S5 Ep8: How to Achieve a Net Zero Status in Your Business Operations with Nels Leader
“There’s still a lot of room in grocery stores for better products. So, there’s a lot more that we could do.” — Nels Leader
As the world continues to grapple with the issue of climate change, businesses are under pressure to find ways to operate in a more sustainable way. One way to do this is by achieving a Net Zero status. Net Zero means a company offsets all of its carbon emissions.
Achieving Net Zero is a major commitment for businesses, but it is one that can have a big impact on combating climate change. As more businesses strive for net zero, we will move closer to a sustainable future. Moreover, achieving Net Zero is not only good for the environment and for the people, but it can also help businesses save money on energy costs and make them more attractive to customers and investors.
Bread Alone is one of the companies that has worked hard to achieve this status. Bread Alone is a family-owned, values-driven company that has been making fresh, organic bread since 1983. Besides their tasty, honest, and affordable products, this values-driven bakery is a passionate advocate for regenerative farming and other sustainability measures. They are also committed to supporting local farmers, protecting the environment, and promoting the health of their customers.
In this episode, Justine sits with Nels Leader, the CEO of Bread Alone to discuss how we can be faithful stewards of the earth. Listen in as Nels shares what we can learn from his parents, Dan and Sharon about building a resilient family business and how they were able to build their facilities and run their operations in a very sustainable way. Justine and Nels also talk about how we can find a more purpose-driven life, why we should not stop or slow down in making better products, and how big of a difference small changes can make.
Connect with Nels:
Nels Leader is the CEO of Bread Alone, a family-owned bakery that supports sustainable business for people and for the planet. Their family moved to the Catskill Mountains in 1983 where they started their journey. Since then, Bread Alone has become the home of freshly-baked oven organic bread. Nels joined his parents Dan and Sharon in 2012 and helped them make the company’s vision bigger.
Nels was also trained for AI Gore’s Climate Reality Project and is the co-owner of several other businesses. For the past years, Nels has been lecturing on Bard College's Sustainability Programs. Today, we can find Nels in Woodstock NY with his wife, son, and their dog.
Episode Highlights:
01:17 The Genesis of Bread Alone
06:05 Building a Family Business
10:02 Searching for A More Purpose-Driven Life
13:04 How to Achieve Net Zero in Your Business
16:10 How to Start Operating in a More Sustainable Way
18:57 There’s More Room For Better Products
Tweets:
As businesses strive to become more sustainable, many are looking to achieve a Net Zero status. What does that mean? And how does it help a business become more sustainable? Listen in as @jreichman and @breadalone CEO, Nels Leader answer these questions and more! #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredient #BreadAlone #organicbread #farmers #purposedrivenbusiness #sustainablebusiness #netzero #climatechange
Inspirational Quotes:
06:58 “It was all in a commitment by my parents to build this business. And as a kid, it was wonderful.” -Nels Leader
11:14 “A lot of people are trying to integrate a more purpose-driven life, more purpose-driven business.” -Justine Reichman
12:36 “The retail store and our farmers are important to the conversation,” -Nels Leader
13:09 “Definitions matter. We’re at a point in time where there’s a lack of clarity about what different words mean.” -Nels Leader
14:49 “The businesses today believe that actions to mitigate climate change are the most important issue that’s facing the natural world.” -Nels Leader
16:33 “Small energy improvements make a big difference.” -Nels Leader
17:04 “Affect change at the highest level that you can, which means starting small and then building on it.” -Nels Leader
19:23 “There’s still a lot of room in grocery stores for better products. So, there’s a lot more that we could do.” -Nels Leader
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman: Welcome to Essential Ingredients, I'm your host, Justine Reichman. Today, we have Nels Leader from Bread Alone in Woodstock, New York. It's so great to be chatting with you from Woodstock and Bread Alone, one of my old haunts, from years back.
Nels Leader: Yes, thank you for having me, Justine. And yeah, a lot of fun to realize that we might have been neighbors with slightly different changes in the course of our lives.
