Tom Frainier left a job in the corporate world where he made a lot of bread to make real bread at a tiny storefront bakery in Kensington almost a quarter-century ago. Frainier is now president and CEO of that family-run business — Semifreddi's — one of the Bay Area's largest artisan wholesale bakeries.
The 54-year-old Moraga resident left a job at Clorox in 1988 to work at the bakery, then located in Kensington and owned by his sister, Barbara Rose — who had worked at the bakery and purchased it from the original owners a year earlier — and her husband, Michael Rose. The bakery gig paid $7 an hour. Frainier thought it was going to be a way station of sorts until he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. Then he woke up and smelled the bread.
"I remember walking in at 4 a.m. into a 450-square-foot (building). I had never baked a thing in my life. It was just the visuals, the smells, making something that comes out of the oven, and you sell it to people and they're happy. It was a very cathartic experience for me. I just felt a calm come over me, like this is where I should be," Frainier recalled. Within a week, he bought into the business and became the third partner.
Frainier talked about the bread business in an interview at Semifreddi's Alameda headquarters, which employs 123 people. The place houses a huge, high-ceiling light-filled bakery that bustles with workers who produce about 140,000 loaves of bread and
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