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KANSAS CITY, MO — Welcome to “At the Bench,” a Craft to Crumb series hosted by Richard Charpentier, CMB, and CEO of Baking Innovation that features one-on-one conversations with some of the country’s top bakers about what inspires them, and the trends and innovation they’re seeing in the industry.
In this Q&A, Richard speaks with Heidi Heideker, CMB, a renowned baker and pastry chef instructor at Kendall College, about how her experience growing up in her family’s bakery and her education journey shaped her perspective on the industry and the craft of baking.
Richard Charpentier: Heidi, it’s a pleasure having you here. How are you today?
Heidi Heideker: Thank you so much, Richard. It’s really a joy to get to talk to you. We’ve had such great conversations in the past, and I’m looking forward to talking more.
Richard: I love how educated you are around baking, and you and I have spoken on many occasions. I’m going to ask you three questions. First, can you walk us through your journey and how each chapter of your life shaped who you are today?
Heidi: I recall as a young kid sitting outside the entryway of our bakery. In Chicago, alleyways are the delivery points for all the businesses on the streetscape, and I could sit out there and have conversations with the delivery guys who would come from the milk company and the flour company. The air duct from the store below came up into our apartment, so I could hear the customers, the transactions, and I would count the cars that were double-parked in front of the store and get all excited if it was a busy day.
My whole memory of that place … it just was such a cornerstone of the neighborhood. My thoughts about the bakery as a community center have always revolved around the idea that a bakery needs to have people working in it that are representative of the community that it finds itself in … that the retail landscape is also a place for nurturing humans as they go about their daily lives. People in business have that responsibility to the community that they’re doing business in, and also the incredible amount of human relations and human development that goes on in a retail shop where people are making things together by hand.
Up until I was about 10, I just saw the bakery as this incredibly miraculous place where nuts were turned into coffee cakes and there was this whole mixture of ethnicities there. There were a lot of immigrants and a lot of guys coming back from the Korean War, and so it was just a very unique time.
Later on, I became more acquainted with the labor part of it because my dad expected us all to work in the bakery. I just remember one vignette when I got my first car. I had money that I had saved up, so I bought a Fiat Spider convertible, and I was going to drive to the shopping mall. And lo and behold, there on the kitchen table were 12 cases of strawberries that needed to be picked … taking the green part off so that they could be used in decorated cakes. I had two older brothers who also were called upon to do a lot of work in the bakery, and it was a hardening experience. What I mean is that my brothers — more than I — learned about competition and the incredible amount of stress that my dad and the people running the bakery were under, which translated to us having to work and understand that you had to work and pull your weight. I just say that because I can laugh about it now.
There’s a competition aspect there that isn’t a bad thing, and it really teaches you to want to excel in some way, and it teaches you how to problem-solve. That’s actually the thing that I think these jobs really do: They create problem-solving abilities.
In my teen years, I really started to benefit from the vast amount of skills practiced in the bakery. We had 12 full-time bakers. It was a double storefront. One side of the shop had the mixing department; the other side had the decorators, and we had four full-time decorators.
I learned a lot of skills and then went to pastry school. I was fortunate to be in a business where people who made things were coming into direct contact with the people buying them. There were lots of activities around that, and it’s interesting.
Retail bakers have constant daily feedback from customers, and they can adjust and modify based on what they want; versus larger bakeries, where when you buy it, you can go complain online. But as retail bakers, they’ll come to your bakery and yell at you, then say, “Hey, I didn’t like the product,” and then you have to redo it or modify it. It’s the constant stress of being nimble and making sure customers are happy as they buy your product.
Richard: I’m glad that we’re laughing because we can remember those kinds of conversations. If you put a little bit more almond extract in one day or something … people are very particular, and it’s a wonderful thing, in a way.
Heidi: Yep. That’s how we work fast versus having one product you press a button, and it makes the same product day in and day out. I’ve always said it’s missing the life out of the product versus when you have the baker … at least you can go yell at him if you’re not happy. One of the things I think about when we have started having our conversations is that recently, they’ve gotten more and more excavation in Pompeii, where they’re so similar to what the what the retail bakeries are, where you have these frescos showing products on the walls, and you have a counter space, and you have display spaces, and you have the interaction of people. That’s just such a human need, and it’s such an important thing.
Richard: It’s 6000 years of history; we’re just passing through. We’ve forgotten quite a lot about how we did things, and yes, we’ve made the life of the bakers easier today. But there are a lot of things we can bring back, and I think the main thing is the human interactive side of a bakery. My second question is: What are you seeing in the bakery industry today?
Heidi: What really excites me is seeing these small pop-up bakeries start out with excitement, passion, drive, and they’re actually succeeding. That amazes me … against all odds. When I was young, in my teens and early 20s, I would see these small places start up, and they would invariably not succeed because there were so many mid-to-large-sized bakeries that somehow had captured more of the market. A lot of those places don’t exist anymore.
The super small places run by one or two people with a lot of creativity — those are just being embraced so incredibly by neighborhoods. I live in a city, so I don’t know if it’s the unique density that we have here that allows that to happen. Hopefully, it’s a phenomenon that’s happening in communities all over, in mid-sized cities and smaller towns, too.
But it seems like customers really want to reward and appreciate on a person-to-person level the people that are behind the counter and behind the bakery. They want to really support them, and they’ll do it to the point where — I never saw this when I was young — that the bakeries could be open only Wednesday through Sunday or something. They could make such specific hours, and people would still be very loyal, and the customers would plan their shopping patterns around the business, which is a big deal. So it’s the reverse of the convenience idea.
Richard: What would you say to someone who is considering entering the baking profession about the path, challenges and rewards of becoming a baker?
Heidi: The incredible reward is the pride and the satisfaction and the sense of meaning that comes from being in a job or an occupation where, first of all, you’re performing experiments every day. Every day, you’re observing something different in what you make. That’s really amazing … and your interaction with what you’re doing; you’re having a direct impact on what you make. That’s a quality of life that’s really nurturing to the person doing it.
I’m so lucky to get to work with students and see them go out into the field and to hear back from them and also hear back from the people employing them. I get to hear what’s happening in the retail business and what works and what’s not working. More than ever before, we just have to be very strategic and think about what we are going to put on the shelves on a given day. We have to know that there’s somebody there that wants to buy it. We have to be strategic about our locations.
I just see people making mistakes all the time because they think they get a good deal. They get a space where maybe the rent is cheap, but three other bakeries have failed there, three other restaurants that failed there … Do your homework. It really is worthwhile, and it’s only going to mean that when you actually are there, spending your valuable time in this business, that you’re going to be rewarded, as opposed to having to struggle to even survive. Do your homework and investigate a location or investigate the possibilities of a new product that you want to make.
Also, I think my biggest lesson — even though I came from a bakery family, and I had the example of my dad, who really interfaced with a lot of other bakery owners — you have to really not be afraid to talk to the other people who own these kinds of businesses. You have to develop yourself in such a way that you can do that without being threatening to them, and also learn from them because that’s another really important resource. I see people really struggle so much more if they don’t have the ability to connect with other business people who are in their profession.
Richard: And how about the point about the path? What place would they go to start becoming a baker?
Heidi: Of course, I’m in education, so I feel very strongly that our program does a lot to stand behind the people that we educate and train. We’re there with them when they go into their first jobs and their first positions. And I do advocate for education, but I didn’t come to it myself until I already had exposure to what a bakery is. I worked in a bakery. I think that’s really important to spend some time working in a couple of shops to get direct experience, so you really, really know what this is about. That’s the most important thing before turning to education and knowing what it could do for you.
