52 M I N N E S OTA H I S TO RY

F loury fi ngerprints of bakeries past dot the streets of South

Minneapolis. Where once— in 1935— 115 “Bakers— Retail” were listed in the city directory, by the 1980s and 1990s barely two dozen remained, and some of those were outlet stores or cookie shops.1

Today, some of those fi ngerprints have become coff ee shops, private homes, social- service agencies, nail shops, or small retail stores. One loca-tion, however, has retained a baked- goods function since 1915: 1534 East Lake Street. Over nearly a hundred years, this storefront at Bloomington Avenue has had 17 proprietors. Some brought their skills from other coun-tries, and some learned the bread- and- cake business in the U.S. But the longest- lasting bakers at 1534 East Lake were a large band of counter-culture pioneers. They were probably the fi rst to make and sell granola in Minnesota, and they nurtured and ac-celerated health- food trends that are

still with us. Collectively, they were the People’s Company Bakery, tenants from 1971 to 2002.2

The story of People’s Company contrasts dramatically with those of its predecessors. In 1971 the new bakers actually did throw out the old ways of doing things— not only modes of working and marketing but also some typical bread ingredients. Additionally, they brought a social and economic awareness to replace old- fashioned boosterism. And by virtue of their setting, they were both witness to and sometimes a catalyst for South Minneapolis’s chang-ing neighborhoods. In retrospect, they were a signifi cant transitional enterprise.

“Neighborhood bakery” is a slip-pery term, often limited by nostalgia. A widely cited fi gure in American baking history is that in 1890, 90 percent of bread was made in the home. But as the twentieth century progressed, bakers’ ambitions and consumers’ budgets built a mutually supportive sell- and- buy relation-ship around loaves, pies, cakes, and

doughnuts. Historically, bakeries were walkable destinations; a 1956 textbook proposed a two- to- three block radius for eff ective neighbor-hood service. (Bakers also typically lived either on the premises or within a few blocks.3 At multiple high- traffi c intersections in larger cities, citizens could count on a retail mix of butcher shops, bakeries, dry cleaners, shoe re-pair, hardware stores, and the like.

Through much of the twentieth century, including PCB’s formative years, 1534 East Lake matched that picture. In 1905, when the storefront fi rst had tenants, its corner was a hive of activity. Lake Street had long been an important east- west artery, fi rst for carriages, then for weekend cyclists, and ultimately for motor vehicles and public transport— especially the Lake Street Cross Town Line, com-

People’s Company Bakery

Phil Anderson

PHIL ANDERSON, professor of liberal arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, retires this year. From 1978 to 1999, he was also a freelance writer and fi lm critic, primarily at City Pages weekly.

FlourPower

r

S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 53

This article was funded, in part, by the Atherton and Winifred (Wollaeger) Bean Fund for Business History.

pleted in 1905. Bloomington was, like Nicollet, Chicago, and Cedar Avenues, an important and incrementally extending north- south route to resi-dential settlement, also blessed with streetcars. By 2002, however, the intersection represented the evolving twenty- fi rst century with diff erent businesses and more varied ethnic neighbors. The store’s most recent tenant, Panaderia San Miguel, was opened by an immigrant from More-los, Mexico, who shares with seven of his predecessors many new Ameri-cans’ ambitions for success: the pana-deria is an off shoot of an older bakery in St. Paul.4

While bakeries big and small op-

erated all over Minneapolis through-out the twentieth century, this half of the city— south of Franklin Avenue— was home to both more and longer- lasting ones. As the decades progressed, fewer and fewer neigh-borhood bakers and grocers held on, their numbers dramatically declining by the 1960s. Yet analysis of city di-rectories over a century shows a more concentrated survival of Bakers— Retail in this area than others. A par-tial explanation of this anomaly could be the historically more residential, more Scandinavian districts east of

Hiawatha Avenue, where neighbor-hood bakeries remained well into the 1970s, even as other parts of the city lost many of theirs.5

The fi rst stores at 1534 were candy shops, run by diff erent

owners every year. They shared the street with barbershops, cafés, fraternal- group halls, butchers, and others. Lake Street had enough enter-prises that a separate business associ-ation promoted it as a “district.”

After the serial confectioners gave up, in 1915, the storefront became a bakery. The fi rst two tenants took diff erent approaches to the trade. New Hampshire- born John Condon (proprietor, 1915–18) was a small en-

aBOVE: Producers and products: People’s Company Bakery workers in the store, late 1980s. Production manager Steve Spoering stands (in all white); general manager Mark Suchy is at his left . facing: Early PCB logo from the December 6, 1973 issue of Win, published in New York State.

54 M I N N E S OTA H I S TO RY

trepreneur who moved on to other locations and careers. By contrast, Caro M. Brown (1919–21), Minnesota born, seemed a harbinger of informed industrialism: She had a degree in cereal chemistry from the University of Minnesota and had worked for a Canadian miller.6

Brown’s position as a woman bak-ery owner was potentially symbolic. Before 1900, home baking dominated the fi eld, but the new century’s com-mercial bakers had been industrial-izing rapidly— and disparaging the “competition.” Fueled by pure- food scares and the federal government’s new regulations, they had decided the housewife was their enemy. “One thing which we bakers in the larger cities see most plainly today is the absolute necessity of educating the housewife to quit baking at home,” insisted Paul Schulze in his 1911

presidential address to the National Convention of Master Bakers. He told of a woman off ering him her “Health Bread,” which he described as sicken-ing and potentially disease- causing. By 1922, thanks to bakery prolifera-tion and wholesaling through grocery stores, the American Bakers’ Associ-ation’s new secretary- manager could claim, “While the art of breadmaking is not wholly lost, it will no longer be practical. The housewife has fi nally had to admit she can buy better bread from her baker or grocer than she can make at home.”7

