Although processing is highly automated, every product is made from scratch and hand finished to give it an artisan appeal.

Photo by Joanne Ho Young Lee

Since many employees are native Spanish speakers, the plant has developed a bilingual culture. As such, plant operations are fully conducted in Spanish, a language in which Trilevsky and many of her managers are fluent. “People in this country don't realize the value of speaking two languages,” Trilevsky says, as she greets all production employees by name and converses with them in their native language.

Buying directly from growers is a company philosophy, further aided by its northern California location. “Over the years, we've established partnerships with different suppliers; the greatest supply, in terms of volume, is wheat;” Trilevsky explains. “We work with a co-op of 11 family farmers in eastern Washington called Shepherds Grain, who practice no-till farming as an ecological strategy. We have a pretty close relationship with them. During the off season, the farmers will come here because they like to see how their wheat is used. We send employees to their farms to understand the growing process, too. It's a nice connection, and it's a good business model as well.”

The bakery also does business with local fruit and nut growers, including raisins, blueberries, pecans and walnuts. This instills confidence and provides transparency in how the crops are grown and the resulting quality of the products.

Automation with a twist

Scott Reed, senior vice president, operations, was involved in the construction of the building that now houses the bakery. The building was built as a food manufacturing plant for quiche production. Eventually, Trilevsky purchased the building and acquired Reed along with it.

“I was hired to make the transition from the Menlo Park facility to this facility,” Reed says. “We basically moved from a batch mode of operation to continuous flow. This facility had all the infrastructure, which was valuable. It has a large refrigeration system, great frozen capabilities, a waste treatment system, water system and great power service. We basically gutted the building and refinished it for our needs.”

“That was Scott's baptism by fire,” Trilevsky adds. The plant has a 75,000-lb. flour silo, a 7,000-gal. oil silo, a separate mixing room with 400-liter high-capacity mixers, a high-capacity, automated depositing line, a sheeting line, a finishing room, a separate laminating room, a retarding room, high-efficiency tunnel ovens with impingement technology, twin spiral coolers, a spiral blast freezer and multiple packaging areas.

FullBloom begins baking its fresh array of products at midnight every night. It has more than 30 products it bakes fresh seven days a week, 365 days a year, “which is operationally a challenge,” Trilevsky says. “You can imagine this line…four muffins, four scones, five cookies, six brownies and so on. After that shift is finished, we move into the more continuous production where we'll do one product on one line and one product on another.”

“We have very industrial capabilities with continuous lines that are very large, efficient and have high throughput,” Reed says, “and yet we produce very artisan, high quality products, with hand finishing. We're very flexible.”

While the plant strives for automated efficiency, it does not cut any corners. All products are “scratch” formulations, even going as far as ripening bananas and hand peeling them for its daily banana bread production, Whitman notes. Examples of hand finishing include topping muffins and scones with blueberries, inserting large chocolate chips into chocolate croissants, hand tossing morning buns in a cinnamon-sugar mixture, and so on.

In spite of the manual labor involved, throughput has increased dramatically with the new lines. “By utilizing tunnel ovens in place of rack ovens, we are capable of producing the same product in one shift that previously took three,” Reed says.