E6: From Passion to Partnership — Amy Emberling of Zingerman’s Bakehouse

In this inspiring episode of The Perfect Rise, host Kimberly Houston sits down with Amy Emberling, Managing Partner at the legendary Zingerman’s Bakehouse, to explore what it really takes to build a bakery business that lasts—not just in years, but in values, vision, and community impact.

Amy shares how she went from baking as a child in Nova Scotia to helping build one of the most respected bakeries in the country. You’ll hear her journey through the food industry, her surprising detour into corporate consulting, and why she ultimately returned to the world of artisan bread and purpose-driven leadership.

We dig into: ✔️ How to define your North Star as a bakery owner
✔️ The biggest shifts in baking and food safety since the ’90s
✔️ Why your dream bakery starts with knowing how you want to live
✔️ What most people get wrong about pricing and the real cost of food
✔️ Amy’s advice for aspiring bakers before they open their doors

✨ FREE BONUS ✨
 Want to design a bakery business that truly fits your life?
 Download our free visioning guide → “Design Your Ideal Bakery Life”

Whether you’re running a busy shop or dreaming of your first storefront, this episode is a must-listen for anyone in the baking industry.

👇 Drop a comment and tell us what your dream bakery life looks like!

🔗 Stay Connected:
Subscribe for more episodes: The Perfect Rise Playlist
Visit RBA: Retail Bakers of America Website
 

Become a Member

Transcript

 What does it take to build a bakery that lasts not just in business, but an impact to leadership and legacy? In this episode of The Perfect Rise, we're joined by Amy Eberling, a managing partner at the renowned Zingerman's Bake House. Amy brings decades of experience of the table, but what sets her apart is how deeply she's thought about the why.

Behind the work from early childhood curiosity to navigating food trends, industry shifts, and the not so glamorous realities of growth. Amy's story is layered with insight. You'll hear her take on why every baker should understand their North Star. What most people misunderstand about the true cost of food and why working in a bakery before owning one is the smartest move.

You can make this conversation is rich with real talk on sustainable success, thoughtful hiring, and what it truly means to run a values-driven bakery. In today's world, if you are a baker looking for staying power, not just social media buzz, you'll walk away with tangible takeaways and a fresh perspective on what it takes to make a bakery thrive.

And if you've ever wondered what your dream bakery life could really look like beyond the storefront, don't miss the free resource that we've linked down in the show notes. It's a quick reflection guide that will help you get clear on what you want, inspired by Amy's thoughtful take on aligning your work with your life.

Let's jump right in. Hi Amy. Welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you join me today. How are you? I'm doing great, Kimberly. Nice to be here. You. So, as we get started with these, with this particular conversation, I would love for you to tell us about your journey in the baking industry, essentially.

What's your origin story? Um, okay. Well, probably like a lot of people that you speak to, speak to. Well, maybe not to everybody, but I hear it a lot. I like to bake even as a, as a young child. I don't know why. I think I like the mystery of it. You know, how does it work when you put all these things together and then you get something that's very different from all the parts?

So I used to do the baking in my household. I'm the youngest of four kids and my mother actually really didn't like to bake, so I got to be the baker. And um, and then I went to college and I didn't think I was going to be a baker, but I thought that maybe I would like to be a chef or own a restaurant one day.

I don't know why. I think, you know, I went to college in the early 1980s and of course there were bakeries around, but maybe it, you know, sort of the artist and bread movement hadn't quite hit all over, so I didn't really consider it. And then I got some after college, I worked in some restaurants and I was not loving it.

Um, you know, I'm an extreme morning person, so not necessarily the best thing to be if you wanna work in a restaurant that, you know, focused on dinner food. Right. And yeah. You know, I think that a lot of us know that restaurants aren't always the easiest places to work. Um, so anyway, I thought, gosh, maybe this isn't gonna work for me.

And I was at one of my favorite restaurants here in Ann Arbor called Zingerman's Delicatessen, and I saw the owner by chance he was in there. He is a pretty distinctive looking guy, and I found the courage to walk up to him and say, you know, I'm wondering where you think I should go and work. And he, this is a delicate test, and so.