Caro Brown’s educated tenancy at 1534 East Lake was an anomaly. By the mid- 1920s she had become an in-surance agent. Subsequent bakers fi t a more conventional mold. A father and son, immigrants from England, took over the spot for fi ve years and resided two blocks away. Other im-

migrants (from Germany, Sweden, Latvia) followed over the years, al-ternating with U.S.- born bakers. The true entrepreneur at this address (1936–46) must have been Richfi eld- born Llewellyn Day, who retired from a 40- year baking career in his last year at 1534 Lake. And 1946 was a good year to turn over his business. Although American consumers were then buying 85 percent of their bread from commercial sources, most pur-chased it at grocery stores, including the new supermarkets. While some bakers had long been wholesaling to grocers, nearly 70 percent of bakeries were single- unit retail stores.8

The postwar era established what

Zinsmaster Company bread in a Minneapolis grocery store, about 1929. The Duluth fi rm was baking in both St. Paul and Minneapolis by then.

People’s Company came up against in 1971. During those midcentury boom years, bread and pastries were in-creasingly made from mixes in larger and larger plants. A 1959 trade maga-zine showed an automated Indianap-olis factory turning out 6,000 loaves an hour. The 1950s also witnessed the rise of supermarket “in- store baker-ies,” new competition for storefront bakers. In addition, the Food and Drug Administration since 1941 had recommended enriching commercial breads and pastries with thiamine, niacin, ribofl avin, and iron. Suppliers touted additives or processes that sounded like synthetic fabrics: Wy-tase, Flufulote, Frost- O- Fast, Meedo,

Lev- U- Dex, Lezirol.9 National baking chains conglomerated, home deliv-ery was a competitive option and, by today’s standards, the product range was limited. White- bread simplicity was the norm.

At the same time, editorials in 1959 issues of Bakers Weekly broadly mocked “Dizzy Diets,” food faddists, and legitimate nutritionists such as Minnesota’s Ancel and Margaret Keys (Eat Well and Stay Well), all of whom criticized the widespread enriched- white loaf, “the baking industry’s basic product.” Although another 1959 issue of Baker’s Weekly provided a whole- wheat sugar cookie recipe, fl avor was the draw. Nothing was said

about possible health benefi ts: “These have the physical characteristics of the regular sugar cookies but have a distinctive nutty fl avor.” Similarly, a long 1968 feature honored “variety breads” and their rich histories but recommended new mixes and auto-mated processes, assuring that the re-sults were “superior to old fashioned methods,” with “noted improvement in keeping quality.”10

And yet, some neighborhood bakeries held on into the 1950s. “It’s funny about how that market model worked,” said Mike Jurmu, a third- generation member of the Wuollet Bakeries clan. “I’d even say that Min-neapolis in the 1950s and ’60s was closer to how Paris would be today, with local shops always at hand.” However, “Supermarkets, frozen dough, more cars— all these trends made it so by the 1970s the small baker wasn’t ‘feeding families’ any more. We realized that to survive, we needed a niche, and so did the other survivors.”11

“The housewife has fi nally had to admit she can buy better bread from her baker or grocer than she can make at home.”

Through the fi rst half of the twentieth century, neighborhood bakeries in South Minneapolis were both plentiful and easily reached on foot. As population density increased, the overall number of bakeries declined while the number of specialized stores grew.

Neighborhood Bakeries in South Minneapolis

1906 1919 1927 1938 1948 1958 1963 1968 1971 1983 1999

3953

97108

100

5748

29 23* 27 **

70

*3 were thrift - store outlets; 1 sold only doughnuts; another, only croissants.

**Only 6 were multipurpose Bakers— Retail. 5 others sold mostly pastries or cakes; 3, Mexican- style goods; 1, Vietnamese; 1, Middle Eastern. 3 were thrift or outlet stores; 8, artisan bakeries.

Rise & Fall

56 M I N N E S OTA H I S TO RY

The long history of People’s Company Bakery (PCB) could

be told from many directions. Three people working in North Country Co- op started it in 1970, and within a very short time there were dozens more founding parents and, even-tually, hundreds of workers. Born in the Cedar- Riverside neighborhood and located first in a home, briefly in a church kitchen, and then in the West Bank People’s Center, the bakery was a logical outgrowth of the buy-ing clubs and food co- ops of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet it was not a co- op in organizational terms. “Work-ers were automatically members and owners from Day One,” explained Dave Wood, an employee in 1971–72. “But that didn’t mean much, other than everyone shared the work and responsibilities.” The prevailing belief was “The co- ops belonged to the com-munity.” Fellow pioneer Susan Hoch noted, “It never actually occurred to us that anyone would ‘own’ the bak-ery. It was more of a resource.”12

Financially and legally, People’s Company Bakery began as an unin-corporated partnership “because the tax accountant couldn’t find another category for it,” according to Mark Suchy, PCB’s longest- lasting worker (1971–2002). By 1975, after the dra-matic and occasionally violent con-flicts of the Twin Cities “Co- op Wars,” the bakery (along with many of its co- op customers) organized more for-mally, realizing the need to “tighten up for liability and control purposes,” as Suchy put it. From 1975 to 1985, PCB was officially a worker- owned cooper-ative, with required staff purchases of stock and profit- sharing. By the early 1980s a professional manager an-swered to a five- member board of di-rectors at biweekly meetings. Workers had benefits (“premium health care!” Suchy asserted) and, because of incor-poration, the board was not liable for bankruptcy debt.13

