The Wizards of Ozery

Ozery Morning Rounds are a huge hit in Canada – so much so that they have redefined the breakfast category, and started to knock dry cereal off its lofty but boring perch. Perhaps that's because these "puffy pitas" – wholesome, low fat, all-natural, and available in scrumptious flavors like Muesli, Apple Cinnamon, and Cranberry Orange – are quick, easy, and nutritious, and perfect for people who are on-the-go in the morning.

But upon closer investigation, the popularity of Morning Rounds is just as easily attributed to the people behind them: the affable Ozery brothers of Toronto, Alon and Guy. Starting with little more than their Grandmother Nadra's recipes, a business plan developed in college, a few after-hours experiments in the pizza ovens at Canada's Wonderland theme park, and a whole lot of gumption, the Ozery brothers have built a thriving business that is just now starting to explode on the U.S. scene. Their remarkable entrepreneurial talents (Alon is the founder, creative spark, and product developer; Guy is the President, head of ops, and shares the day-to-day management of the business), along with a huge heaping of fraternal jocularity and a little Canadian/Israeli fellowship, have transformed their company from a single Pita Break sandwich shop in downtown Toronto into a dynamic and industry-leading international bakehouse operation.

Fresh Off the Press (FOTP) met with Alon and Guy in March, 2011 at the Natural Foods Expo West in Anaheim, and caught up with them again later in the year in Toronto.

Guy: I'd like to just state for the record that we think Sprouts is the best chain in the world, and that we love you guys.

Alon: Hear, hear!

FOTP: {laughs} OK, it's on the record. Alright, enough of that. Let's go back to the beginning. Tell me what life was like growing up in your household.

Alon: We grew up in Israel to a Yemenite family, and therefore always made pita bread for family reunions and get-togethers. We never bought bread. Bread was always made an hour before people got there. The women and one of us, usually, were in the kitchen baking.

Guy: Well it was mostly our grandmother, right?

Alon: Our grandmother Nadra, our aunt, and actually a couple of guys. We are three boys and parents, but the extended family was fairly large. We always gathered on weekends.

Guy: At our grandparents' house, yeah. And you'd have dozens of people over there, cousins and relatives.

FOTP: But no one was in the baking business?

Alon: Our father started initially in computers. He was one of the first programmers in Israel. And he opened his own business, a t-shirt company, selling Disney stuff all across Israel, but we were never in the food business.

Baking always fascinated me tremendously, and I enjoyed very much standing in the kitchen and watching the dough rise, kneading it, and mixing it, and the magic of watching the dough go in completely raw – this special pita device, where you need extreme heat from the top and the bottom – the pita was in there less than a minute, and would become a beautiful fresh flatbread from that wet, sticky dough. That was amazing. And then we'd make pizzas with it. You'd put all kinds of stuff on it. And as it came out I'd say the lifespan of a flatbread was less than a minute, because it was consumed immediately by everybody.

Guy: Alon, that's a beautiful story. I like it, the way you said it.

Alon: Well that's the way it was.

Guy: For me the fascination was seeing the pita disappear in my mouth within 30 seconds. And as you can see from the pictures, my build vs. Alon's build, I enjoyed eating it much more.

FOTP: The mix of accents in that household must have been amazing.

Alon: The interesting part to add to that, our father is of a Jewish family and our mother came from a Protestant family in England. She did convert, but we have our entire family, British branch, in England. So we got a different point of view from our different branches.

FOTP: The amazing thing is that you ended up going into the food business despite having half the family being British, with no taste buds.

Alon: That's 100 percent true!

Guy: Hey listen, in order to know what to do you have to know what not to do.

Alon: Our poor mother.

Guy: [laughs]

Alon: A funny story, and it has nothing to do with it, but the first time our father visited our grandmother's house in Seven Oaks, England – you know, families are different.... Our father woke up at night, he was a little hungry, you know? And when you're hungry you go downstairs and raid the fridge. So he went downstairs and ate some of the food in the fridge, and went back to sleep. In the morning he woke up to the screams of our grandmother, and he ran down and said "What's happened?" She said, "We were robbed! Somebody took all of the food out of the fridge." Everything is counted there, per person, for the next day.

FOTP: So when did you move to Israel?

Guy: We were young, [in] 1972 we went back. Alon was 3, I was 2. Then we grew up most of our lives there. High school...we came back to Canada.

FOTP: And after high school, you went to university?

Guy: I went back to Israel and became a pilot, for 10 years.

Alon: Guy flew helicopters. I went to Ryerson University in downtown Toronto. I took hospitality and business for 4 years. That's where the business plan was written, in one of the classes.

Guy: Alon was trying it out every summer in the theme park, what's it called?

Alon: I worked for Canada's Wonderland, which is Canada's largest park.

Guy: Like a Six Flags park.