Justine Reichman: Well, you also mentioned you worked at 6th Avenue, I worked at 52nd and 6th in consulting.
Nels Leader: So yeah, I was 46 and 6. So both in our city lives and our country lives, we were nearby.
Justine Reichman: We were. I'm excited to get to chat and to have those folks that are not familiar with Bread Alone learn a little bit about Bread Alone. It was the place that I went to in Woodstock to go get bread. As far as I was concerned, it was the only place to go get bread, I got my bread and my coffee there. So for those folks that are not familiar with Bread Alone, maybe you can just give a little intro to Bread Alone and your family business.
Nels Leader: Sure, I'll try to collapse 40 years into about 40 seconds. Bite sized bit for 40 years. So we're a family owned values driven bakery. My parents founded the company in 1983, and you got to take yourself back to 1983 to appreciate the grand round's story. This is like the land of wonderbread. Back then, you couldn't go to a grocery store and get good artisan bread like you can today. So my parents, who were chefs by training working in New York City, wanted to escape their city lives and do something simple in a small town in the country, like a lot of people today. And from some experience traveling in Europe eating good bread, took that little bit of knowledge and translated it into an old garage on route 28 in Boys Ville and started baking that artisan bread. And from the very early days, they were committed to using organic grain. So commitment to the natural world was something that started in the very beginning for Bread Alone and they grew the business. In the interest of time, I'm going to fast forward and tell you a bit about our footprint today so that listeners can understand the business.
Justine Reichman: I mean, organic in 1983. I mean, my mom was ahead of her time, I thought at least, and 1983 was progressive to be organic.
Nels Leader: Absolutely. It was progressive, and it was before there was a USDA Organic standard. Organic was a set of growing principles that farmers in the case of the bread business, Millers adhered to. And for my parents, it was an intuitive decision from visiting farmers that were farming organically comparing that to what they saw and larger monoculture. And feeling like that was the appropriate way to be a steward of the earth. So they made that commitment from an early intuitive place. And now, we know a whole lot more.
Justine Reichman: That part of their journey in Europe, part of their exploration there.
Nels Leader: My parents were part of the back to the land generation that was taking root in the late 70's and early 80's. They were heavily influenced by Helen and Scott nearing two homesteaders in Maine that had a small but dedicated following. So I'd say their influence was actually more from experience in the US than abroad. But the appreciation of good bread came from abroad.
Justine Reichman: So they married the two together and they created Bread Alone. So now, they came back and they put these things together and they started this Bread Alone company in Woodstock. How was it received there to come and bring this artisan bread company when everybody in the 80's was eating Wonder Bread? Except for me because I never ate sandwiches. Which is weird. But how is it received? It's organic and it's artisan?
Nels Leader: Yeah, two new things at the time. This was not a situation where they opened the doors and all of a sudden, there was a monster line out the door every day. It was really the story of love by loaf. And there were a few fortunate moments or moments where they created luck depending on how you look at it, where the word was able to get out a bit. One of the notable ones was that Florence from the New York Times wrote a piece about Bread Alone, and that introduced more people from New York City to the bakery and what they were doing, and opened up a source of demand to start delivering the bread to New York City. So that was one of the moments that really helped. And Justine, as you can appreciate, because you've spent so much time in the Woodstock area, there are a lot of connections between New York City and Woodstock. So a lot of people would weekend upstate, experience this bread, and get to know the company. And then when they would see it in the city, it was a part of that country life they could enjoy in the city. So it really was a story of one loaf at a time little engine that could more than an outpouring of overwhelming support from all over right after we opened our doors.
Justine Reichman: Wow. So in 1983, did you open the shop immediately?
Nels Leader: In Woodstock? No, that came in the mid 90's. I'd have to look back to give you this specific year. So for many years, it was that original bakeshop on route 28. And voice on Woodstock was the first next step, the first cafe that we opened in the Hudson Valley.
Justine Reichman: I think that's what my first memory is. I remember standing in the queues getting the coffee and ordering the bread. So between 1983 and the 1990's. I'm just being vague about it. What was that journey like to get there because that's a big deal. Yeah, first 10 years.