The original PCB planners, Keith Ruona, Jean Kreyche, and Bob Smith, saw a future in a simple appliance: “Keith was given a 20- quart Hobart mixer,” Kreyche recalled, “so we de-cided it would be a good idea to start making bread.” Smith added, “It was a grand idea, even though that Hobart mixer was really more of a counter-top appliance. But Keith had a great visionary sense.” Once announced, the bakery quickly gathered in loans from people in the community. The business assets cost $5,000; the premises were always rented. Within a year, the start- up loans were repaid, as business became good— fast. “Be-ginning with North Country Co- op,” Kreyche explained, “other co- ops quickly sprang up and wanted bread and granola. The demand for whole grain, natural foods exploded in the community, and the need for more dedicated workers at the bakery ex-panded, too.”14

The new enterprise made an im-mediate and singular impression on two impartial witnesses: Minneapolis bakery owners Bernie and Judy Pos-tuma, whose shop became the over-night production plant for PCB for several months. Forty- plus years after she first met PCB’s pioneers, Judy Pos-tuma quickly recalled, “Oh, they were just the nicest people. They made the best granola.” Questioned separately, her husband, Bernie, replied with lightning speed: “They were the nic-est people! . . . You looked at ’em and thought, ‘Hmm, those people are kind of dirty.’ But they weren’t. And they didn’t know anything about baking!”15

In 1971 the Postumas ran Nebel Bakery at 1819 East Lake, three blocks east of PCB’s eventual location. A third- generation Dutch American, Bernie was born to the trade; a grand- uncle ran a baking school in Holland, and his grandfather and father oper-ated a bakery in Iowa. Octogenarians Bernie and Judy still respect the 1970s pioneers of PCB: “Whole wheat, dark rye, granola, no preservatives— look at it now, it’s all over the place.”

1971’s early successes had quickly required increased effort and a more professional setting. “Jean was con-vinced people wanted to buy this bread,” Bob Smith noted. “At first we baked once a week and it sold like . . . [chuckles] hotcakes. . . . So Jean went out door to door, calling on these neighborhood bakeries to see if we could rent space. And Bernie Postuma was entirely willing.” Ber-nie explained, “Nobody would rent a space to them. But it was twelve hours I wasn’t working, so I thought, ‘Why not?’” At the end of his day, Postuma put his utensils away; at midnight the PCB people came in. They greeted their landlord in the very early morn-ing. “There was only one restriction,” Smith remembered. “We could eat anything in Bernie’s store, but not his cakes.”16

PCB needed Postuma’s shop for just a few summer months in 1971, though the relationship continued. “He was always coming through in the early times,” said Mark Suchy. “A lot of these people working at this time were what you call ‘freaks.’ And here was a very straitlaced white

The bakery was a logical outgrowth of the buying clubs and food co- ops

of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Wooden sign advertising the goods at Peoples Pantry, predecessor to Minneapolis’s North Country Co- op, about 1970

58 M I N N E S OTA H I S TO RY

guy . . . just the nicest guy in the world. I think he was quite proud that there was a generation taking over that business.” Postuma satisfi ed his curiosity and lent some tips, partic-ularly on the diffi culties inherent in using whole- wheat fl our.17

Once settled into 1534 East Lake, the bakery was both a

storefront and a production plant. Most of its output, sold to the bur-geoning co- ops as well as Mom and Pop stores, was delivered by truck. (The fi rst truck belonged to Jean Kreyche’s fi rst husband, Ernie Pet-scher.) Co- ops were growing like weeds in 1972, according to long- serving worker Bruce Yarwood, and PCB “helped many [local co- ops] get off the ground, providing free [product] until they could aff ord to buy it.” A 1973 article by Dave Wood cited the Twin Cities’ “11 food stores, a food warehouse, a fl our mill, a bak-ery, a tea and spice warehouse, two restaurants, a community garage, a bookstore, a dry goods store, and two hardware stores.”18

Many of PCB’s founders dismissed the simplifi ed moniker of “hippie bakery.” Historians of the era note that resistance to war was joined by resistance to anything “establish-ment,” including food additives. A new defi nition of natural became linked to non- establishment foods and their marketing. Suchy stated that selling whole- grain bread was “a moral idea,” and Jean Kreyche noted, “There was this idealism that somehow we had the power to change the world . . . [our] idealism took the form of ‘Flour Power.’ We wanted to educate people about how to live healthier, saner lives.” Idealism and trust also fed the company’s hiring and expansion. Susan Hoch remem-bered, “Friends spread the word and it was just in the air. There were no ads. No one recruited or . . . checked backgrounds. . . . Media used the term ‘counter culture,’ but it was sort of like a new, exciting subculture vil-lage.” Nationally, the Twin Cities were among the leading communities to establish co- ops of all kinds.19

PCB’s ideology was fueled by health- food gurus of the time, such

as Euell Gibbons (Stalking the Wild Asparagus), Adele Davis (Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit), and Zen monks who published The Tassajara Bread Book. In addition, some founders had been near- witnesses to one of the era’s sig-nal political experiences. Jean Krey-che, Susan Hoch, Bob Smith, and Jean Gorman had all been at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970, the day the National Guard killed four student antiwar protesters. All moved to Minnesota for practical reasons (entering medical school or following a spouse or friend), but the fresh start of more positive activity was also a draw. Minnesota- born Mark Suchy found the connection signifi cant: “Those people from Kent were kind of turned off to how violent the peace- movement activity had become, and they really wanted to get into some-thing that was constructive. They wanted to build a counter- institution. And that was the period of ‘you are what you eat.’” Bruce Yarwood, at 24 a Vietnam veteran and not fi xed on any career, showed up in 1972 and stayed into the 1980s. He remains in awe of the bakery’s founders: “These

Poster from the bakery’s early years, about 1972, and worker in the kitchen bagging “goodies,” which came later

People’s Company Bakery (undated) and a view down busy Lake Street from nearby Thirteenth Avenue South, about 1972

Poster from the bakery’s early years, about 1972, Poster from the bakery’s early years, about 1972, and worker in the kitchen bagging “goodies,” which came later

“There was this idealism that somehow we had the power to change the world . . . [our]

idealism took the form of ‘Flour Power.’ ”

were smart, motivated people . . . just absolutely merciless workhorses. They were part of this [food] revolution. They were just tireless, going out, making contacts, getting orders, just doing impossible things.” The work paid off swiftly; by the fall of 1971 PCB was making thousands of loaves a day.20

Susan Hoch asserted that the founding group “had a law . . . that the bakery wasn’t going to proselytize or make any political statements. And otherwise we had a group of creative free thinkers, but we didn’t ever put up any posters or say who we were endorsing, or all carry one voice.” An early logo for PCB, on its documents and painted on its window, was in-deed a fi st— but the fi st was holding stalks of wheat.

