Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Aloway.

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

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?

Uh, not that much. I went through this like I'm just going to The answer is basically no. I'm just No.

Wait, you were going to say something. You went through a phase. One time in high school, I got in this like weird experimental baking obsession with a friend of mine where we just sort of tried to relearn baking by first principles and see what worked.

Oh my god, what does that mean?

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

You should. It's really fun.

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?

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.

Uh, I I I am aware. And the other thing is not only um I understand that it's uh 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 stakes and everything like how do you do it over and over and over again and get a repeatable process 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 demand. So it's really an interesting lens to kind of look through. Well, one of our uh one of our the favorite episodes that we've ever done I which I think was 2022 or maybe 2021,

long time ago.

Uh 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 uh commodity costs. We learned a lot what was going on with pricing power, etc. Well, it's 2025 now. I would like to learn more about what's going on.

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

wouldn't baking baking from first principles be a really good That would be a That would be like a good name for a cookbook. All right, sorry. Keep going.

Um, good name for a baking podcast, perhaps. Okay,

we're going to be speaking with Andy Kaden. He is the owner of a bakery in LA that's called Bub and Grandmas. 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 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 sourdough and got really into carbohydrates

Or I I maybe I'm a little uh uh protocoid 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 uh always had an obsession with cooking and eating and um

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 a Italian Jewish sandwich mecca. uh and saw saw that there was sort of a a 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.

Um, 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 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 pseudocoid rhythm of daily baking and the obsession of that that comes from falling into its uh you know into its grasp and uh 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.

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

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 6 months after I started baking, 6 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 my house. um and moved into a semi 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 volume and number of employees, stuff like that?

The wholesale bakery, which is what that story evolved into, is now a 50 person business. We have a 6,500 foot facility that produces bread, just bread, not pastry, for about 180 restaurants in Los Angeles. It's a pretty wide distribution and we are still trying to grow. We're kind of wallto-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 3 years ago, which is insane how quickly that 3 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 Glassel Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. We are in the process of opening a pizza place in Highland Park, a neighboring neighborhood. 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.

Why did you decide to do the uh 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 uh face-to-face interactions with customers which sounds nice to me but obviously you have a different opinion.

No, I don't. Um, I mean, we started with wholesale. We started in this less sexy, less customer-f facing environment for the first, say, 5 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 I sort of describe it as, you know, you have this big ship. it it's moving up and down in the in the water, but ultimately is forward moving.

Um, 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 uh at the now that I'm there, you know, maybe wholesale would have been better to stay at, 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 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 actual like 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 uh 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 restaurants.

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 wallto-wall. When I say wall to- wall, it basically means there is literally no more oven space per hour available for 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 a.m., you have a very narrow window to cool that bread, pack that bread, get it into the vans, and get it out to these uh accounts. So, our ops team at the bakery are true geniuses in building out these routes because you have only have this very narrow gap to hit.

And if there's famous LA traffic or anything else that uh 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 uh 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 options especially for when we potentially move to a bigger space about outsourcing our distribution.

Um there are a lot of upstart wholesale distribution companies some of which are based in in LA a lot more in San Francisco that are sort of taking the Uber approach um and outsourcing their drivers or having a dedicated pool of drivers who work with a variety of different accounts as opposed to onetoone. 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 con customer, you know, a consumerf 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.

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 brake pad

become a mechanic.

No, you're at the break of repair business too and you got to take that into account. 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 uh transportation and delivery aspect of it. But Andy, you mentioned 2:30 a.m. 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 want to, I guess, wake up at like 1:00 a.m. in the morning and go bake bread?

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 230 aspect is is, you know, very very early and a very very different lifestyle. Um, in a in a literal way, you are falling asleep at 5:30 p.m. And that means that your, you know, connection with your family, your 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 2:30 a.m. bake for the Hollywood Farmers Market. I would, you know, get up at 2, 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. and then, you know, finish the bake, pack it up, put it in my truck, and go to the farmers market and and sell it.

Um, and then the day would wrap up around 2:30. So, it would be this 12-h 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 2:30 in the morning, it scramles 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 5 days a week and still trying to manage the business 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 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.

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 think 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

hiring availability is unique for us uh obviously we are looking for a very specialized group of people. So the skills that they hopefully already have are in in rare supply in Los Angeles and uh 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. um the bakery.

Real quickly, is that would you have said this same thing in 2022 or 2023 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 and service entities were complaining about how impossible it was.

I I think that it's I think that it's impossible if you don't already have a name um that people know. Um, 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. Um, and I think that when we open the restaurant after the bakery, that was already somewhat established in the in the public eye. So, um, that helps us to kind of make this play. I I mean this is the 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 healthcare and

you know we um really built this thing on that. um 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 um you know sales remain the same.

Um, 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 uh, you know, a global commodity that has uh a lot of fluctuations. It's usually compared to others fairly steady. But for example, when the Russia Ukraine war broke out there uh 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 to cover for the loss of supply. Um, so we saw maybe a 10 10% increase in flower pricing. It caused us to have to drive our prices up for the first time uh in a long time bread-wise. Um uh now it has settled back down. Uh but in the meantime, everything else has gotten more expensive.

And you know, there's there's a um you know, massive wave of restaurant closures in Los Angeles right now, including yesterday Kohl's, 117year-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, let you know, survive, let alone thrive in in this town. So, um interesting times for sure.

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 um at a certain price? And I I guess like how long-term are those prices set?

