Breaking Bread: Sustainability Lessons from a Former Counter Girl

My first real job was at a bakery.

Which might explain a lot about me as a person, but that’s a different blog post. After school and on weekends I would trot over to a small, family-owned Polish bakery and work as a counter girl. Morning shifts consisted of tackling the bagel rush and evenings were all about fulfilling orders for family dinners and get togethers.

Making endless pots of fresh coffee, slathering toasty bagels with every variety of cream cheese, icing cakes (poorly) with Happy Birthday messages, using the incredibly terrifying bread slicing machine, and filling bakery boxes with Linzer cookies and Hamantaschen.

They were simple tasks but I found simple joy in helping start or end someone’s day on a happy note.

Some days we would sell out entirely of certain bagels and breads, and other days would be slower. Much slower.

I didn’t know it then, but it was one of my first lessons in operational planning, supply chain challenges, and sunk costs. (If you didn’t think that I’d find a business angle here… well, hello new friend and welcome to my blog.)

At a fairly young age, I saw first hand how uncertain demand could be and how trying to meet that demand resulted in high operating costs, unsold inventory (in the form of perishable goods), and slim profit margins. But that’s the nature of the food business - better to be overstocked than run out of the item that someone wants and lose their business forever. It was heartbreaking to watch this couple work harder than anyone I knew, only to barely make ends meet.

I became very emotionally attached to this job and my little family of bakers. It was back-breaking work (literally back-breaking because we didn’t have anywhere to sit and any ‘breaks’ we had were spent leaning on a door frame next to a hot oven) but I found myself picking up extra shifts just to spend more time with the people who very clearly gave me my work ethic.

Anyone who’s worked in the service industry will likely agree that closing is more work than opening. After a long shift, the last thing you want to do is go around the store/restaurant to clean and reset everything, but it’s a part of the job. I knew what to expect when I signed up for the job and, although my hustle-heart loved the adrenaline rush of the morning shift, I came to love my evening shifts in unexpected ways.

Here’s what I wasn’t expecting: this small, family-owned Polish bakery that was struggling to turn a daily profit would recognize an opportunity in their sunk costs. Not a financial opportunity, but an opportunity nonetheless.

Every night, while I was refilling cookie trays, cleaning the slicing machines, wiping fingerprints off the display cases, and sweeping the floors, a small, round, elderly man would appear in the window of the shop and tap on the glass for me to unlock the door. He was a volunteer for a local homeless shelter and would come every evening to collect the unsold bread and bagels that were bound for the dumpster.

Even though he wandered the shop munching on a cookie and spilling crumbs on my freshly swept floor or asked me to slice a loaf for his own dinner right after I had cleaned the slicing machine, I didn’t mind. He had unlocked something in me that has lasted a lifetime: the chance to do something good for people and planet.

Having fresh food on the table is something that so many of us take for granted. Over the years I’ve immersed myself formally into the world of sustainability, and I’ve learned that 80 billion pounds of food is thrown away every year in the US. I’ve learned that 37 million people across America — including 11 million children — suffer from food insecurity. I’ve learned that food waste makes up approximately 22% of municipal solid waste.

While I didn’t have all these facts and figures at the time, I knew that hunger was a major societal problem and, even back then, throwing away perfectly edible food felt morally wrong. So this small act of kindness on the part of the bakery owners would make my heart would swell every night. It was a rush like no other.

For this bakery, there was no financial repercussion for taking the ‘easy’ route and simply throwing the food away. There was no financial incentive to donate it either. But they chose to donate it and likely changed the lives of hundreds if not thousands of individuals. We weren’t JUST keeping food out of the dumpsters and landfills, we were bringing families together to break bread and build memories.

Unfortunately that bakery went out of business and a Chipotle popped up in its place. I still (bitterly) burst into Big Yellow Taxi every time I pass by it. But if it was still around, I think about the brilliant and organic sustainability campaign I would have put together for it. Yes, there would be some fun facts and statistics woven in about organic ingredients and diverting food waste, but the core of the campaign would be family & community.

Because it’s a sustainability marketing manager’s wet dream.

In a world that is now littered with greenwashing campaigns from big corporations, I can’t help but think about the millions of sustainability stories that go untold at the local level. Small mom and pop shops that are doing the right thing simply because it’s the right thing. Because they know that their communities will be stronger for it. Because they know there is great power in the smallest of actions.

If you’re working in sustainability or volunteer in environmental work, I’d love to hear from you! What are some of your earliest memories of doing good for people and planet? How have they shaped you into the incredible and unique human that you are today?