Their frustration with baking’s history matched their impatience to get new kinds of bread into people’s homes. Moving into 1534 Lake Street, they threw out the previous operator’s supplies. Kreyche recalled thinking, “Who knew cherry pie fi lling didn’t need to have cherries in it?” By 1982 a PCB ad touted “Apple- Cider, Corn- Wheat, Egg- Onion, Rice- Wheat, Seven- Grain, Soy- Wheat, Squash, Swedish- Rye” among 16 bread varieties.21

The bakery met the wider world on honest terms. An October 1971 Pio-neer Press article was amused, calling the operation “something of a curios-ity.” It quoted a PCB manifesto: “Our purpose is to provide other people

with wholegrain natural food without preservatives or artifi cial additives. Our bodies are natural organisms built to use other natural forms. . . . We feel that the less that’s done to food, the better it is for you.” The arti-cle was prompted by the International Day of Bread, a special event hosted in cities nationwide to celebrate 30 years of government- recommended en-richment of fl our. The PCB crew had a table in Dayton’s auditorium, Minne-apolis, where, next to other bakeries

and along with sample wares, they gave out a typed fl yer providing all of their recipes. “DON’T BUY BREAD. Make Your Own,” it said. “Don’t pay a middleman to do something you fi nd pleasurable . . . if you have even a slight desire to do your own baking, gain more control of your food and life, and spend less money, DO IT!” PCB products never were enriched.22

People’s Company Bakery may have confounded reporters and

traditionalists, but it became a legit-imate business. Wholesale distribu-tion to food co- ops and conventional supermarkets grew regionally. “Good-ies”— lime cake, sesame cookies, walnut coff ee cake, fruitcake— joined their variety of breads, which com-peted with mainstream brands. “You

Bread delivery, 1980s

60 M I N N E S OTA H I S TO RY

have to remember what a grocery store used to be like, before the co- ops,” said Jim Haefemeyer, PCB’s only “experienced” bakery worker in its early days. (In his Nisswa home, “I was the lackey who fried doughnuts and drove the truck.”) In the 1960s, “All the vegetables were in shrink- wrapped trays. I think Adele Davis might have said at the time that there’s two types of bread in Minne-apolis: white bread and colored white bread.”

Davis’s remark may be apocryphal, and veterans like Bernie Postuma and Mike Jurmu assert that local bakers knew how to fashion hearty Old World whole- grain loaves and pastries without additives. Local bak-eries such as Scandia, Ingebretsen’s, Egekvist’s, Wuollet’s, and Hove’s kept Scandinavian staples on the shelves, and Northeast Minneapolis shops sustained other immigrant traditions. Occasional articles in Bakers Weekly and Bakery Production and Marketing from the late 1950s to 1970s discussed “hippie” and ethnic “hearth breads” throughout the nation.23 A casual re-view of local newspaper ads between 1958 and 1972, however, revealed that the spongy, standard white loaf predominated. Off erings like stone- ground whole- wheat or dark Russian rye were pitched as special- occasion, connoisseur- oriented products.

One staple product of People’s Company Bakery may have been a Minnesota fi rst: granola. According to Bob Smith, “Granola was not even trendy yet” in 1970, and other veter-ans from diff erent eras at the bakery insist PCB was the fi rst to make and market granola. The Postumas, who used PCB’s recipe in their own shop, had never tasted it before; Bruce Yarwood, who had been in San Fran-cisco’s Haight- Ashbury district before Minneapolis, said it was a restaurant specialty there. No evidence has been found to support or disprove

the claim; small bakeries did not advertise much and counterculture ones, even less. But late- nineteenth- century health- food devotees could buy products called Granula and Granola, and middle- European immi-grants as well as Seventh Day Adven-tists knew the benefi ts of rolled oats mixed with nuts and/or fruits.24

Most likely, granola was a coun-terculture rediscovery. Susan Hoch asserted that the original PCB recipe came from a widely available cook-book, and she sheepishly admitted that when a major local food mar-keter called for the recipe, she happily recited it. (She also vowed that the eventual corporate product tasted like sugar- frosted discards from some other cereal.) Dave Wood remem-bered joking, “‘Someday, some big company will discover it [granola] and start making lots of money.’ It was the most outlandish thing any-body could think of.”25

Central to Minnesota’s alternative food movement of the early 1970s, People’s Company Bakery followed innovations now widespread: using organic ingredients and whole grains in everything, ordering from local providers, and rediscovering artisan, preindustrial recipes or techniques. Historians of this shift in American taste, such as Warren J. Belasco, give “Flour Power” its deeper context.

In 1969–70 . . . dietary change was one of the more substantial household reforms. . . . Fash-ion and musical styles changed rapidly, but food habits were imprinted almost from birth, and even in a culture dedicated to perennial obsolescence, food patterns changed slowly. To undo these patterns took considerable eff ort. . . .

