John and Dennis Rossetti have made Italian Home Bakery what it is today.

Traditional, old-school bakers would have considered Dennis and John Rossetti tremendous risk takers in the mid 90s when they purchased Italian Home Bakery (IHB) with the intention of expanding the business. Instead, the Rossetti brothers had faith in one another's expertise to take the business and turn it into a real operating artisan bakery. Dennis had 29 years of experience in manufacturing and product and process development with Canada Bread, Pizza Hut and Kellogg Co., and John's expertise was in finance and restructuring.

When the Rossetti brothers bought into the company in 1997, it was a small artisan bakery run by five partners who “really didn't know what to do with the potential success they had built,” says John, vice president and C.F.O. Back then, business was conducted on a day-to-day basis without any planning for the future. Sales were basically pulled along by grocers.

The Rossettis changed the whole premise of the company, so it could move forward in a more modern world. Much of their forward progress can be attributed to the technology and knowledge of operations that Dennis, president and C.O.O., brought with him from his past experiences. Today, IHB produces a wide variety of fresh, authentic, artisan breads and is on the verge of expanding into the frozen finished product business, so it can broaden its distribution into Eastern and Western Canada, and perhaps into the United States.

A historical perspective

IHB started in two row houses in 1955 at a time when the Italian population in Toronto was growing. Initially, the owners established themselves with door-to-door sales, which grew to more than 4,000 homes. Eventually, grocers enticed the bakery to sell its bread to them, so they could sell it directly to consumers. IHB managed to get good footing in the ethnic bread division of supermarket sales until the insurgence of artisan breads expanded into mainstream markets.

John was a financial consultant for the original owners in the early 90s, when he learned that one of the partners was retiring. Knowing the skills his brother had and sensing the potential opportunity that lay before him, John broached Dennis with the idea of buying into IHB.

“Dennis was 45 years old when he was introduced to the idea of buying the company,” John says. “In retrospect, one of the things we looked at was that the company was one year old, 45 times. These guys were working really hard and not getting anywhere. They were salt of the earth guys, but they were so provincial in what they knew. The people were crowding in and trying to get a piece of what they were making, but they didn't know how to make any more volume. They were afraid of expanding.”

Kaiser rolls, at 140 g a piece, exit IHB’s new state-of-the-art hearth oven.

After Dennis and John bought into the company, there was some reorganization of the partners. Eventually, all chose to retire. “They never would have considered purchasing the equipment that we've bought over the years because they wouldn't have had confidence to move out of the realm of traditional dividers and other equipment like that,” Dennis explains. “That sort of limited them because you can only make certain product because your equipment isn't capable of making a wider variety of product.”

But Dennis had seen that type of equipment operate. He was well equipped to bring IHB into the 21st century, having worked at Kellogg in product and process development where he met with senior level equipment suppliers and dealt with what John calls “massive capital expenditures.”

Significant growth has taken place since the Rossettis became the sole owners of IHB. There was no technology before. After making radical changes, 99 percent of what IHB is today is new, John notes.