This 40-year old Bay Area bakery makes 190,000 loaves every week

Nothing is striking about the quiet stretch off Harbor Bay Parkway in Alameda, where a cluster of white and gray offices and warehouses dwell. Yet within the collection of buildings is a storied Bay Area bakery that’s supplied dozens of local restaurants and grocery stores with crusty loaves of sweet baguettes and rustic sourdough for the past four decades.

It’s a busy morning at the Semifreddi’s factory, where thousands of bread loaves are in different phases of the baking process. Staff are occupied shaping plump dough and transferring the mounds onto sheet pans headed for proofing. At another corner of the bakery, employees stuff warm loaves of sweet baguette, ciabatta, rustic sourdough and sweet batard into white paper bags that will end up on shelves at Berkeley Bowl, Gus’s Community Market and Rainbow Grocery, among other grocery chains.  

At the center of the active bread-making operation is Semifreddi’s CEO Tom Frainier, who prefers to be called the “chief bootlicker,” and chief creative officer Mike Rose, who is best known by his 126 employees as Semifeddi’s “mad scientist.” Among the many hats they wear, the co-owners are Semifreddi’s official taste-testers for the 45 breads and baked goods the 39-year-old bakery produces.

“We’re only as good as our last baguette,” Frainier said. “Who cares what we did for the previous 39 years. What’s it like today? That’s our philosophy.”

Frainier and Rose, who are the bakery’s second owners, have preserved the 1984 sourdough starter, which has helped place Semifreddi’s on the map among a power ranking of enduring Bay Area bread companies like Berkeley greats Acme Bread, La Farine and The Phoenix Pastificio.

Semifreddi’s has spread its reach throughout the Bay Area, easily cranking out 190,000 loaves a week, but it wasn’t always that way. Semifreddi’s nearly went extinct before it became a Bay Area empire.  

Back in 1984, Semifreddi’s was just a tiny 450-square-foot bakery at 372 Colusa Ave. in Kensington. Cheese Board alums Eric and Carol Pease-Sarpenaer borrowed $60,000 (about $177,300 today) to convert a former real estate office into Semifreddi’s. The budding bakers, plus Eric’s grandmother, crammed inside the compact space to create a selection of four breads, which featured a sour-seeded baguette. They started with 25 baguettes, but in 1986, word got around thanks to a rave review by former San Francisco Chronicle food critic Stan Sesser.

“The Bay Area might be awash with great baguettes, but this place has managed to develop one, rolled in poppy and fennel seeds, that tops them all,” Sesser wrote in 1986.

 After that, the rustic loaves gained popularity with locals — eventually selling by the thousands each week.

“From the moment the first customer bit into a crisp loaf of bread at Berkeley’s Semifreddi’s in the fall of 1984, the tiny bakery’s success was assured,” read a 1987 article by the Oakland Tribune. “Critics and the media soon followed, catapulting the tiny business from 25 baguettes a day to 3,500 a week by mid-1986.” (The paper wrote that Semifreddi’s original location was in Berkeley, but the bakery was in Kensington.)

Over the years, customers were curious about the bakery name itself, which in Italian means semifreddo, a half-frozen dessert. It was news to the Pease-Sarpenaers, who didn’t realize it at the time. They thought they were coining their business after their favorite bakery in Italy due to a semifreddi sign placed on the storefront exterior. They never realized the shop was simply advertising semifreddos. Despite the minor blunder, the name stuck.  

“We figured the name Semifreddi would be just right for our new bakery,” Eric told the Oakland Tribune in 1986. “It’s also a name that’s hard to take too seriously. And we wanted our bakery to be a fun operation.”

In a strange turn of events, the Pease-Sarpenaers decided to permanently close Semifreddi’s in the late 1980s despite the mass success it gained in a matter of years. It wasn’t until their employee Barbara (Rose’s wife) intervened. Rose said that his wife Barbara learned about the bakery’s looming closure shortly after she started working at Semifreddi’s. Armed with a degree in culinary arts from Contra Costa College, Barbara placed a bid on the bakeshop and successfully became its new owner in 1987. After the sale, the Pease-Sarpenaers moved to Monroe, Oregon, and opened an even smaller bakery inside their garage, according to the Oakland Tribune, while leaving Barbara with their original sourdough recipe and their 1984 sourdough starter. (The Pease-Sarpenaers eventually opened The Phoenix Pastificio in Berkeley in 1995.)