Being diff erent in something so basic and taboo- laden as food

In its day, People’s Company Bakery happily shared its granola recipe. Here it is again, transcribed from a typed copy minus the handwritten calculations for enormous increases in quantity. Note that the raisins go in aft er baking; like many traditional family recipes, this one is not a step- by- step guide.

• Mix in large bowl.• Spread mixture thinly on cookie sheets.• Bake at 350 degrees.• Stir frequently to brown evenly.• When it is as done as you like it, sprinkle in raisins.

Experiment with other ingredients: walnuts, cashews, dried fruits, crushed rye, barley, corn meal, wheat bran, fl ax seeds, soy grits, cinnamon, ginger, etc. The secret is to keep the mixture in a propor-tion of 21 cups dry ingredients to 3 cups of wet.

6 cups rolled oats6 cups rolled wheat3 cups coconut2 cups roasted peanuts2 cups sunfl ower seeds1½ cups oil

1½ cups honey1 cup sesame seeds1 cup wheat germ1 tablespoon vanilla extractas many raisins as you want

Recipe courtesy Susan Hoch

PCB Granola

S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 61

Poster from the bakery’s early years, about 1972, and worker in the kitchen bagging “goodies,” which came later

62 M I N N E S OTA H I S TO RY

might lead to being different in many things. This, not genera-tional rebellion, was the implicit agenda of the countercuisine: food was a medium for broader change. If dietary rebels seemed a bit self- righteous, perhaps it was from their renewed sense of moral purity and political consis-tency . . . dietary rightness could be lived 365 days a year, three times a day.

Belasco summed up the era’s polari-ties: “process, not product . . . brown vs. white . . . slow foods vs. fast foods . . . craft vs. convenience.”26

Mainstream bakers were not en-tirely blind to these trends; by 1972, Minneapolis- based Peavey Company was marketing natural and stone- ground flours and mixes, including to PCB.27 Handcrafting became a na-tional marketing concept, and prod-ucts like Catherine Clark’s Brownberry Farm Bread appealed to nostalgia and this new approach: “The way it used to be. . . . Too good to stay in the past,” boasted its 1973 ad copy.

Early PCB work had notes of monkish sacrifice. In 1971 Don

Olson, one of the Minnesota 8 draft resistors, spent “only a few months” at the bakery because of his upcom-ing federal prison sentence for raid-ing a draft board. But he remembered his first night at PCB: “I thought I was going to die from working so hard. It was the middle of summer, and it was so hot.”

Nonhierarchical equality reigned. Workers rotated through three dif-ferent eight- hour shifts and multiple tasks: bread, granola, goodies. Pay was $10 per shift (about $46 today), and no one could have more than three shifts a week. (Later, the bakery changed to a piecework pay system that lasted into the early 1980s.) Be-

cause many PCB workers were also students or had other part- time in-terests, the schedule was not seen as a problem. According to Dave Wood, “Everything was very ad hoc, casual, informal. There was a lot of energy. . . . We didn’t feel deprived [by the wages]. It made us feel aligned with poor and working- class people, and many of us took satisfaction in partic-ipating as little as possible in the war economy.”28

People’s Company operated in a context of truly alternative modes of eating, working, and paying. Food activists in other cities called their markets “conspiracies” and dreamed of fully separate “Food Systems.” Some co- ops resisted paying higher wages on ideological terms, feeling they would lead to a “managerial class.” Laughing at the implausibility, Susan Hoch recalled that an academic visitor to an early- days meeting “told us we should have our own mone-tary system. He was quite insistent!” Suchy mentioned with a chuckle, “In the mid- 70s our bookkeeper said, ‘The price of flour went up and we’re starting to lose money because of inflation.’ And one of the guys said, ‘Oh, we don’t want to get into that in-flation bag.’”29

PCB’s employees were a diverse crew. In 1980 a longstanding worker listed “one Negro, one mulatto, one native- American, one half- native- American, two Druidic witches, one independent witch, one Chicano, one suicide, one orthodox Jew, a bunch of Catholics, a couple Children of God, a few Ananda Margiis [The Way

of Bliss], drug- dependency half- way people, prison half- way people, a couple bisexuals” as coworkers. The bakery was determined to guaran-tee gender equality; the first of five purposes listed in its 1983 employee manual was “striving for a balance of the sexes in responsibilities, work and membership.”30 Early women workers attested: “Oh, it was a hard job” (Jean Kreyche); “The hours, the all- night shifts. We had to heave 55- gallon drums of honey and huge things of oil, and the bags of flour you had to get up on your shoulder!” (Jean Gor-man); “30- pound boxes of raisins!” (Susan Hoch).

The weightlifting seems meta-phoric. Adele Davis’s influential advice on nutrition in the 1960s and 1970s still assumed that housewives prepared the family’s food. Kreyche summed up the feminist perspec-tive on her attraction to the bakery’s combination of food ethics and hard work: “Much as I love my mother, I did not want the relationship nor the life my mother lived. And so you just go out looking. . . . eliminated what you didn’t want, and you look for what might be a healthier, more liberated— at that time— work for women, and more creative outlets.”

As the 1970s anticipated the 1980s, the broader food co- op

movement weathered dissent. Market forces inevitably affected the bakery. According to Suchy, “As people got older, then they started saying, ‘Well, you know, we really need health in-

In the earliest days . . . everything depended on “Sunday potluck

meetings, consensus, and trust.”

