Pearl Bakery

John Woosley, I'm a manager at Pearl Bakery. Pearl's opened its doors in 1997 to fill anishin in Portland for specialty baking that didn't at that time exist. We're getting almost all our flour from Lehigh Ruler mills in Lehigh, Utah. They're one of the few independent mills left in the country. There's less than 50 smaller independent mills They source their grains from within a 200 mile or less radius. The grain is not being brought from clear one coast to the other to a centralized location and distributed back to the coast. There's a much shorter journey that it goes on from mill and then ultimately to Portland. If it can be sourced seasonally and locally, we generally make an attempt to do that. That can mean some of our specialty items like fresh fruit danish or berry tarts during the s We're picking up those fruits at the farmers market and bringing them back to the bakery. We work with several partnerships with farmers and growers really close to Portland. We work through Batdorff and Bronson coffee. They're local enough. They're in Olympia, Washington. Great relationship we've had with them for quite a few years now. I believe nine years at Batdorff and Bronson. They carry some coffees that are not organic but we use all of their organic coffees. More importantly, they have a great relationship with the farmers who grow the crops that they use. So it's good relationship coffee and that trickles down the chain. I'm the owner'son, production manager. I got my degree in electrical engineering and my father talked me into working here. We've always been about sustainability and local. As of late, we've turned into also very family oriented. You're hard-pressed to find somebody here that doesn't also have a relative employed, especially in production. And that's a core of our mission. We have the option to mechanize and feasibly make more money. And we've said up until now, we've said no to that because we would rather pay more h When it comes down to it, we're people oriented, we're community oriented, doing as much as we can to help our community. By employing, by buying local, by trying to sell a reasonably priced product so the restaurants we serve can do well also. And we have, people know that about us and we've had people that have been with us for almost the duration accounts that have been with us for 11, 12 years. They're getting our blood, sweat and tears and every back end working as hard as we can to make the best product every day. We're from scratch bakery daily, so there's no day old. We reinvent the wheel every day.