“In three weeks, we basically built three businesses: an e-commerce business, a delivery business, and a takeout business," said Patti Röckenwagner, the co-owner of Röckenwagner Bakery, which is located on Washington Blvd. in Mar Vista near Venice Beach. The bakery shifted from dine-in and catering to pickup and delivery during the COVID-19 health crisis.
Röckenwagner Bakery employs 300 people and has a fleet of 40 vehicles that deliver goods from Santa Barbara to San Diego. Patti said “the world changed overnight” for her bakery.
“More than half of our business went away because restaurants [and] universities closed, catering stopped happening, events stopped happening, corporate campuses stopped functioning because they had everyone working remotely,” she said. “But we wanted to be quick to make adjustments so that we could keep as many staff as possible.”
When L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a stay-at-home order in mid-March, Patti closed the two full-service restaurants and converted the cafe in Mar Vista into a marketplace.
“We started doing pre-packaged foods there. We started bringing in pantry items. We diverted our delivery staff that used to work at the wholesale part of the business and had them create an in-house delivery system, so we have them delivering to consumers directly to their homes,” she said. “We did that intentionally because we wanted to keep their jobs.”
Patti said she didn’t want to deliver food through third-party companies like Postmates or GrubHub because she’d rather pay her own employees and monitor food safety.
“During this crisis, we wanted to make sure that we could manage the food handling and safety and sanitizing. All of those things are really important to us.”
Patti created RöckenwagnerMarket.com so that people can order online and have it delivered the next day or pickup at curbside. Since the Bakery is delivering its own food, Patti said there was a learning curve for customers who wanted their goods immediately.
“I think that customers were used to having these third parties deliver things to them who have massive fleets, who are driving around all day, who have sophisticated software that can track them and give them very specific delivery windows, who have big companies and big investment firms who are behind them back and can help them stand up these types of businesses. We are a small, independent business,” she said. “We created this literally overnight, and so a lot of it was customer education to say, ‘We’re really sorry, but as much as we’d like to give you a delivery window, we know that we can do it same day.’ We don’t have all of that infrastructure and didn’t have years to build up that infrastructure.”
Patti has also had to adjust Röckenwagner Bakery’s menu.
“Things that we would normally do in a restaurant that you're serving à la minute, like right there... sometimes people just want the comfort. They want something that they can have, they can plan a week in advance, they can reheat tomorrow,” she said. “And so we had to really retrain our chefs and are cooks and ourselves to kind of do a menu that's based on that unique need.”
In order to deliver customers a variety of products, Röckenwagner Bakery is partnering with other companies to bring customers fresh vegetables and fruits.
“We partnered with County Line Harvest. We do produce boxes; it's a produce and bread box, so they get Röckenwagner bread, they get this beautiful produce,” she said. “I would say it's even a better model than what they were used to before because it's truly farm-to-table. It's truly oven to table. There's no middle person or market in between.”
Röckenwagner Bakery is also working with Murray Family Farms.
“They do the best fruits. Right now they have strawberries and oranges and citrus fruits that are delicious; the best we've ever eaten,” she said. “I feel like not only have we solved some of our own [problems,] you know, wanting to keep our employees, but we've helped them to be able to keep their employees and to keep their product, which is perishable, going. And so we've been able to keep three businesses going by starting this system.”
The pandemic has revealed that our food supply chain is broken.
“How is it that we have more bread that we can service and yet the market shelves are empty of bread? Or we have wonderful farms here in Southern California, we’re so lucky, and yet they are not able to get their products into the market? It shows that there's so much that needs to be fixed in that distribution and delivery system,” Patti said.
Patti has noticed a shift in the way customers understand chefs’ work.
“We're hearing from people who say, ‘Wow, I have a new appreciation, a new respect, for what you do with the kitchen there, that you make everything delicious and hot and it all comes out together, and people can enjoy it,’” she said. “Now that we're all having to cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for our whole families, and do all the dishes, and do all the shopping and procuring of the items, we're all starting to realize it's not so easy.”
Patti said there’s a new understanding of food too.
“I think there is a new appreciation for the art of what we took for granted before of food, and where it comes from, and how to respect it, and that you know it's not going to be an endless supply if we don't take care of it.”
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