Built to Last: The Staying Power of Great Bakeries
May 12, 2026 | 7:00pm–8:00pm ET
Building a bakery that stands the test of time requires more than great bread, it demands vision, resilience, and a willingness to evolve with changing times. What does it take not only to endure, but to grow and thrive over decades?
For this special Hearthside Chat, we are honored to welcome three influential voices in American artisan baking to reflect on how their bakeries have grown and adapted over time.
Together, these bakers have helped shape the landscape of artisan bread and pastry in the United States. In this candid conversation moderated by Karen Bornarth, Executive Director of the Bread Bakers Guild, they will share the stories behind their baking journeys—how their businesses began, the challenges they have navigated, and the decisions that allowed them to evolve with changing tastes and times while remaining grounded in their craft.
This event is part of our Hearthside Chat series and is open to Guild members only. Registration is free.
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Joanne Chang, pastry chef/co-owner, Flour Bakery and co-owner Myers + Chang
James Beard Award-winning chef Joanne Chang opened the first Flour bakery in 2000. More than two decades later, she now operates eleven Flour bakeries and sister restaurant Myers + Chang in Boston/Cambridge with her husband and business partner Christopher Myers. Joanne, Flour, and Myers + Chang have garnered local and national recognition from Gourmet, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, the New York Times, the Food Network, Conde Nast Traveler, Inc. Magazine, O Magazine, Boston Magazine, and the Boston Globe. She is the winner of the 2016 James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker. She is the author of five (soon to be 6) cookbooks, and she serves on the Board of Directors for Share Our Strength as well as Beacon Financial Corporation. Joanne appeared as a judge on the first season of Netflix’s competition show Baking Impossible. She also teaches classes and advises pastry cooks both within the bakery, at area cooking schools, and virtually with her Bake Like a Pro session on MasterClass.
Amy Scherber, Amy’s Bread
Amy Scherber is the owner and founder of Amy’s Bread, a New York City bakery that will celebrate its 34th Anniversary in June of 2026. Amy started with a staff of 5 in a small kitchen on Ninth Avenue. Today the bakery has 100 employees and features her handmade bread and wide variety of morning pastries, sandwiches and salads, cookies, bars, pies, and layer cakes. The bakery has retail cafes in Hell’s Kitchen, and Chelsea Market, and small cafes in the New York Public Library, the New York Design Center, and the Museum of the City of New York, and bread and pastry kitchens in Long Island City, Queens. Amy’s Bread is still a local neighborhood bakery and a family run business—Amy and her husband, Troy Rohne, run the company together. Everything they serve is handmade from scratch daily with great care and the best ingredients. The bakery delivers to more than 200 wholesale customers daily, including many of NYC’s finest restaurants. Amy is the co-author of Amy’s Bread and The Sweeter Side of Amy’s Bread. She was an original member of the Bread Bakers Guild of America, since 1993.
Steven Sullivan, The Acme Bread Company
Steven and Suzie Sullivan founded The Acme Bread Company in 1983 to bake bread for restaurants and stores that wanted to offer better bread than was generally available on the wholesale market at the time. Acme is primarily a wholesale bakery but also has two retail shops: the original location in Berkeley, California, and another in San Francisco’s Ferry Building Marketplace. Acme supplies bread to dozens of restaurants around the Bay Area, including Chez Panisse—where Steven began baking bread in the seventies—as well as to a variety of grocery stores and retail locations throughout the region.
Over the past forty-some-odd years, Acme has expanded its product list from four items to more than 100. The bakery has also worked to incorporate as many organic and locally sourced ingredients as possible, proudly making the switch to 100% organic flour in 1999.
Over the years, Acme has also prioritized environmentally responsible practices, including donating fresh leftover bread to charitable organizations, schools, and nonprofits, and encouraging customers to minimize packaging by offering a discount for bread purchased without bags in its retail shops.
Karen Bornarth, Executive Director
Karen has been a member of the Guild for more than 20 years, and has served as Executive Director since June of 2022. In her work with the Guild, she supports bakery owners and professional bakers to achieve success in their baking practices and businesses through education, training, and community-building events. Prior to taking the role of ED, she spent 8 years in workforce and small business development with Hot Bread Kitchen, a nonprofit in NYC dedicated to creating economic opportunity for immigrant women and women of color through careers in food. While at HBK, Karen developed an initiative to improve job quality and business performance in small food businesses, and she oversaw a team to design and deliver a dynamic workforce development program in New York City, growing program outcomes fourfold over a three-year period. She launched her career at Amy’s Bread, one of very few women in production, and worked her way up from packer to supervisor while teaching part-time at the Artisan Baking Center.
The French Culinary Institute provided her the opportunity to focus her passion for teaching; she spent five years as the lead instructor and coordinator of their bread department, improving the curriculum and creating new classes for both professional and amateur students. She also worked for four years at Le Pain Quotidien, where she managed its Bleecker Street demonstration and teaching bakery, and then transitioned to product development, quality control and training on a national level. Through all of her years of experience as a bread baker and educator in New York City’s baking landscape, she brings a passion for education and advocacy for frontline food production workers. She is particularly interested in breaking down the systemic and structural barriers to career and economic advancement for people of color and women in the baking industry, and in cultivating and nurturing the next generation of bakers and bakery owners.
Photo of Amy Scherber by @ChelseaMarket
Photo Clipping of Steven Sullivan from www.farine-mc.com