“It was all in a commitment by my parents to build this business. And as a kid, it was wonderful.” -Nels Leader
Nels Leader: We have to keep in mind that this is my parents at this time. I'm a toddler, and then in elementary school, and then upon high school kid throughout this part of the business journey. But what I can tell you about it from growing with the families, we were hard working gritty entrepreneurial families that revolved around the bakery. It was in a household where we all sat down at 6:00 o'clock around the dinner table every night for our dinner. It was a household where my dad was working and my mom would leave for a few minutes to scoop us up from our friend's house or from Little League practice. And then we, maybe, will be stuck hanging out of the bakery for a few hours until the day is done. And it was all in commitment by my parents to build this business. And as a kid, it was wonderful. I mean, my playground was the stacks of flour bags in the bakery, and I got to hollow out loaves of fresh bread straight from the oven from my after school snack. So it was different from some family stories, but the best.
Justine Reichman: And as a kid, did you get the bread of what it took to build a business? Do you feel like you got to participate or watch all the different facets of building that business?
Nels Leader: Yeah, and of course. I didn't appreciate it at the time. It's not like I understood the things that I was sort of intuiting from watching my parents operate as a young kid. But some of the moments, there were situations that my parents needed to address and out in my mind. For example, I remember one time we lost water at the bakery and so we had to run in the bakery van back and forth to our house with big buckets of water so that we could continue mixing dough at the bakery. Lots of moments like that that I think helped develop grit, and no one had to be scrappy to build a business.
Justine Reichman: Yeah. I grew up, my mom is an entrepreneur. I feel like watching her figure out how to be scrappy and fix all those things as she was doing it, makes me the entrepreneur I am. So I don't know how that plays into your story now, but I'd love to hear that. I think you just spoke about even the things that you watched.
Nels Leader: But the truth is, at the same time, my father and I have very different personalities. And my father, he is sort of a typecast first generation entrepreneur, ready to leap first and ask questions later. That's who he is, and that's his comfort zone. And I certainly come to the business from, I think, a slightly more contemplative perspective. I'm much more of an introvert than my father is. I think the balance of some of my inherent qualities with what I observed from them growing up has been really formative for me and has influenced how I operate today.
Justine Reichman: So now talk to us, you come to this business, you came back to this business after working, did you say consulting? So that experience plus the experience you had working with the family or being participatory as a child--
Nels Leader: My first official job was when I turned 12 doing Saturday cleanup at the bakery. So scrubbing bread racks.
Justine Reichman: Instead of a lemonade stand, did you have a bread stand?
Nels Leader: No, I wasn't out front at first. I was in back cleaning. I had to graduate to customer facing work after a few years.
Justine Reichman: I'm sure you appreciate that, though.
Nels Leader: Very much. I was happy back in the bakery.
Justine Reichman: If you graduated and years later you come back to the business, why don't you come back to the business? What made you decide to come back?
Nels Leader: The business was a really interesting moment at the time that the family and I started talking about coming together. We had essentially outgrown the original footprint that we are operating, the space could no longer sustain the amount of bread that we were trying to produce. Every time a loaf was packed, it had to immediately go out onto the delivery truck because there's nowhere to stage it on the floor. There were bakery racks outside. It's a classic story of entrepreneurship. The good problems to have. So the business was at that juncture and I had done work for the better part of a decade that, maybe although not objectively bad for the world, was not objectively good. I was doing consulting for oil and gas companies for pharmaceutical companies, and I come from Woodstock from an organic bakery. So that didn't feel like the right path for me. And by contrast, helping to contribute and build on the Bread Alone story felt like something that would be meaningful over the years. So the business being at that juncture and me looking to find a bit more purpose, like so many people with their work.
“A lot of people are trying to integrate a more purpose-driven life, more purpose-driven business.” -Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: A lot of people are really trying to integrate a more purpose driven life, more purpose driven businesses. I know I am, and that's what NextGenChef is really here to support. So I think we're on the same page.