I wasn't a place that I was gonna be, you know, work as a cook. And I said, I love what you're doing here. I, but I wanna do some, you know, it's not exactly the kind of food I wanna make. And he said, oh, my friend Frank is opening up a bakery. So that's how I made my way to Zingerman's, um, bake house. Uh, so I was almost thinking this whole thing wasn't gonna work.

Um, but instead I went to the bakery and I interviewed for the, a job and I didn't hear from Frank for a few days. But finally, um. He called back and, and, uh, offered me a job. There were eight of us and that was kind of the beginning of it back in 1992. Wow. And you've been there since? Pretty much the whole time.

I worked here from, I worked at the Bake house from 92 to 96, um, and then my, I was in Ann Arbor because my husband was a graduate student at University of Michigan, and then thankfully he finished. And, uh, we were, it was time to leave town and often I didn't think I'd ever be back because often people don't come back to wherever they got their PhD.

Mm-hmm. So, uh, we left town. I said, bye-bye bye, Zingerman's. It's been nice. And, uh, we went to Denmark for a year and then we were in Manhattan for three years. And, um, during that time I had, I, um, actually went to business school. And I got a job in a consulting firm that I thought I was gonna love because you know, you got to wear nice clothes and be clean all day.

Right? Yes. Very exciting. And have, you know, a nice office and travel for work. Well, after about three months in there, I just thought, this is not for me. Um, I really hated it and so I was getting calls from Frank and saying, you know, could you go back to Ann Arbor and be a partner with me? Um, and I said, I, so my husband was away, he's an archeologist who was away on a dig, and he came back to town and I said, Hey, what do you think about leaving and going back to Ann Arbor?

And he said, you know what? Let's do it. And so that, that was in 2000 and I've definitely been here ever since then. Wow. That is so cool. Oh my goodness. I love all of that. I feel like I'm the opposite right now from the bakery into let's do more business consulting. Yes, let's help some people out. Right.

But I kinda love it, so I get it though. I get it. I totally, totally get it. I don't think I would've been able to do that many years ago, like when I was like 18, 19. I started off in a corporate setting and I was like, I hate corporate. I do not wanna work here. And so then I moved into like retail and then into the bakery, and I was like, I love this.

I'll never, ever, ever do that whole corporate thing again. And now here I am. So, right, right. But it's all, it's finding your spot. Right? It is at the right time too. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I I totally get that. I get that. So what is one of the biggest lessons you've learned in your career?

I. Um, I think here at Zingerman's we are really, um, committed to sort of having our own vision of what success looks like and what kind of food we want to make, and I think that's been super helpful because you know, obviously you can do it lots of different ways, but for us that always having that north star of what are we really trying to do?

Buffers us from all the rollercoaster of, you know, public opinion about what is the most in thing, or diets, you know. So being at the bakery since 1992, I've lived through low salt, low low fat, or no fat. Um, the Atkins diet. The early years of, uh, gluten-free, which, you know, I have respect for when people, when it's a real health thing.

Absolutely. Um, so we've kinda lived through a lot of those trends and it's been really helpful to kind of have our own vision of what we wanna do. 'cause honestly, we've, we've managed to maintain a clientele through, through all of that. Um, so I think that's, that's probably what I would suggest. Love that.

And it's. As soon as you said North Star, I was completely dial and I was like, yep, that's my language. Because I am always telling people that like, yeah, it's great that you see this on TikTok, or you follow this person and you love how they do things, but what do you want to be known for? Like when this trend passes, who are you?

Right? You can't, you just, 'cause you went viral once that I'm like, I went viral on TikTok for chopping up Oreos. I was literally just chopping Oreos. Like there was nothing special about that video at all. It was just me and Oreos and I had like 8,000 new followers overnight. And I was like, this is so stupid.

And ever since then I was like, okay, I will not be known as the lady who was chopping Oreos like that. I don't even do that anymore. Right. So who are you going to be as a brand, as a business? Um, when the trend passes and I think. That is definitely a great lesson. No one has said that, so I think that that is Okay.

