Since Sliced Bread

In this episode of Since Sliced Bread, Walt Tunnessen, Energy Star national manager at the EPA, explains how the program can help bakeries get their arms around their energy consumption and make significant changes.

Opportunities exist throughout a bakery to improve an operation’s carbon footprint, whether it’s quick changes or major capital projects. In this episode of Since Sliced Bread, Margaret Ann Marsh, vice president of sustainability and environmental, Flowers Foods, discusses how the company incorporates sustainability initiatives at every level and reaps not only environmental rewards but also business benefits.

In this premier episode of season five of Since Sliced Bread, Jack Bobo, food futurist and chief executive officer of Futurity, a food foresight company, gives a tour of how consumers and food companies’ sustainability priorities sometimes misalign. Listen to this episode to hear what the baking industry is doing right and where companies can grow to not only better serve the consumer but also still improve the environment.

Baking & Snack’s podcast Since Sliced Bread is taking a closer look at why companies are putting sustainability front and center and what it takes to create an effective program. Be on the lookout for season five, premiering February 3.

In the final episode of Since Sliced Bread’s fourth season, Marjorie Hellmer, president of Cypress Research Associates, returns to dive into some best practices bakeries can implement to recruit and retain employees.

This October, the American Bakers Association (ABA) and NDP Analytics released the findings of the Baking Industry Frontline Workforce Landscape study. On this episode of Since Sliced Bread, Mary Donovan, principal and economist, NDP Analytics, will explain what the data means for the baking industry. As a participant in the study, Pat Richards, vice president of organizational development and recruitment for Hearthside Food Solutions, Downers Grove, IIl., gives her perspective on what this data looks like on the ground.

As one of the sponsors of the Workforce Gap Study discussed in the first episode of Since Sliced Bread’s fourth season, the American Society of Baking (ASB) has been hard at work addressing the issue since the studies 2016 release. In this episode, Brittny Stephenson Ohr, director of product management at Sugar Foods Corp. and third vice chair at ASB, details what the society has been addressing since being armed with such data.

For more than forty years, Alvarado Street Bakery has operated as a 100% employee-owned bakery. Due to its co-op structure, the company has experienced low turnover and high employee engagement. In this episode, Dae Lee, director of marketing at Alvarado Street Bakery, discusses how a worker-owned co-op operates and how it’s principles could apply to any commercial bakery.

By partnering with the International Institute of Akron, Main Street Gourmet has found a loyal workforce in refugees that have resettled in the United States.  Hear what hiring from this population entails and how it can benefit bakeries and their employees in our discussion with Kelly Loebick-Frashella, director of human resources, Main Street Gourmet.

Kansas State University’s Department of Grain Science and Industry has been supplying the next generation of bakers to the commercial baking industry for years. The department itself though, struggles with the same recruitment issues the industry does. In this episode, KSU Grain Sciences Department Head Gordon Smith, PhD, and Aaron Clanton, Baker’s National Education Foundation instructor, share how the workforce gap looks from the university program’s perspective.