Sweets with a Side of Opportunity
By Lorrie Baumann
The Rubicon, as those who remember their world history classes – and no one else – will recall, was made famous by Julius Caesar’s decision to cross it on his way from Gaul to Rome, thus trespassing onto Italian soil and sparking a civil war. The incident has survived in the mythology of the Roman Empire as marking a point of no return, a border between past and future, and Julius Caesar’s determination to shape that future.
With a name so redolent of self-determination, one would expect Rubicon Bakers, located in Richmond, California to have a story of its own. “We’re more than a bakery,” said Rubicon Vice President of Marketing and Sales Catherine Trujillo. “For over 25 years we have helped rebuild lives by employing, training and supporting people who need a second chance. Many employees come to Rubicon from life on the streets, from prison or recently recovered from substance abuse. We provide employment so they can turn their lives around.”
Rubicon Bakers, founded in 1993 as a nonprofit organization benefiting those in need of second chances and job training, is now a privately-owned certified B Corporation that continues to embrace the mission with which it was founded as it grows into a national brand, currently selling its cakes, cupcakes, cookies and muffins in more than 2,500 stores nationwide. The company currently employs more than 200 people, recruited from local substance abuse programs and the re-entry programs at San Quentin State Prison, the Santa Rita Jail and other facilities. “We get a lot of walk-ins, too,” Trujillo said. “People know us in the community for the work we do.”
“One of our core values is compassion,” she continued. “We keep blinders off and our hearts open here. It’s our not-so-secret ingredient – compassion – and it’s baked into our products. There’s a lot of kindness and love in all of our business transactions. We love to collaborate with retailers that appreciate what we do and what we stand for.”
With more than 50 unique items in its product line, Rubicon Bakers is well known for its Mom’s Chocolate Cake. “It’s the cake that you wish your mother made,” Trujillo said. The company has also just launched four new vegan items, Vegan Chocolate Blackout Cake in a 4-inch format and a four-pack cupcakes format and Vegan Vanilla Cake in the same 4-inch format and four-pack cupcakes format. “We’re really excited to share these items with those who choose to eat a plant-based diet and those who don’t. They’re delicious, rich and decadent, and ready to be enjoyed by all types of eaters.”
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The 11-ounce 4-inch format cakes will retail for $6.99. The 10-ounce four-pack of cupcakes retails for $4.99.
Like Rubicon’s other products, they’re made with clean, straightforward ingredients – vegan sugar, chocolate chips, non-GMO expeller-produced canola oil, with no artificial flavors, colors or preservatives. “All of our products are handmade. We make everything from scratch,” Trujillo said. “We use natural colors derived from vegetables and fruits… It’s something that we believe in with our ingredients. We always use clean, honest ingredients.”
Rubicon Bakers offers both retail-ready cakes and cupcakes and cake blanks in 8-inch rounds, 6-inch-rounds and 4-inch rounds as well as in cupcakes. They’re delivered frozen and ready to be frosted and decorated at store level. The 6-inch retail-ready cakes include several other flavors in addition to the Mom’s Chocolate Cake: California Lemon Cake is another everyday item, Trujillo said. “We love our lemons here in California,” she said. “We’ve had customers tell us it tastes like sunshine.”
Retail-ready cupcakes are filled and iced, and they’re also offered in several flavors. The Chocolate Cream Cupcake is particularly decadent, according to Trujillo – it’s filled with white cream filling, topped with ganache and hand-decorated.
A Pumpkin Pie Cupcake is offered during this fall season. It’s filled with pumpkin pie filling and frosted with cream cheese icing. “All of our items are hand-finished,” Trujillo said.
For more information, visit www.rubiconbakers.com.
Olive Roots: A Bridge from Greece to the U.S.
By Lorrie Baumann
Katerina Barka wants Americans to know that there’s more to the Mediterranean diet, and to Greek food in particular, than olives and olive oil. To really appreciate that fact, though, they’ll need access to products that are authentically Greek rather than “Greek-style,” and that means that somebody’s got to go to Greece and fetch them back to the United States. She says she’s that person, and her company, Olive Roots, is the vehicle she launched at this year’s Summer Fancy Food Show to do that.
Barka herself is as much of a Greek import as the products she’s bringing to the States. She grew up in Greece, went to college there, and came to the U.S. only after she’d graduated from college and needed to figure out what to do next with her life. While searching online for options for further education, she came across a Harvard University postgraduate course in international business, enrolled in the program, and came to Boston. There, she later completed her degree in finance at Boston College and then went to work at as a wealth manager for an American firm.