S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 63

surance. Plus, this is not really paying me enough, now I’ve got a child.’” More divisive issues, involving mass- market products and sugary foods as well as leftist politics, fractured sev-eral consumer co- ops in the historic Twin Cities Co- op Wars of the mid- 1970s, when strict ideological factions collided in showdowns, lockouts, and intermittent violence. While People’s Bakery experienced some of these tensions, what Suchy called a “third force” of “just the food people” prevailed there. Two more radical employees left and “the food people evolved into trying to be more smart as business people.” For example, as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, annual profi t- sharing declined, some-times to nothing at all.31

In the earliest days, though, as Susan Hoch and others explained, everything depended on “Sunday pot-luck meetings, consensus, and trust.” With everyone a stakeholder and no

one a middle manager, decisions were slow to come. According to Bruce Yarwood

We went through an evolution . . . [at fi rst] insisting we don’t have any management. . . . When it was your turn, you wrote the checks and divvied out the money for the shifts and ordered sup-plies. It took us a couple of years to realize that some people are better at some things than others. And some people just simply did not want to have anything to do with decision- making. And of course there were other people who really got charged up!32

Management structure, wages and, ultimately, marketing concerns evolved toward mainstream con-ventions. By the early 1980s Suchy, originally a walk- in employee, was full- time general manager working

on a business degree. There were fi ve seniority levels. At that time, PCB brought “co- op friendly” consultants into its welcoming, awning- sheltered Lake Street storefront, as sales were declining. Realizing that it was pri-marily a wholesale operation, the bakery developed a business plan and stuck to it. This tactic carried the co-op for another 20- some years.33

Granola and sugar- free goodies kept PCB going, and whole- grain

bread distribution was a solid niche for a good while, but by the 1980s healthy breads and treats had both more converts and more suppliers. First Cub supermarkets and then the Rainbow chain sold PCB loaves; 100 in- store metal racks and custom banners touted their products in mul-

Diverse crew brandishing tools of the trade, 1970s. Mark Suchy stands second from right.

tiple locations— next to other brands. By 1986 half of PCB’s sales were to traditional retailers. A number of commercial bakeries made inroads into the market, too. Besides going to Hove’s, Lund’s, or Byerly’s, South Min-neapolis shoppers could purchase so-phisticated, artisanal baked goods at Gelpe’s (1979), Pam Sherman’s (1980), Great Harvest (1983), French Meadow (1985), or Turtle Bread (1994).34

Competition does not entirely ex-plain the 1985 arrival of Steve Spoer-ing, PCB’s fi rst professionally trained baker, but his addition to the staff

was vital. Fresh out of Dunwoody In-stitute’s one- year baker training and with chef skills gained at Minneapolis Technical College, Spoering answered a classifi ed ad and showed up in a suit. “It was hard to fi nd a baking job. The small bakers had given up and bagels were taking over. The skill had been taken out of most commercial baking by that time,” making it “more like a fast- food job.” PCB’s off erings intrigued him.35

As production manager, Spoer-ing’s professionalism was a boon. The products had been tasty for years;

Spoering both made sure they stayed that way and experimented with alternatives.

We didn’t have a steam oven, so we couldn’t do the crusty Euro-pean loaves, but we tried a lot of interesting new things: focaccia, brioche, asiago bread. We tried a veggie bread . . . . We were on the cutting edge with spelt bread; there was a new demand for this gluten- free loaf. But we were try-ing to take on the giants, and we used expensive ingredients, like the honey and straight- up butter.

Others at PCB innovated, too, at the weekly experimental shift. Bruce Yar-wood developed a salt- free bread that gained physician support.36

Some changes were less positive. By the 1990s, PCB’s location worked against it. When the company fi rst moved there, people joked that the neighborhood was “a suburb of the West Bank,” but now crime aff ected Bloomington and Lake. Retail neigh-bors included taverns, a boarded- up gun shop, a “sauna,” and a blood- donation center. Across the street was the Pizza Shack, the popular hang-out for Minneapolis police where offi cer Jerry Haaf was murdered by gang members in 1992. “It was pretty rough,” Mark Suchy said of that era. “We grew it a lot, but . . . we couldn’t make it profi table.” A bad year, circa 1996 or 1997, “put us in a hole.”37

By 1998, encouraged by commu-nity leaders, PCB had solid plans to convert the former gun shop into a neighborhood café. Gang activity had decreased, and new Lake Street businesses were drawing immigrant shoppers from Latin America and Africa. Yet funding for the café proj-

Ad from the April–May 1982 issue of The Scoop, published by the All Co- Op Assembly in Minneapolis

S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 65

ect could not be guaranteed, and wholesaling was becoming ever more diffi cult. Suchy explained that it was “hard to make a profi t, with things like the unsold bread buy- back,” a new policy aff ecting all bread whole-salers. Instead of accepting day- old loaves returned from grocers, pro-ducers had to pay a half- price charge. In 1999, Suchy said, bakery sales were “higher than ever. The margins, though, had just shrunk away.”

Ultimately, larger national enter-prises (such as Trader Joe’s and

Whole Foods) as well as ambitious local supermarkets expanded the “foodie” interests that PCB and its ilk pioneered. Surviving co- ops now match for- profi t employers in terms of benefi ts as well as inventory. Scott McKell sees alternative food retail-ing from a wide perspective, based on years of experience in not- for- profi t work both before and after his 1992–95 stint at the bakery.

I remember at one point, when “profi t” was a bad word and “growth” was a bad word. And that was a lack of understanding. . . . The goal is not profi t in and of itself unless you’re a standard type of business that is making decisions that benefi t the stock-holders and do not benefi t the customers. We have no incentive to make decisions that work to the disadvantage of our members.38

McKell credited Suchy with taking the bakery through some challenging times, pointing out, however, that it did not begin as a commercial opera-tion and “never eff ectively made that transition.” Yet PCB survived longer than many other co- op businesses that provided books, bicycles, hard-ware, day care, housing, clothing, and various repair and banking services. Some of the pressures aff ecting these businesses were internal and unique, such as the switch from collective to centralized management or the

Bakers in the kitchen, about 1996. Steve Spoering sports a PCB 25th anniversary shirt.

eventual embrace of advertising and marketing. But there were more widespread pressures as well: “We were having to learn new economies of scale,” Suchy explained. “We had to purchase more equipment to bring down labor costs. And as we were supplying the supermarkets, unifor-mity became more important. Bar codes, unit pricing, calorie counts in an individual serving— all of these were new and more elaborate pro-cesses for all retailers.”