Nels Leader: Yeah. I don't lose sight for a moment of how fortunate I was, and I am that I had this experience that I can jump into my fingertips. That's just my good fortune and no doing of my own. So in any case, this was around 2012 when I came back and the business embarked on a big expansion. We built a second bakery outside of Kingston. We went from 7000 square feet to 30,000 square feet. And the bakery that we built that I'm sitting in right now helps us bake about 20,000 loaves of bread a day that we distribute around the Northeast. And we have about 175 employees that are based here at our main bakery, and then we also have four retail stores around the Hudson Valley, our Woodstock location, also in Rhinebeck, Boysville, and here at our main bakery. And then we've got about a dozen Farmers Markets in New York City that we're at each week.
Justine Reichman: Anything, I'd love to hear about this. Because of course, back when I was there, that was not happening.
“The retail store and our farmers are important to the conversation,” -Nels Leader
Nels Leader: No, yes, it's changed a fair bit in the past. And the retail stores and our Farmers Markets are really important to the conversation because the new bakery that we just built, our net zero facility, which I never was to get into.
Justine Reichman: I want to just go back, just pause on that for a second. There's many people listening to this or watching the videocast and I just want to make sure that the vernacular that we use, or the vocabulary that we use that we're just very straightforward about, everybody is on the same page. So net zero, what do you mean by net zero just so that everybody knows.
“Definitions matter. We’re at a point in time where there’s a lack of clarity about what different words mean.” -Nels Leader
Nels Leader: Yep, yeah. I'm glad we're pausing to talk about it because the definitions matter. And we're at a point in time where there's lack of clarity about what the different words mean. We're in like a standard setting process, coming to the same agreement of what these things mean. So net zero is a state when we are removing from the atmosphere as much carbon as we're emitting into it. So we're in equilibrium, that is a net zero state.
Justine Reichman: That is something you guys imposed for this facility that you put in.
Nels Leader: Yes. We constructed what we've designed to be a net zero building. For us, that means that we have electrified everything in the building. So we're not running any propane or natural gas to the facility. We are producing from renewable resources on site through solar, all the projected needs of that equipment.
Justine Reichman: And what prompted you to make this decision? Why was it so important for you?
Nels Leader: I mentioned earlier how commitment to the natural world has been with Bread Alone since the beginning, and I can't take any credit for that early commitment. The business today believes that action to mitigate climate change is the most important issue that's facing the natural world. So our extension to this early commitment is to mitigate climate change. I believe that what we need to do to do our best work on that front is stop burning fossil fuels, period, full stop. Electrifying our lives and then producing from renewable resources, all that electricity is the most direct path to reducing that consumption of fossil fuels. At the main bakery, the place I'm in right now, in 2018, we put in about 200 kilowatts of solar on our roof which provides part of the energy that we use in the building that was like dipping our toes in the water of what we could do on a larger scale to generate electricity. And then with this recent Net Zero project, we took the learnings from doing that project, other learnings from around the business, and put them all into this new project.
“The businesses today believe that actions to mitigate climate change are the most important issue that’s facing the natural world.” -Nels Leader
Justine Reichman: That's amazing. So for other founders that are watching this or listening to them, if they wanted to dip their toes, if they're startup, are there any recommendations that you might make to them, or suggestions that you could offer them so that maybe they could dip their toe in if they couldn't make such a large commitment today, but maybe start them on the right path?
Nels Leader: Absolutely. So my first piece of advice is to affect change at the highest level that you can, and that's going to change over time. So for a business that is just starting to learn about these issues and wants to start taking steps to operate in a more sustainable way, maybe doesn't have a whole lot of capital to throw at the problem, small energy improvements can make a big difference. So that's starting with the basics like an LED fixture, improving windows, tightening your building envelope. Small changes to your business. And as you take those first steps, you're gonna learn, and then you're gonna learn about what the next step is. And if you continue to affect change at the highest level, you can give it the knowledge that you have, you can work up to a much more substantial renovation, like going into a full Net Zero facility. So that's my overarching advice to effect the change at the highest level you can, which means starting small and then building on it.
