Rise to success

By Angela Pirisi
Photograph: Ruth Kaplan


	“Loafty” goal: As co-owner and CFO, CA John Rossetti brought his Italian Home Bakery into the high-tech age

John Rossetti, co-owner of Italian Home Bakery, admits he doesn’t know much about baking bread but he still knows lots about managing dough.

He and his co-owner brother, Dennis, transformed the Toronto Little Italy bakery that could, shifting it from a hands-on, labour-intensive production to an automated, high-speed, high-volume system. Moving the bakery into the high-tech age, however, hasn’t meant skimping on quality or snubbing tradition, insists Rossetti. They still maintain some artisan bread techniques, such as fermentation and scoring by hand.

Instead of just selling direct fresh products daily, the brothers expanded their line to include branded, frozen products. As one of the largest independent bakeries in Southern Ontario by distribution, volume and market penetration, IHB supplies restaurants, including Toronto’s top sub sandwich chain, and supermarkets. It makes approximately 40 different kinds of dough and 40 to 50 varieties of breads, turning out 50,000 to 80,000 loaves a day.

As the company’s CFO, Rossetti, 50, oversees the finances and overall operations, while Dennis, 49, a food scientist and baker, handles the operations side. “I do a lot of troubleshooting,” says Rossetti, who handles any glitches on the assembly line, at head office or among the 30 distributors that go out daily. The only downside is that now he can’t sit down in front of a bread basket in a restaurant without picking up a roll and thinking, “How can we make this differently and how do we make it better?”

It’s not a bread thing, he says. “I don’t care if we made cardboard boxes. I’d look at the same three things: is there a growth opportunity? Is there a demand in the market? And how do we take advantage of it?” To Rossetti, a business is a business, no matter how you slice it.