Six years later, it was an encounter with one of her wealthy clients that changed the direction of her life. She presented him with a bottle of her family’s olive oil. His reaction to the gift, and to the oil itself, sparked a chain reaction that led to her decision to abandon an interesting and successful career in finance for the risky proposition of starting her own business in the food industry. “At that moment, I realized that you can do any job you want, but when you do great, it’s when you’re doing what you love,” she said.
She and her husband, another Greek native that she’d met in Boston, picked up their lives and moved them back to Cyprus, where her husband has family, and then to mainland Greece, which is closer to the farmers who grow her ingredients. She found farmers and artisanal food producers who were making amazing products but who didn’t have the expertise to navigate the bureaucratic requirements of exporting them to the United States. Back in the United States, she found buyers who were willing to sell Greek products to the American market but who had grown frustrated with the difficulties of working with small producers inexperienced in managing an international supply chain. What they both needed, she discovered, was a bridge between the two groups, and that’s the role that she sees for herself and Olive Roots.
Her initial product line, which she’s just started to sell in the U.S., consists of authentic Greek products sourced from small producers who make the foods that comprise the Greek version of the Mediterranean diet, which, compared to the usual American diet, contains more olive oil to salads and other dishes, more fish and less meat. “The Greek diet is full of vegetarian and vegan food options,” Barka said. “More than half the days of the week, we eat vegetarian meals – we just don’t notice, because they are Mama’s recipes.”
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The company’s first products to market include marinated sardines packed in olive oil. “They are a tasty way to eat fish,” Barka said, in addition to containing about 10 meals’ worth of Omega 3 fatty acids per serving.
The company also offers a line of dried mushrooms – both cultivated and wild varieties, including a powdered mushroom line that’s used in cooking to add flavor and umami to dishes – and an Organic Grape Syrup that was named a best food at the Summer Fancy Food Show by the editors of Culture magazine. “It’s a great replacement for honey on pancakes or waffles,” Barka said.
Among other products, Olive Roots also offers EON Pine Honey with Mastic, the MELIMA line of handmade Greek pasta and LACONIAN LEGACY monovarietal extra virgin olive oil from Sparta. The newest release, one that Barka is very excited about, is a dip called Greek Salad in a Jar. All of the products are created from simple, everyday authentic ingredients. Barka said, “There’s nothing weird in any of our jars or packages.”
Most of the farmers who grow the ingredients for the products and the producers who package them for the market are Greek women, Barka said. “It just happened,” she added. “With this team of women, we can only succeed.”
Find our more about Olive Roots by visiting www.myoliveroots.com or email Barka at katerina@myoliveroots.com.
Epicurean Trader Contributes to San Francisco’s Foodie Vibe
By Lorrie Baumann
The Epicurean Trader store in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of San Francisco, California, is one of two locations in the city for the specialty grocer and wine merchant. The store devotes one entire wall to its range of wine and spirits, with the rest of its limited footprint devoted to nonperishable specialty items and its cheese case. The merchandise mix is “anything that fits the upscale boutique grocery store theme,” says Store Manager Ruthie Young. “It’s a mix of items that are pantry staples and the hard-to-find smaller batch liquors with a lot of local products that you’re not going to find in 
an upscale grocery store across the country.”
Typical of those hard-to-find items is bread produced by a local bakery that’s so sought-after that the store regularly receives phone calls from customers inquiring if the store has received its delivery yet. “People seek it out, but you can’t get it anywhere,” Young said. “It’s nice to be able to offer something kind of exclusive like that.”
Epicurean Trader also partners with a local coffee roaster for a special coffee blend and a couple of distillers to get the small-batch products that its customers come looking for. “We do have a whiskey club that members can join,” Young said.
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This location opened here in Cow Hollow about a year and a half ago in a storefront formerly occupied by a jewelry store – the original Epicurean Trader store is also located in San Francisco. Young has managed it for the past few months after moving from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she had been a sales representative for a cheese distribution company. “I was changing things up,” she said. “My family lives close to here. I saw this job come up and jumped on the opportunity.”
The Cow Hollow neighborhood is walkable from the waterfront, and its population is a mix of young people just starting their careers, those with young children and older San Franciscans, and because it’s close to both the water and a couple of nearby parks, Epicurean Trader sees quite a few tourists as well as customers who live in the neighborhood. “We have a lot of picnickers coming in on the weekend,” Young said. “And we have people who come in on the weekend to get a baguette and a wedge of cheese and a bottle of wine and call that dinner. We’ve definitely seen success in that area.”
Local products are a particular draw, especially for customers who come into the store looking for a gift, Young said. “We have a good selection of items that you might not buy for yourself but make good gifts,” she said. “Usually those people want things made in San Francisco.”