Baking & Snack - February 2008 - 34

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Fresh Start Bakeries shifts its flagship Southern California bakery
to a new, larger location just in time for a major market expansion.
BY LAURIE GORTON
aking more than 10,000 doz buns an hour, Fresh
Start Bakeries' new 189,000-sq-ft Ontario, CA,
plant already sets new speed records among the 29
facilities it operates worldwide. Such results were
always part of the plan, begun eight years ago, to replace
Fresh Start's aging flagship bakery at City of Industry, CA,
but they took place at a particularly opportune time.
"Increased throughput" was what Craig Olson, president of the Brea, CA-based company, pegged as the main
priority for the new bakery, which represents a $30 million investment. "And we accomplished our goal."
"Production here has already reached 1.1 million doz
buns per week," added Mike Ward, Fresh Start's senior
vice-president and chief manufacturing officer.
The timing? Fresh Start's market was about to change
- in a big way. The company, a pioneer among the "single source" bakery suppliers to McDonald's Corp., had
recently inked contracts with other quick service restaurant (QSR) groups. To meet its customer's requirements
and continue to grow in California, company executives
knew they had to replace City of Industry (which the Fresh Start staff refers to
as "CI") with a larger facility. But the
decision by Interstate Bakeries Corp.
to exit Southern California by October
2007, prompted Fresh Start to accelerate its plans to "go retail" and jump into
supermarket distribution.

model of a commercial business-to-business bakery. Yet
entry into that market has been on the minds of company managers for some time.
"We knew that retail supply was down the line," said
Bob Mitchell, Ontario's plant manager. He also served as
plant manager at City of Industry. "We had shopped for
baggers and other such retail packaging technology, but
we didn't put it in at CI."
The 67,000-sq-ft City of Industry bakery lacked space.
In fact, it was completely out of room to add anything
more. "That all changed when we came here," said Clyde
Kawamoto, Fresh Start's vice-president and director of
engineering, describing the new Ontario facility.
"When the smoke clears, our business at Ontario should
be about 30% retail," Mr. Olson predicted. Fresh Start labels
its retail buns and English muffins with its own Premier
Bakers brand for goods sold through Costco. "The other
retail brands belong to our customers," he explained.
Fresh Start, a privately held company, sells more than
$500 million annually. During the past two years, it

ᮢ Fresh Start Baking's
new Ontario plant
operates under the
direction of (from left)
Clyde Kawamoto, vicepresident and director
of engineering; Mike
Ward, senior vicepresident and chief
manufacturing officer;
Craig Olson, president;
Bob Mitchell, Ontario
plant manager; and
Rob Crawford, Ontario
general manager.

INTO RETAIL. "Retail was kind of unexpected," Mr. Olson observed. "If we had
not been two weeks into startup at Ontario, the [Southern California] market
would have been without buns and rolls.
Retail is a whole new world for us."
To many industry observers, retail
distribution might seem foreign to the
business model of Fresh Start, the very

February 2008 / BAKING & SNACK

Baking & Snack - February 2008

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