Yeah, it's it's um depends very much on volume and we are in this very unique sort of middle ground where we are not a giant 25,000 foot bakery and we are not one of the sort of more retail oriented 2,000 ft² 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 Cameas Country Mill directly from you know a variety of other flower 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 in the moment now where we're operating through distributors 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 um 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 flower orders.

it's it's a fairly significant regular order. So even if they're making a very small amount on that uh 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 that really matters in that relationship. It's just if you can get us the price we will order from you this week and and they know that and they fight

and it's a weekly price. Uh it's it's more frequent than week weekly at the moment. There's a little bit of flux. June June uh you know and I've just have regular conversations with King Arthur who's our main bread flour supplier

um who are one of the most wonderful businesses in the country and just good people and and always you know driven to to help their uh clients. um 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 push down a little bit further to try and fight for cheaper

But there was a big spike. You know, things have been trending downward in in price that that uh 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. Um, and it's a um, you know, something that if you're constantly monitoring it um, is changing very often um, in in minor increments, but if you do that across an entire batch of mil wheat, that's that's hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So, how does that actually feed into your prices for bread? Like, and how dynamic are they? If you get a price increase um, one day, do you immediately pass that through to the customer?

Almost never. Um and that that's you know the the increases and decreases are uh 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 15 and 1750 for 150 lb bag of bread flour. And that fluctuation it stays in that zone. Maybe a year ago it was up at 23. And if you think about that, if we're ordering, let's say, 5,000 pounds a week of flour, it's actually more than that. I think it's closer to 6,500 pounds and we're talking about a fluctuation of a dollar. That is a massive change in our endofear, 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 15 to 17 range as opposed to going all the way up to $23 a bag, that is um 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 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 $15 a bag to $23 a bag. The main issue is labor.

The main issue is labor because cogs typically with bread are in the, you know, 10 to 15% 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 30% for labor, we're looking at more 42% for labor and 12% for COGS where COGS typically in a restaurant food business environment is somewhere to 25 to 30 if you're doing okay. We're at 14. So they the model is a little bit different in the wholesale universe than it is in the retail restaurant.

and that that is uh you know we're able to have those extra bodies to get things done because the cost of goods are so low.

This is fascinating. Let's continue on this. 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 monthtomonth. 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 incre increase prices and when.

Yeah, I I would say that we are less uh on 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 oper the operations 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 sourdough loaf of bread which I you know we charge $6 for wholesale and a lot of other places might charge $750 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. Um we are a higherend wholesale product which makes us unique as well. Uh 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 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 are 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 I I feel the benefit very, you know, I feel the benefit from passing savings off to the to our accounts, but at a certain a certain point, you have to protect the business, and that's 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. 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?

Well, Los Angeles in 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 uh or be an absolutist in any way, but I will never do a firstg space ever again. Um 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 uh you know into the pile.

So it's it's a very very very difficult process. Do I think the exact opposite just stripping down things to nothing is the is the uh 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.

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

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 it closing, pandemic, actor and writer strike, crime, labor costs, bureaucracy, etc. But just on this point, like I have never worked in a um actually I did work in well actually I've worked

you worked at the sandwich shop

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 cuz when people hear all of this stuff about like oh you got to move the drain. What was there 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 baited breath about whether they see something or not before you can open the door. 100% 100%.

The the the fear that is 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, it's just in 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 is 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 going to get. There's I I heard stories of so a lot of architecture companies have sort of sprung out into 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 they're architects design the restaurant but then we'll 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 go crazy. I hear I have no experience outside of Los Angeles that this this infrastructure is one of the the worst out there.

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.

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 uh misfire. Um, 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 copout 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 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 for almost a decade. And I think that this provides a 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 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 you mentioned digital fame at your uh at the pizzeria at the restaurant. Do you feel like the need to have your equivalent of like, you know, the viral arrowan 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 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 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 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 Tik Tok video that goes viral. So that's Yeah.

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, uh, 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. Our, you know, a variety of pieces of equipment are coming from international places, but I 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, floating around. I 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. Um we 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 um to see if we can find something comparable because the the you know um uh samarzanos 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. Uh, but so far have not seen anything really in terms of uh uh tariffs uh 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 Los Angeles, you know, you hear certainly hear about it in New York and Chicago and u Los Angeles is going through a lot. There were the uh fires,

the recent ice raids and riots and then you know the people what people and I mention 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 as a city?

It's excruciating. Um, this city is is uh especially in the in the food business is 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's a an endless list of factors that make Los Angeles complicated, its 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 a lot less b business happening in Hollywood proper. That said, it's a 400 square mile 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.

Part of it is exciting because it's 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. Silverl and Echo Park and Los Filas 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, but you're also very much uh behind the eight-ball.

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

I wouldn't say subpar. I wouldn't say subpar. The climate is vaguely different. Uh, slightly different. So, you end up with a little bit different result. From what we've seen, the Samaranos from Italy end up being a little bit sweeter, um, 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 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 uh it may just be our own projection, but we're working to try and find whatever the uh the best possible option is for us.

All right, just a couple 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 know you're going to

I mean, Deontes Defontes in Brooklyn is is a special spot, but you know, the the the deli that I grew up with is in Milbour, New Jersey. It's the Milbour 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 OddLots. We're going to have to leave it there, but uh it was really fun to talk about the baking business with you.

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

Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thanks, guys.

Joe, have you ever been to Alidoros?

No. In Soho.

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 uh expanded store is not so good.

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

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

That'd be fun. 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, uh, when we talked to the DOJ, but it's that idea of the tyranny of the middleman, right?

And this idea that okay, obviously you're buying flour from a flower 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.

No, I I think all that's super interesting. Also, this idea that like you could have an Uber for distribution, but then you lose that

a 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,

um, 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 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 in uh 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 going to do a pizza episode.

All right. Shall we leave it there?

Let's leave it there.

This has been another episode of the OddLots podcast. I'm Tracy Aloway. You can follow me at Tracy.

And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our producers Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman-Synan at Dashbot and Kalebrooks at Kalebrooks.

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