With few employees left, People’s Company Bakery fi led for bank-ruptcy in 2002, the day before Paul Wellstone’s plane crashed. “Most of the people there were big Wellstone supporters,” recalled Suchy, “so we didn’t know which part of it we were grieving the most. And that was a hard week.”39 Nevertheless, longer- term memories are positive. Whether measured in terms of politics or eco-

66 M I N N E S OTA H I S TO RY

nomics, in fl avors of bread or primacy with granola, the bakery’s 30- year experiment had a lasting impact. Vir-tually no veterans continued in bak-ing, though many moved into other kinds of co- op work. Others entered professions such as social work, law, medicine, teaching, or government.

Co- ops are inherently value- driven businesses,” McKell ob-

served, citing the Buddhist maxim of Right Livelihood to explain “what working in food means to me.” Com-parably, Suchy claimed the People’s Company Bakery was a kind of com-munity organizing: “Our ideal was the Mondragon Community in Spain, which is almost entirely worker- and consumer- owned co- ops.” The slow, awkward operational shift to full- time positions, a smaller board, and major-ity voting (instead of consensus) kept the bakery going through the 1990s with minimal compromise.40

Several PCB veterans feel that

“

the bakery’s legacy includes another important nonfood innovation: more thoughtful management. Bruce Yarwood’s fi rst, short- lived job after People’s Company Bakery was at a commercial bakery. “They thought that because I was a Vietnam veteran I could be a drill sergeant— really put my foot down. And I was anything but that!”41 Contemplating his busi-ness studies and how America’s work-places have changed, Mark Suchy said that co- ops and collectives were among the fi rst places to practice “Sil-icon Valley management.” Although decision- making by consensus was later replaced, “managers had to have a much more collaborative style. . . . Even though they had to make the fi nal decision, it was in their inter-est to make sure that people were involved in the process.” Other post- PCB workers also discovered in new jobs that collaborative management got better results.42

Dave Wood, later a communi-cations director for a nonprofi t or-

ganization and graduate student in counseling, concluded, “We didn’t know how to do anything, but we knew we could do everything.” Jean Kreyche, eventually a teacher, an-swered her own rhetorical question: “Did we feel we were successful? It was just a royal high— so exhilarating, and hopeful.” Jean Gorman, retired rheumatologist, added, “It was part of a larger community that was learning all these new things, and realizing that they were safer, healthier— and that’s what we really wanted.”

Notes 1. Minneapolis City Directory, 1935,

1980s–90s.  2. The unrelated commercial/wholesale

Peoples Baking Corporation (no apostrophe) op-erated ca. 1921–68 on Minneapolis’s North Side. In 1936 the short- lived Bunnie Ice Cream Parlor was at 1534 East Lake.

People’s Company baker pausing for a photo while the mixer spins

S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 67

 3. Aaron Bobrow- Strain, White Bread: A So-cial History of the Store- Bought Loaf (Boston: Bea-con Press, 2012), 23; William Panschar, Baking in America (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1956), 78.

 4. Eldon G. Burdick, “Lake Street, Past, Present and Future,” Lake Street Guide/Veterans of Foreign Wars Roster, 1926; Minneapolis Tribune, Nov. 23, 1919, D12; Minneapolis City Directory, 1900–93; telephone directories to 2000. The panaderia has moved to a larger corner location one block away.

 5. Calvin F. Schmid, Social Saga of Two Cities (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Council of Social Agencies, 1937), 138. The author consulted every twentieth- century Minneapolis city directory or phone book and compiled a list of all retail bak-eries on or south of Franklin Avenue; a few of them were merely sales counters at commercial bakery plants. This article sets Franklin Avenue as the northern boundary of South Minneapolis, with the Mississippi River and neighboring sub-urbs’ borders as the other boundaries.

 6. Society of Chemical Industry, Canadian Section, comp., The Chemists of Canada (1916). Brown had worked for Lake of the Woods Mill-ing Co.

 7. Paul Schulze, “President’s Address,” Re-port of Fourteenth Convention, National Associa-tion of Master Bakers (Philadelphia, 1911), 10–14; “The New Secretary- Manager of the American Bakers’ Association,” National Baker, Jan. 1922, 27–28.

 8. Minneapolis City Directory, 1920–47; Marion D. Shutter, ed., History of Minneapolis, Gateway to the Northwest (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing, 1923), 2: 597; Panschar, Baking in America, 234.

 9. “Automation in Action,” Bakers Weekly, Jan. 19, 1959, 25; Panschar, Baking in America, 217. Product names collected from advertising in Bakers Weekly and Bakery Production and Market-ing, 1958–72.

10. Bakers Weekly: “Dizzy Diets,” Mar. 9, 1959, 23; “Eat Well and Stay Well . . . Their Way,” June 22, 1959, 19; “Specialty of the Week: Whole Wheat Sugar Cookie,” June 1, 1959, 39; “Variety Breads— A Neglected Field,” Sept. 30, 1968, 31–33.

11. Mike Jurmu, interview with author, Mar. 19, 2013. Notes from all interviews cited herein are in author’s possession.

12. For detailed accounts of Twin Cities’ co- ops’ beginnings and struggles, see Craig Cox, Storefront Revolution: Food Co- ops and the Coun-terculture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer-sity Press, 1994); Minnesota Historical Society, www.mnhs.org/library/findaids/00074.xml. Dave Wood and Susan Hoch, emails to author, both July 24, 2013.

