PITTSBURGH — It took Nicholas Ambeliotis Jr. — known as Niko at Mediterra Bakehouse — a minute to embrace his opportunity in the family business. When his father, Nicholas Ambeliotis Sr., opened the bakery in 2002, Niko was barely a teenager, with more on his mind than his dad’s entrepreneurial calling to become a baker.
As he grew into a self-proclaimed numbers guy, Niko followed a practical path, studying accounting and working part time in the bakery.
“I didn’t think it was something I wanted to do as a career,” Niko recalled. “I just saw it as a learning experience.”
But there’s a gravitational pull at the center of a family bakery. Niko could have done anything with his accounting degree … but Mediterra was his destiny.
After paying his dues with “grunt” work like driving and packing, Niko got involved in the production side when Mediterra’s frozen business took off with a national account.
“Production was tight, and they needed me there,” he said. “That’s when I started finding my groove and grew this passion for baking.”
Incorporating his love of numbers into that new-found groove, Niko carved out a niche as Mediterra’s head of production, a role he shares with his brother Anthony.
“Bakery production is all about knowing how many loaves you can run through each oven and at what time throughout a shift,” Niko said. “You have to understand how much product has to be made each day and how that fits into the process. I love numbers and formulas, so figuring out those challenges is a sweet spot for me.”
While he’s responsible for ensuring the bakery cranks out product by the tens of thousands, Niko’s not just crunching numbers. He’s also developing formulas and keeping his hands in the dough.
“I love working with my hands, forming the dough,” he said. “There’s something about taking just a few ingredients and turning them into a beautiful loaf of bread. I’m very passionate about it.”
Things like baker’s percentage — formula based on flour weight as 100% — come naturally to Niko, and his combination of formulaic knowledge and production expertise create a driving force in the bakery.
Although he believes there’s no such thing as a perfect loaf, Niko spends every day on a quest to achieve it. And in that process, he hopes to bring others along.
“With bread, you strive for perfection, knowing you may never reach it,” he said. “Every day, you have to get a little better with the process. In that respect, I try to do things the right way and set the example for everyone else.”
It’s a mentality Niko maintains not only as a baker but also a business owner.
“Every day, you walk in and there’s a different challenge,” he said. “You become a better person by overcoming those challenges and growing from them. It’s what I look forward to every day in the bakery.”
Niko easily could have taken his degree and run the corporate route. But after experiencing what his family was building with Mediterra, he knew his role — and his heart — was in the bakery. Here, he’s becoming a centrifuge.
“I realized at some point that I didn’t want to be a cog in a corporate wheel,” Niko said. “I saw the potential here — the team we had and where we were going — and I knew there were big things in the future for this place. Here, in our family business, I’m part of something bigger.”
This story is from the June | Q2 2023 issue of Craft to Crumb. Read the full mini-mag here.
