North Bay bakers find work, life balance in competitive marketplace

Since it opened in January 2017, Goguette Bakery has drawn a loyal following to its storefront in a nondescript Santa Rosa shopping center, attracting lines of customers before it even opens its doors.

There is the coffee shop in Stockton that uses Uber to pick up loaves from Goguette that can be frozen and later served to its customers. A group of friends in Palo Alto regularly rotates visits up to Sonoma County to buy its long-fermented sourdough loaves that have garnered rave reviews. San Rafael attorneys use an overnight service to get the loaves, which are made from freshly milled organic flour. Tokyo and Kyoto tourists have flocked there after reading an article in a Japanese bakery magazine, seeking special loaves with green olives or chocolate tucked inside.

Taylor Lane Organic Coffee recently selected Goguette to provide sandwich bread and baguettes for its new menu, as the Sebastopol coffee company expands into three new locations in the Bay Area.

But Goguette’s husband-and-wife owners, Nas Salamati and Nagine Shariat, say they aren’t thinking about expanding their bakery, staffed with six employees.

“You don’t let the business run you,” said Shariat, who previously worked as a dietitian. “It’s not overwhelming. We still have vacation. We still have family time.”

They are satisfied being open only four days a week - Wednesday through Saturday from 1:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. - a schedule that allows them to spend time with their 12-year-old daughter, Soraya.

“We are going to grow organically. We’re not going to do the typical (thing) … and just put everything out there,” Shariat said.

While such thinking may be anathema to modern-day capitalists and MBA students, some North Bay bakers have found a way to balance work and quality of life and not be beholden to growth targets. For example, Wild Flour Bread in Freestone is only open four days a week with a devoted following who drives from outside the county to sample loaves out of its wood-fired brick oven. It celebrates its 20th year in business on Thanksgiving.

Scaling up a bakery can be difficult, said Craig Ponsford, who won the 1996 World Cup of Baking and founded Artisan Bakers in Sonoma.

“There are a lot of negatives to it,” he said.

Working grueling hours, Ponsford found that out firsthand. He brought on private-equity investors as Artisan grew to have 100 employees, loading bread at around midnight for retail customers and then back at noon preparing for the next day’s deliveries. Ponsford said he then had a falling out and “ended up getting kicked out of my own business” in 2010.

“From that experience, I wouldn’t want that to happen that way to me again,” Ponsford said. “It did teach me a lot of things. There is life to be had outside the bakery.”

After leaving Artisan, Ponsford said he found enough time to start dating and eventually got married. He now operates Ponsford’s Place bakery in San Rafael, which is open a couple of days a month, while also ramping up educational programs at the Central Milling Artisan Baking Center in Petaluma.

Ponsford noted that he isn’t rich and helps subsidize himself by consulting and renting out his bakery to others.

“I feel super lucky and get to do what I want to do,” he said.

The North Bay has been filled with Horatio Alger tales of food and wine entrepreneurs who started with little and ended up striking it rich. Adam Lee, for example, moved out from Texas to help usher in the pinot noir boom in Sonoma County with his Siduri Wines, while Tony Magee started brewing beer on his stovetop before capitalizing on the craft beer revolution to make Lagunitas Brewing Co. one of the biggest brewers in the country. Both businessmen eventually sold out to larger companies to manage their continuing growth.

And people still come to Sonoma County to try to fulfill their passion in the food and drink sector. Bread baking is one of the prime opportunities because it offers a lower cost of entry into the field, as opposed to making cheese or wine from increasingly more expensive ingredients.

A storefront bakery can cost from $250,000 to $500,000 depending on the location, bakers said, but it is not a requirement to get started and can be done for much less. Salamati and Shariat were able to use their savings to start Goguette - with the biggest expense being the $80,000 French-made oven.

For quality bakers in the North Bay, profit margins can range around 10 percent, Ponsford said. “I would say not doing 10 percent puts you in kind of danger,” he added.

Some have opted for a go-small approach. For example, Ian Conover does his baking at home for his Relax and Eat Bread bakery and home-delivery service. Like Salamati and Shariat, Conover had a previous career in retail management in Sausalito and was looking for a chance to spend more time with his wife, Tara Williams, a local elementary school teacher who also helps out with the business.

“For me, part of it is learning to live with less,” Conover said.

His bakery has an email list of 600 customers and Conover makes up to 120 loaves a week, in addition to some morning buns on Sunday. He has a defined delivery schedule: Santa Rosa on Monday; Sonoma Valley Tuesday through Thursday; and Petaluma on Friday. Relax and Eat Bread offers three different sourdoughs at $7 a loaf.

“My family all lives around here and I have two nieces. I get to see them on weekends and holidays, ride bikes and go on hikes that I get to enjoy,” he said. “If you are spending 60 hours a week in the service industry, you miss out on all those things.”

One advantage Conover found was low-cost classes in the North Bay, a resource that should grow as the Artisan Baking Center expands its offerings. He graduated from the Santa Rosa Junior College Culinary Arts program and also took a class at the center under Mike Zakowski of The Bejkr (The Baker) in Sonoma, which he said was especially helpful because he did not come from a baking background.

Digital technology has allowed bakers to sell and deliver their products directly to consumers, cutting out the wholesale industry that Zakowski contends turned him into “a slave to the customer.” He previously served as operations manager at Artisan and also shares Ponsford’s philosophy that bigger is not necessarily better. He now is his own one-man operation.

While some weeks he’s had to put in 50 to 60 hours, Zakowski has more control over his life today than when he worked at larger bakeries. He delivers one day a week and on Fridays he sells at the Farmers Market in Sonoma, a schedule that allows him to easily take vacations and travel.

“I do well. I only need so much. I can live in Sonoma and travel,” Zakowski, 49, said. “If you want more money, don’t go into bread baking.”

In a town of around ?11,000 residents, he said he only needed a couple hundred customers from Sonoma to earn a living. Zakowski also does private events with his mobile oven and some consulting to help pay the bills. He believes there is opportunity for other entrants - something that is much harder to say in other more mature local sectors such as beer and wine.

Given that many Sonoma residents are affluent, he can sell some of his loaves for as much as $16.

“They don’t even bat an eye at it,” he said. “It’s not for every community.”

Salamati and Shariat have learned to say no, including to the one customer who wanted to write a check to open up a second location. Salamati had worked as an electrical engineer and has an MBA, so that background will help the couple prepare if they do want to expand down the road.

“If or when we decide to scale up, he knows how to do it without compromising the quality or burning your employees or yourself out,” Shariat said.

You can reach Staff Writer Bill Swindell at 707-521-5223 or bill.swindell@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @BillSwindell.