There you go. Final and stellar. Good. I think it's lovely. So I do wanna know your opinion of how the industry was when you started, um, what that looks like now. Like what did the differences between those and where do you think it's gonna go? Hmm. Okay. So, uh. There are a lot of things that are different from when I started.

Well, first of all, you know, I started in 1992, which wasn't the olden days, but at the bakery at that time, um, we, we weren't using computers. Hmm. And maybe we had a fax machine. So just to talk about how technology has changed. Yeah. So tremendously. And in terms of advertising and marketing, most of it was print, you know, social media.

Really didn't exist. So from a technological standpoint, things have changed dramatically. Mm-hmm. Oh, it's still advertising and marketing. It's still having recipes. It's, you know, now they're not in a binder, now they're in a, you know, in some kind of program. So essentially the content is the same, but the tools are really different.

So that's one thing that's changed a lot. I think it's made, I think the having, um, computers in different. Sort of bakery management systems has made it a lot easier to do our work. Food safety laws have changed tremendously. Mm-hmm. So we all wore hats, but I don't even know that we had to. We didn't document anything.

And when the inspector came in, they didn't say, show us your pre-op checklist, and mm-hmm. Anything, there was no sort of paper trail. They just watched what we did. Were we doing it correctly? Were we following the laws? Um, but there was no need to prove it. And so now there's just a lot more documentation than there ever was, and there are much more complicated laws, and the expectations of what we're doing every day are much greater.

So I'm respectful of all of that. And of course we wanna make safe food, but I think it's definitely added a layer of complexity to our work that's not always really inspiring. 'cause if you got into this to make food, uh, so as my, my original Frank Corolla, who I referred to earlier who founded the bakery mm-hmm.

He said, you know, I thought I was, I had an artisan bakery. And then at a certain point it became clear that I was a, um, a manufacturing facility. Not that it not, that was just not how we wanted to think about things, but, so that's changed things in a way that is good and bad. The other thing that, one thing that's really been great that's different is when I started, um, hardly anyone went to cooking school.

There weren't that many of them in the country. Then there was a period where there were a lot of schools and a lot of community colleges had schools, and so that I think was great for both people who were interested. You could get training without it being incredibly expensive, without you having to go far away from home.

I. As an owner of a bakery, it was really great getting people who had already gone through a certain amount of training, and a lot of it was the even. Even if it wasn't about the techniques of baking, it was really nice for people who understood what the food safety laws were and that sort of thing, and that people.

Um, we, it was that they were joining because they wanted to have a profession. Mm-hmm. So when I started, a lot of, you know, it wa uh, many people who were working in the bakery, you know, it was just a job. And, um, and that's fine too. And there's still people in the bakery who are, you know, maybe they're going to school.

There's students here in Ann Arbor, they need to make some money. Um, which is fine. It's a mix. But it's been really nice to have more people who, um, are trained and are really committed to the food. Then I'll say one last thing that's kind of different in the Ba Zingerman's Bake House opened in 1992, and that was also the year that the Food Network started.

So for some people, and maybe you, you look like you could be young enough that, you know, you've known life with the Food Network. Mm-hmm. But I think there's been a real democratization of food and knowledge about food in the last 30 years, and customers are much more knowledgeable about food and it's made it fun because.

They really appreciate, uh, what we're doing or they know more about it or they have a lot of questions and there can be a lot of good conversations. So the, how much food knowledge and food interest there is in the United States has really changed in the last 30 years. That's so cool. I never even thought about that, but you're right.

You're like, my favorite show. One of my favorites was like watching Elton Brown. Right. Elton didn't even know that. It's that like, yes, I totally get it. Fully hadn't even thought of that, but, and I taught kids, so that was my, like I was the kid whisper. So me and kids in the kitchen, they always have questions.

There's like, why is it, why are we gonna to do that? Why, why? And I'm just like, I can't say because I said so. So as the instructor, like I did go to Le Cord on Blue, but I'm like, I can't imagine if I didn't go to culinary school trying to answer those questions for children who were like, okay, but. I don't understand why I need to mix the frosting for 10 minutes or why do I need to cook this this way?

