Every generation of the Rotella family has taken the family’s commercial bakery, Rotella’s Italian Bakery, to the next level. The founder, Alessandro Rotella, an Italian immigrant who began his family bakery in Omaha, Neb., while on strike with Union Pacific Railroad, would not believe what his son, grandson and great-grandchildren have built upon the foundation he laid in 1921. Alessandro’s son, Lou Rotella Sr., strove to have one of the best commercial bakeries in the United States, and his grandson, Lou Rotella Jr., chief executive officer, took the company’s distribution nationwide with frozen product.  

The fourth generation — Lou Rotella III, chief operating officer, and John Rotella, general manager — are poised to continue the tradition of going further than the generations before. 

Each of Lou Rotella Jr.’s sons plays to his own strength and passion in contributions to the family business. Lou Rotella III has spent much of his career in the family business, formalizing policies and procedures to better support the company’s immense growth over the past few decades. John Rotella, a natural-born builder, has streamlined the company’s production to reach new efficiencies and is the one the family turns to in order to design and implement every capital investment project. These contributions to their father’s dream as well as their own dreams for the future of Rotella’s Italian Bakery have earned both of them the honor of being named Baking & Snack’s Operations Executives of the Year. 

Being a Rotella does not automatically mean you must make your career about Rotella’s Italian Bakery. Lou Rotella Jr. recalled no pressure to join the family business unless it’s what he wanted. He has also given each of his three sons the choice: Lou Rotella III and John Rotella both took him up on his offer while Joe Rotella has pursued a career in medicine. 

“I never forced them to come into the bakery,” Lou Jr. said. “I wanted them to make their own choices about what they wanted to be. … I’m so fortunate that I have two of my boys in the bakery, and the most important thing is that they’re capable of running the company. That’s not always the case with a family company, but my kids work really hard. They’ve proved to me and everyone else at the bakery that they’re capable of running it.”

While the kids may have been able to choose their ultimate career paths, they all worked at the bakery growing up. As teenagers, their part-time jobs involved every aspect of the bakery: production lines, packaging, sanitation. 

“If you weren’t playing an organized sport, then you had to be working,” Lou Rotella III said. “Typically, on a Saturday, we would put in a 10- to 12-hour shift on sanitation.”

Between family dinners and working the front line of the family business, Lou Rotella III and John Rotella were steeped in their family culture and the business’s core values informed by that culture: quality, customer service, product innovation, generosity and teamwork. They’ve done every job in the bakery, which has given them an incredible understanding of the business and empathy for their employees. They have firsthand experience of how their grandfather and father ran the company and the production room floor, and what their expectations were that led to the bakery’s growth and success. Thinking back to those days putting in a shift on the sanitation crew, John Rotella remembered his grandfather’s priority on cleanliness and how that reverberates today.

“Our grandfather was extremely meticulous when it came to maintaining a clean bakery, which we still are today,” he said. “As a matter of fact, we just scored 100% on an SQF audit, which is pretty rare, especially given the size of the campus that we currently have.” 

That meticulous nature, however, went beyond sanitation to every facet of the company.

This article is an excerpt from the December 2024 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Operations Executives of the Year, click here.