Taking over an established bakery was good fortune, but it didn’t come easy. Rose admits that they sold some lousy bread in the early days after the takeover. But there was a logical reason behind that. By 1988, Barbara gained two new business partners with unconventional backgrounds: her husband and Frainier (her brother). Unlike Barbara, Rose and Frainier’s professional backgrounds couldn’t be further from the culinary world. For the previous 10 years, Rose had worked as a sales representative at import company Albert Kessler. He said Barbara helped him learn the ropes at the bakery while he devoured the fundamentals of baking in cookbooks in his spare time. Nevertheless, it was no piece of cake.

“It was a learning process,” Rose recalls of his early days. “Bread is simple yet challenging and complicated. I had some beginner’s luck but not enough humility at first.”

Meanwhile, Frainier had spent about seven years climbing the corporate ladder at Clorox. In 1988, he quit his career when he realized that life behind a cubicle wasn’t very fulfilling.

“I was in corporate America and hated it,” Frainier told SFGATE. “It was a good company, but I couldn’t see myself doing it forever.” He added, “When I quit, I didn’t know what my passion was going to be. It was kind of like the Tom Petty song, ‘Free Fallin’.’ Luckily the parachute opened, and my sister and brother-in-law had this tiny bakery and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come help us? ’ I just fell into it, kind of like an accidental entrepreneur.”

Being “accidental entrepreneurs” was a common thread among the new owners who carried Semifreddi’s into its new chapter. In 1989, they moved the bakery to a larger 5,000-square-foot facility in Emeryville and expanded their line of bread from four to 45 different products, including pastries, like sugar-dusted morning buns. When their landlord, Pixar, took over the building in 2009, Semifreddi’s moved once more to its current home at 1980 North Loop Road in Alameda. The Roses and Frainier held on to their original Kensington digs as a retail space where customers can buy fresh ciabatta rolls.

Back at the factory, bakers are sorting through 50,000 pounds of flour delivered twice a week to the Alameda warehouse. Part of that flour will become bread sold to 15 notable Bay Area restaurants, like Beep’s Burgers, Saigon Sandwich, Fior d’Italia, Oceanview Diner and Belotti Ristorante e Bottega, among others.

Around the bakery’s 20th anniversary in 2004, Rose and Frainier turned down an investor who urged them to open a Semifreddi’s outpost in Los Angeles. Years later, they don’t regret the decision. They preferred to err on the side of caution to keep Semifreddi’s a local treasure and avoid the route of becoming a frozen food aisle item.

“Once you start getting into that kind of mass production, you can’t do it fresh anymore,” Frainier said. “We’re kind of purist. I’ve seen many bakeries go for the investor money throughout the country and the quality doesn’t stay the same. … We just couldn’t do that.” 

Making bread is a tough business to get into, especially in the Bay Area, where bakeries like Tartine Bakery and Firebrand Artisan Breads have entered the arena in recent decades. It’s a different playing field compared to the early 1980s, but Rose and Frainier say they embrace the competition.

“It is a very competitive market, but it’s not cutthroat,” Frainier said. “Bakeries will call us and sometimes ask for advice. When Acme was building a bakery in South San Francisco, they came through and looked at what we had done. It’s a very collegial environment. There’s a niche for everybody.”

Semmifreddi’s hopes to expand its client roster sometime in the future, but for now, Rose and Frainier say they prefer to maintain their momentum at the Alameda factory. When the co-owners look back to nearly 40 years, they’re proud that they’ve stayed true to the company’s core values while helping spread its reach throughout the Bay Area. The past four decades have been a blur for Frainier but in many ways, he feels like Semifreddi’s is still that tiny 450-square-foot shop in Kensington.

“I walk in here sometimes and go, ‘How the f—k did we do this?’” Frainier said with a laugh. “But we didn’t, we did it with our people. We’ve been very consistent from day one on how we run this thing.”

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Rose said.