Justine Reichman: So for Bread Alone, what are your big plans given your drive and your ambition to create great change for the climate?
“Small energy improvements make a big difference.” -Nels Leader
Nels Leader: So the Net Zero project and voice fill in many ways was a proving ground for a new higher level of scale for this type of work. There are a lot of residential projects happening that are net zero, right? You don't see too many commercial or light industrial projects that are happening that are applying that same thinking. So we've applied it to our 7000 square foot facility that's going to provide products to our cafes in Farmers Markets. Now, we have to take some of the things we learned at that scale and apply it on an even larger scale. So for example, in designing the Net Zero bakery in Boysville, designed an electric heat exchanger to produce the heat for ovens. You have to bake bread that takes a lot of heat energy, usually it comes from natural gas. We figured out how to do it with electricity in Boysville. Now, we can apply that same technology to our much larger bakery and use it to make 20,000 loaves of bread a day, not just a few 100. So we're going to take the things we learned there and apply them to other parts of the business that we can continue to scale.
“Affect change at the highest level that you can, which means starting small and then building on it.” -Nels Leader
Justine Reichman: That's amazing. Are we going to see Bread Alone outside of the Northeast and the New York area? I say this selfishly, because I love Bread Alone, and I'd love to share it with the people that I know here, even though I don't eat gluten.
Nels Leader: We don't have plans to expand beyond our geography right now. And the reason is that this is a big area, and I want you to just even think about the experiences of--
Justine Reichman: The carbon footprint. If you don't need to go elsewhere, you may not want to because there's lots of other people doing it elsewhere. I was just asking.
Nels Leader: No, it's a good question. I want you to picture going into a grocery store and going to the bread aisle. Think about a conventional grocery store, that bread aisle, it's huge. The whole row, different breads, one of them sort of the other. And now, think about how much of that bread aisle is artisan bread made without preservatives, made with organic grain. So that's what you have out there. So there's still a lot of room in grocery stores for better products. So there's a lot more than we could do on these tests.
“There’s still a lot of room in grocery stores for better products. So, there’s a lot more that we could do.” -Nels Leader
Justine Reichman: Oh, totally. Totally. It's funny when I came out here, I didn't know anything about what was local here. We always look for local things. You want to buy local because you want to buy what's locally here. It's easier to get, you want to support the local farmers, you want to support the local businesses. I support buying and eating locally as well. But you are a large company and I did want to see what your plans were for the future and support your initiatives, whatever they may be.
Nels Leader: Thank you. Not coming to the West Coast yet.
Justine Reichman: I have to wait. I came back to New York to have some bread.
Nels Leader: Yeah. Just don't don't fly out here too often or buy carbon offsets when needed.
Justine Reichman: I haven't been on a plane, it will be three years in June since my friend's daughter's Bat Mitzvah.
Nels Leader: Yeah, that's air travel. It should be for those special occasions.
Justine Reichman: I would say that was special, it was a mitzvah. So I really appreciate you joining us on Essential Ingredients, and I'd love to be able to have you share with us how people might find information on Bread Alone. If they're in your area and they want to be able to check out one of your locations or find out which Farmers Market you're at, or where your cafes are, what's the best?
Nels Leader: We're easy to find. So breadalone.com, on the interwebs and on social, we are at Brent Alone bakery. I encourage folks to come out and see our new Net Zero baking facility.
Justine Reichman: I think that sounds awesome. The next time I'm in town, I want to check it out as well. Thank you so much for joining us, and we look forward to following along and seeing if there's a way for us to virtually see your net zero.
Nels Leader: No video on the website yet. But now, you've just lit a fire. I'm gonna, okay, we get that done.
Justine Reichman: That's good. I like to light fires. All right. Well, we will look forward to seeing you soon. We want to thank our guests for joining in today. Stay tuned, we're here every Tuesday. And if you like what you see, don't forget to like it on Instagram and follow us on YouTube. It's the best way to let us know that you like what you hear, like what you say. Thank you so much for joining us.