Because you do. But being able to explain that and as someone who would go work in a bakery, that makes sense too. 'cause you come in with a level of knowledge they don't have to teach you now. Yeah. And so I, I definitely think that is great. So for all my students who are listening, just letting you know, you guys need to go find bakeries and tell them you're in school.

They're gonna love that. Yeah, absolutely. I think that is incredible. So speaking of students, um, what is a piece of advice you would give someone who is either in school, in culinary school, or if they're just starting out and they want to open a bakery, what advice would you give them? Sure. Well, I would say, um, work in a bakery.

Now I remember when I moved to Ann Arbor, I had finished college and um, when we came here it was 1988 and there were no cafes. And I had come from, I had been living in Boston and I, where there were tons of cafes. So we came here and, um, I called my father up and we had had a family business. And I said, Hey dad, there are no cafes here.

I really wanna open a cafe. He said, how about you work in a cafe first? Like, oh, thanks dad. Okay. So, I mean, it may seem obvious, but sometimes people think too, they wanna do it on their own, they wanna do it. And I, I respect, I respect that desire, but I think you can learn, you can get paid to learn a lot to help you not make mistakes on your own.

Yes. So I really suggest not rushing being a little patient. And getting a job in, in another bakery. And I suggest that you ch that people choose a bakery that you really, if you can keep trying, if you can't, that you really like what they're doing, the food that they're making, try not to work in a place that you don't really respect the food.

Or if you can't find that, or you have to make some choices, find a bakery that you like. The way they're running their business or what you hear the scuttle bug is that they're really good employers or that they're really good operators, like they do things incredibly efficiently so that wherever you're spending your time, you're actually learning something that will help you later on when you wanna have your own bakery.

Agreed. And by doing that, they'll learn what they don't wanna do. Yeah, for sure. Without investing all that money. I learned very quickly on externship the things I did and did not want to do in my bakery. And I was like, man, if I had like invested all this money into like macaroons, there's no way, there's no way you could pay me to do this all day long.

And like once I did it in a bakery, I was like, this was cute in culinary school, this was, this was so much fun. But when you have to mass produce something as finicky as doubt, no, no. Real quick, right? Yeah. Yeah. That was a great lesson. And I'm like, because in culinary school you, you didn't have people ordering 300 for a wedding, you know?

Like they were just like, here, you need to make 10 in order to pass this practicum. But when you have to make 300 in the same amount of time, you're like, oh, this is. No thank you. Right. I don't, or the opposite where you're like, oh my God, I love this. And I, that's how I fell in love with wedding cakes. I was like, no, I love this.

Like, I wanna do this until I had brides, right? And then I was like, oh, I don't, I don't love. Yeah, I don't, that was really stressful. And then all my brides had babies, and then I found my sweet spot. Baby shower cakes, little kid cakes, heaven. I was like, yes. This is all I wanna do for the rest of my life.

And I did it for 10 years and it was beautiful until it wasn't. But if I hadn't gone through being at somebody else's bakery mm-hmm. And having to do those things, I don't know that I would've had that experience Right. At all. So I Yeah, I agree. I, yeah. Go stars or go work in another bakery so that you know what you want to do or don't wanna do.

I love that. So, okay. I have a wild card question. What's a misconception about the culinary industry that you think we should be bomb?

Well, I think that people are somewhat reluctant to, um, pay the price that really good food actually costs. And I think that's an American problem because, I mean, we're a country that was born of, I, you know, especially if you think about the turn of the century immigrants came here that were starving in Europe or other parts of the world or that were really suffering.

And then America was a land of bound of, you know, bountiful, um, uh, food availability and food was cheap, right? Yes. So it's become a little bit of our culture that, um, you should be able to get a lot for not a lot of. Mm-hmm. I think that, um, really good food, and I don't just mean taste good, but food that is maybe clean and healthy food that was, uh, grown by farmers who are properly being, um, taken care of or paid.

