As Los-Angeles-based Aspire Bakeries looks optimistically to the future, the company and its brands still face an array of challenges, much like other bakeries, said Tyson Yu, chief executive officer of Aspire Bakeries, parent company of Otis Spunkmeyer.

“I would say the three off the top of my mind: labor, inflation and supply chain,” he said. “Those are all related, of course. Probably a fourth is keeping baking top of mind for the consumer.”

Although the turnover rate is starting to return to pre-pandemic levels, the bakery still has labor hot spots, especially in places where the company is expanding. The company employs more than 4,000 people, 123 in Newark, Calif.

 “Baking is not an industry of choice yet,” Yu said. “It probably was 50 years ago, 40 years ago. We think even 15 years ago the skilled hourly population was robust. We saw that slip a little bit before the pandemic. And those labor shifts are a continuous challenge, so we’ve been managing that. The team has done a tremendous job of trying to address that across the United States and Canada. It’s all about engagement; it’s all about leadership.”

The Otis Spunkmeyer teams have a pre-shift huddle every day to discuss important topics like safety. The company also values communication, including sending employees surveys and engaging in ongoing training.

“We found that a constant touchpoint with our people — while that sounds obvious — that engagement has really driven performance and retention,” Yu said. 

That includes a call center where workers can ask about benefits and more.

“There’s a lot of different avenues where we enable our associates to have very close contact with our bakery leadership at all points,” Yu pointed out.

The bakeries have online Alchemy training as well as other company programs to help employees get up to speed on procedures, which is especially helpful for new associates, Sandvold said. He talked about the core fundamentals, or company pillars. 

“Those pillars are small teams where we use problem solving, root cause analysis methods as well as hazard identification and elimination,” he explained. “We use that platform to engage people and involve them in the problem-solving process to eliminate hazards and make each bakery the safest place it can be.”

There’s also supervisor training as well as continuous skills development in which best practices are documented and shared with employees so everyone understands expectations and how each procedure promotes safety. Engagement and worker retention are top focuses.

“We have an onboarding training program where we established structure to aid our associates and communicate expectations and make sure they’re supported and listened to,” said David Sandvold, bakery director in Newark, Calif., and Chaska, Minn. “You don’t want to start in an organization and be left on your own to figure it out.”

Inflation and supply chain are ongoing issues, as the Otis Spunkmeyer team constantly monitors the cost and availability of raw ingredients like eggs, sugar and chocolate. Teams work together to stay ahead of any problems.

“We’ve been working together very closely, collaborating with our entire business whether it’s our procurement team, supply chain team, finance team, an effort led by Beau making sure we’re addressing these issues every single day,” Yu said. “It’s how we do business.”

Because inflation is impacting businesses and consumers alike, they are cognizant of that when it comes to pricing, said Beau Netzer, president of foodservice for Aspire Bakeries.

“The key right now with inflation and the labor issue is not just with us but with our customers, especially with the QSR restaurant space,” he said. “They have an equal if not more of an issue facing them from a cost structure. It’s about being in front of it and providing solutions to our customers.”

The company looks for creative ways to deliver value. For instance, with the higher price of chocolate, the brand is providing ideas to alleviate costs, like providing non-chocolate items such as the new Lemon Burst cookie.

“We leverage our portfolio and provide solutions for our customers so they can deal with this serious situation with inflation,” Netzer added.

Otis Spunkmeyer is also offering customers smaller cookies to help with price point.

“We’re providing solutions without looking like, ‘Oh, they shrunk the product.’ Be intentional. Offer a smaller size on purpose and offer it to consumers in multiples,” Netzer said. 

The upgrades Otis Spunkmeyer has made to the 79,000-square-foot Newark bakery as well as in Chaska and Cayce, SC, are about building in capacity while maintaining flexibility to serve customers.

“To have the ability in our facility to pivot and supply a large QSR that’s launching something is very critical for us,” Netzer said. “We want to play in that space, which is more important today because they couldn’t innovate during COVID. There’s a huge tidal wave of innovation that’s hit the marketplace, and we’ve got to be ready for it. And that requires flexibility with scale.”

The company has a network approach to production with six bakeries making Otis Spunkmeyer products. Many produce the same baked goods, but each one has slightly different capabilities.

“Our supply chain team in conjunction with Beau are constantly developing business plans as part of the growth plans so we have the capacity,” Yu said. “That started in 2019. We didn’t predict the pandemic, but we had a five-year plan at that time, and we are refreshing those five-year views now. We are going to continue to invest in the Otis Spunkmeyer network. We’re fortunate we made the right bets in 2019, and it’s going to be a continuous plan as we look forward.”

Otis Spunkmeyer has an integrated monthly planning process matching supply with demand. Contingency plans allow the six facilities to back each other up if problems or opportunities arise or demand changes. The HACCP-certified Newark bakery runs five days a week and is shut down on weekends for sanitation and maintenance. The bakery processes are capable and repeatable, which promotes quality, Sandvold added.

The company strives to improve its sustainability by working toward zero-waste landfill as well as energy and water savings. The Newark bakery’s waste diversion rate hit 90% in 2023, Yu said.

In 2021, Aspire Bakeries upgraded the Newark bakery, which it acquired in 2012. It was built in 1989. The bakery added a 12,000-square-foot freezer and a high-efficiency frozen cookie dough line, which has the capacity to make a variety of different sizes and can be packaged for bulk or retail sale. It runs two bakery lines as well as the frozen cookie dough line.

That line is fed by a Shick Esteve bulk ingredient system that supplies flour and sugar from Shick silos that sit just outside the bakery. The remaining ingredients are added manually. The batches of dough come together in Tonelli mixers in climate-controlled rooms to ensure precision in every batch. Doughs are fed through a Baker Perkins Wirecut Depositor system that extrudes and cuts them into pucks. The system can accommodate a range of sizes. Cookie dough pucks then go into a -25F freezer before packaging. Products can either be bulk packed directly into a case using an Eagle scale or processed through a Triangle scale system and vertical pillow pack bagger before they are packed into a case. 

For the baked cookie line, ingredients are loaded manually into two Tonelli mixers then go through the same four-stage mixing process as the frozen dough line in a climate-controlled environment. The dough is then transferred from mixing bowls into carts that are wheeled out to the production line and automatically dumped into the Reiser Vemag hoppers. The Vemags measure, cut and place the dough into trays before loading into a Babbco tunnel oven. 

Once baked, the cookies move onto IJ White Systems ambient spiral coolers before they travel into the freezer. The frozen cookies are manually loaded into cases and palletized for storage in a static freezer.  

Aspire Bakeries is continuing to invest in Newark and all of its six Otis Spunkmeyer bakeries as production ramps up. After the downturn from the pandemic and challenges caused by supply chain and inflation, the company is emerging with innovation and a renewed purpose to serve foodservice and other customers. 

“It feels like we’re just getting started. Every day is an exciting time,” Yu said. “We look at this runway for growth for many years to come, and we want to grow into that.”

This article is an excerpt from the September issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Aspire Bakeries, click here.