13. Mark Suchy, email to author, Nov. 12, 2013, and interview with author, Apr. 4, 2013.

14. Jean Kreyche, email to author, July 25, 2013; Bob Smith, interview with author, June 24, 2013; Mark Suchy, email to author, July 25, 2013.

15. Here and below, Judy Postuma, interview

with author, May 2, 2013; Bernie Postuma, inter-view with author, Apr. 30, 2013. All Postuma quotes are from these interviews. The Postumas left Lake Street in 1986, opening Valley Pastries in Golden Valley.

16. Smith interview.17. Suchy interview, Apr. 4, 2013; Susan

Hoch, group interview with author, Mar. 9, 2013 (group included Jean Gorman, Jim Haefemeyer, Jean Kreyche, Don Olson, and Dave Wood). Un-less otherwise noted, all quotes of these people are from this interview.

18. Bruce Yarwood, email to author, July 25, 2013; Dave Wood, “Working in the Coops: Coop-eration or Cooptation?” WIN (Rifton, NY), Dec. 6, 1973.

19. Warren J. Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry 1966–1988 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 87–93; Suchy interview, Feb. 21, 2013; Kreyche email; Hoch email; John Curl, For All the People: Discovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Co-operative Movements, and Communalism in Amer-ica, 2nd ed. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).

20. Mark Suchy, interview with author, Feb. 21, 2013; Yarwood email. St. Paul Pioneer Press, Oct. 4, 1971, 8, reported 6,000 loaves a day; an internal marketing document, “A History of the People’s Company Bakery,” June 1994 (in Suchy’s possession), claimed 2,300 loaves a day by the end of 1971.

21. Ad, The Scoop (newsletter of All- Coop As-sociation, Minneapolis), June–July 1982; Kreyche interview, Mar. 9, 2013.

22. St. Paul Pioneer Press, Oct. 4, 1971, 8; Sen. Bob Dole, Introduction of a Joint Resolution for the Proclamation of “Day of Bread” and “Harvest Festival Week,” July 7, 1971, Press Releases, Robert J. Dole Archive and Special Collections, University of Kansas, Lawrence; copy of flyer in author’s possession.

Federal standards were established in 1941 for food labeled “enriched.” Commercial bakers cooperated voluntarily and, by the end of 1942, 75 percent of commercial white bread was en-riched. Bread that was not labeled enriched did not have to conform to the guidelines. See “Overview of Food Fortification in the United States and Canada,” in Dietary Reference Intakes: Guiding Principles for Nutrition Labeling and Forti-fication (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003), 45–51.

23. Bakers Weekly: “A Touch of the Orient,” Feb. 16, 1959, n.p. (pita bakery in Cleveland); “Like No Bread,” July 29, 1968, 30–31 (Greenwich Village hippie bakers); “In Touch with The Past,” Oct. 28, 1968, n.p. (kosher bakery).

24. Smith interview; “Johnny Granola Seed,” Time, Mar. 6, 1972; Joe Klein, “A Social History of Granola,” Rolling Stone, Feb. 23, 1978.

25. Hoch and Wood interviews, Mar. 9, 2013.26. Belasco, Appetite for Change, 27–28.27. Bruce Yarwood, interview with author,

Jan. 10, 2013; Peavey ads for Natural Grain Bread Mixes, Baking Production and Marketing, 1972.

28. Suchy email, July 25, 2013; Wood email.

Before starting with PCB, “farm kid” Mark Suchy spent two years in Sandstone Federal Prison for resisting the draft; Suchy interview, Apr. 4, 2013.

29. Curl, For All the People, 212–15; Betsy Raasch- Gilman, A History of North Country Co- op (Minneapolis: North Country Co- op, 1994), 5; Suchy interview, Apr. 4, 2013.

30. Phill Baker, “A View of the People’s Com-pany,” The Scoop, Dec. 1980, 15–16. The other purposes (paraphrased) were: contribute to personal and professional development of members/ employees; serve customers and community as a successful cooperative; provide members opportunity to participate in manage-ment, share profits, and influence policy; and support suppliers that operate as cooperatives. People’s Company Bakery Workers Manual, amended May 3, 1983, in Suchy’s possession.

31. Suchy interview, Apr. 4, 2013; Minnesota Daily, June 2, 1976, 3. See also Curl, For All the People; Cox, Storefront Revolution; www.mnhs.org /library/findaids/00074.xml.

32. Hoch email; Yarwood interview. 33. People’s Company Bakery Workers Manual,

1983; Suchy interview, Feb. 21, 2013. 34. “History of the People’s Company Bakery.”

Gelpe, Great Harvest, and Turtle Bread in Minne-apolis City Directory; Sherman, online Minneapolis Star Tribune, Feb. 5, 2003 (obituary); French Meadow, www.frenchmeadowcafe.com/about .html.

35. Here and below, Steve Spoering, inter-view with author, Mar. 26, 2013.

36. Yarwood interview.37. Here and below, Suchy interview, Apr. 4,

2013; St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 30, 1998, 1A, 3A. For example, Mercado Central, diagonally across Lake from PCB, opened in 1998; www.ndc- mn .org/mercadocentral.

38. Here and below, Scott McKell, interview with author, Apr. 1, 2013, and Mark Suchy, inter-view with author, May 23, 2013. Currently human resources manager for the Mississippi Market co- ops in St. Paul, McKell also worked for Lake-winds co- ops in the Minneapolis suburbs.

39. Suchy interview, Feb. 21, 2013.40. McKell interview; Suchy interview,

May 23, 2013.41. Yarwood interview. 42. Suchy interview, Feb. 21, 2013.

The photos on p. 53, 58 (left), 59, 61 (bottom), 63, 65, and 66 are courtesy Mark Suchy; the poster, p. 61, courtesy Jean Kreyche. All others are in MNHS collections.

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