Mm-hmm. Um, food that's good for the whole community because it's being grown or produced in a way that's environmentally sound. Food that's being made by people who are getting paid enough so that they're not actually also on food stamps or having to be on, uh, Medicaid that costs money. And, um, and I am Zingerman is not known for being cheap, and I'm actually really unapologetic about the cost of the food that we make because I know that we do, even though the food costs a fair amount.

Um, we're, we're not just making tons of money and putting it in the bank, but it's because we give good benefits to people. Mm-hmm. Uh, we try to pay people decently. We try to buy ingredients at a fair price for the people who are in a different part of the supply chain. Uh, and I think that in the long run in our, in our community, then less money is going into other things like, um, Medicaid mm-hmm.

Or food stamps or unemployment insurance. So I think that's, that's one thing that, you know, food, that the idea that food should be cheap and I don't think it should be. I agree. And I, I've always thought that in last summer I had an opportunity to go to, uh, on like this trip with the Washington Red Raspberry Association, and we went out in the fields while they were picking the raspberries, and then we followed the raspberries.

To the factory where they're like cleaned and frozen. And then we went to the next factory where they're packaged and shipped out to like Costco and Sam's and all these different places. And to watch that from start to finish to talk to the farmers, to have conversation, to eat with them like they fed us the entire time we were there.

I was like, I have a completely different appreciation for the way our food is moving farm to table. And I was like, no, this, there are real people doing this every step of the way, and by the time it even makes it to you, like so many things have had to happen to make sure it stays safe, that by the time it gets to us as consumers and we are now, you know, packaging it up or turning it into something else as a dessert, I'm like, yeah, you have to pay for that.

Like, I don't, there's no other way to put it. Like you just, you do. And I, I definitely think that's a fun one. No one has said that and I love it. Well, good. That's a good question. It's interesting. It's just the first thing that came to mind. So I'm sure there are others, but I. That makes sense to me. It, it makes total 100% sense to me.

So as we prepare to wrap up, what is one piece of wisdom or encouragement you would like to share with the audience?

Well. I think another thing that we were really big on, well, I talked about visioning, but there's just your personal vision. I think sometimes we think, oh, I wanna have a bakery. Or people often say, I wanna make money. Okay. Well that there are a lot of ways to do that. Mm-hmm. So one thing I often talk to people about is how do you like to work?

And do you like to work in the morning? Do you like to work in the evening? Do you like to work with a lot of people or just a few people? Do you like customers or would you rather not have a, a relationship with a customer? Uh, you know, do you wanna be a wholesaler? Do you wanna be behind the scenes? Um,

and do you wanna be able to walk to work? Do you, do you wanna be able to ride your bike? You know, all those kinds of things that 'cause those details of how we do our work, what our day is like. I think that's what really makes it work for us or not work for us and bring joy or not. And I think we often forget that when we're, especially when we're young and we're really up worried, like, you know, I wanna have a career and I wanna be able to support myself.

And so. I think the money becomes kind of the thing. I wanna go to a, you know, a great place that's, you know, famous or something. Well, maybe, but maybe you really hate that because maybe you have to live in a big city and you'd rather live in a town. Yep. So I, I just think it's helpful to think about how do you wanna live and how do you like to work?

And see if you can craft that. Because I think in the long run it will be more sustainable and you'll really be happy. I love that. It literally made me think that we need to add some sort of handout in our show notes for like a day in the life of what you want your bakery life to look like, because I don't know that people actually stop and think about that.

When I know when I was looking for a bakery, that was not even a thought. It was more like, where is it located? Where's the foot traffic? And I'm glad I never opened the actual brick and mortar because I'm very much so a hallmark girly. And I wanna be in the small town. I wanna know everybody, like I want the bakery to be the place, the same people come every single day and I know your order type of thing.

As opposed to, I live in Atlanta, so we're in a metropolitan city and I have no idea who you are as you fly in and outta Hartsville Jackson airport. Right. And so I, we are gonna add that to our show notes of like. Dream up your dream bakery and what does that look like? I think that is such a great piece of wisdom for us to end this on.

Thank you so much for taking time to speak with us today. I have loved this conversation so, so much. Thank you, Kimberly. It was fun. I.