prize in the California Raisin Board's America's Best
Raisin Bread contest for his raisin walnut pretzels. What
I didn't know about Gary then was that he was a retail
baker with wholesale ambitions. He wanted to take the
best of his family recipes - authentic German artisan
pretzels - and combine the craft of baking with the best
practices and the latest in technology that commercial
baking offers.
Actually, Gary and his brother Greg have been blending retail and wholesale baking for some time. The family's 40,000-sq-ft commissary now supplies custom-made,
fresh-baked goods each morning for the 14 Servatii
Pastry bakeries throughout Cincinnati, relying on the
efficiencies of the centralized operation to keep retail
baking alive and well in southern Ohio.
Scaling up and automating soft pretzels -
which along with cookies account for 35% of the
company's sales - made sense in more ways
than one. In addition to lowering production
costs, moving these two products to a separate
facility would free up space in the cramped
central commissary. Moreover, it would allow
the company to expand geographically.
With the opening of its 84,000-sq-ft plant in
northern Cincinnati, Pretzel Baron - the new business with a more apt German brand name - was born.
While Greg takes care of the retail business, Gary focuses
on wholesale. With roots in retail baking, he is now meld-

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ing his craft mentality with the mindset of a commercial
operator. That has meant applying the best practices of
food safety, food security, traceability and everything else
that's required under the plethora of regulations to be a
successful wholesaler in today's world.
While Gary had a pool of talented bakers working in
the family's retail shops, he chose to hire unskilled operators and train them in the philosophy of wholesale
production and statistical process control. Besides, he
didn't have to break "bad habits" that craft bakers might
have acquired from years of taking a hands-on approach
to dough.
At the same time, Gary "trained" the technology to
take on the art of baking. Specifically, he personally
worked with a European equipment company to program
the pretzel twisting machines to mimic what he can deftly
do by hand - except 100 times faster.
But, as everyone knows, technology isn't perfect,
even if it has been taught by an expert in baking. It
requires a lot of adjusting and fine tuning, especially
during the startup of the operation and even today as
the line changes over from one product to another. In
fact, during our visit to his bakery, I caught Gary a few
times reaching over the line, re-twisting an imperfect
pretzel string into proper form.
In his own way, he was telling technology to step up its
game. It was a classic example of mastering both the art
and the science of baking.
- Dan Malovany, editorial director
dmalovany@sosland.com

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Baking & Snack - May 2016

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