Alon: Yeah. I worked there first as a restaurant manager and then an area manager. And I was allowed to use the pizza ovens there at night, once the park closed. And so I'd make the dough. Tried to Canadianize it. So we started with our grandmother-slash-aunt's original recipe. They were basically white bread pitas. What we started using were whole grains and multigrains. We wanted it to be a healthy bread. We'd bake those off in the pizza store in the theme park. I'd say this was 1994 and '95.

FOTP: And what was the business plan?

Alon: So the business plan that I wrote at Ryerson, the idea was to open a store, and make our fresh bread in the back serving healthy sandwiches for a reasonable price to our customers. At first our original idea wasn't to open a bakery, but to provide really healthy, tasty, fresh baked goods to our customers. One thing led to another, and the business plan was written. You know, the business plan was there but there was nobody else behind it other than myself. And I was a student in debt, basically. Our father was an insurance broker at the time, and he said, "Alon, I always wanted to go into the food business. Let's do it together." And I said, "Of course!"

We did not come from a wealthy family. My parents sold their only investment, which had $50,000 in it, and took that to the bank and, because of the business plan, got a $100,000 loan. And we went and opened the Pita Break store in 1996 in downtown Toronto.

FOTP: Well that took an incredible amount of guts.

Alon: And he was 60, by the way. I forgot to mention that. Lots of other elements were involved.

Guy: That's an amazing story. Not only that, we had about 17 different kinds of pita bread. There was the oregano sundried tomato, onions, there were a lot of very flavorful pita breads, and people would choose whatever fillings they wanted, you know, different kinds of salad, hummus, falafel balls, chicken or whatever. At the time, all we had was a little back room where we baked. And our father who was 60 years old would bake all night. And after about a year, when we started wholesaling to the health food stores and the high-end stores, he would finish up his baking and pack it on the van and take it to these stores, go back home, sleep for six hours, and then go back and start baking. He went like this for a couple of years.

Alon: In Canada, we are still known as Ozery's Pita Break. In the States, we wanted to gear away from pita just because our products aren't necessarily pita products, although pita is the base for it all.

FOTP: So Guy, while all this is going on in Toronto, were you aware of what your brother and father were doing?

Guy: Yeah, I came to visit and was always aware in spirit of what was going on. I think after two years I came over for a year and helped out when we opened the wholesale bakery. I went on a trip and ended up falling in love with a girl and living in New York for a couple of years. And when the business grew enough to support also me, I joined full time.

Alon: The reason Guy left and went to New York was that the business couldn't support three families. And so he donated his time for close to a year, and as he said when we moved out of the store and opened the 4,000 square foot unit – all [old] equipment at the time; we didn't know how to make wholesale bread. But we learned. We learned quickly.

Guy: Well I had the great plan of traveling on a motorcycle all the way down to South America, but I only reached Guatemala, and then I turned around and came back to New York because...

Alon: – he couldn't be without his girlfriend.

Guy: No, I was just stupid, that's all.

FOTP: And what was the third brother doing during all this time?

Alon: Aharon, he's an artist. He also used to come to Canada whenever he could and work with us. He put in hours...

Guy: Yeah, he stayed for a couple of months, right Alon, every summer?

Alon: A couple of times, yeah. Today he's an artist in Berlin.

FOTP: When you started to make this transition from the retail store into a wholesale business, you must have been facing really long odds.

Alon: Our philosophy when it comes to developing food and bread was to not create what's out there. That's just boring, and it isn't what we do. When we had our sandwich store we made thicker, chunkier, healthier bread. The reason we didn't think we'd go into wholesale mostly was...at the time pitas were selling for 99 cents or $1.19 for six very thin crumbly pitas. And what we were making was a completely different product, and we had to sell it at retail for $2.29 at the time. And we weren't sure people would pay that when they were used to paying much less for not a similar product, but a pita. To our surprise, we were wrong. We were pleasantly surprised. We were at the store many evenings in the beginning, coming in to scramble to make more product, because the health shops that Guy talked about and a couple of other stores were screaming for product in a positive way. People just picked it up and loved it. So from there we decided to open up that 4,000-square-foot industrial bakery which we had no experience with. And during this process we almost fell a couple of times. Luckily, we never got outside investments so it was a family-run business. Guy put some of his money in.

Guy: I put in all of my money. When I got back from Israel to help out with the wholesale business in '98 and I stayed over for a year, all of my savings from the 10 years that I was flying I put in the business. And I remember it was funny, because the first month that I was here, if I recall, we sold $17,000 worth of product, and we spent $21,000. So I was like, "Oh my God, how are we going to survive it?" We turned this around really quickly, but during the period up to today there were two or three times that we got ourselves close to running out of money. Because we tend to invest everything back in the bakery, and we like growing, and we're fairly aggressive about it at times.

Alon: We've had to grow because of demand. To go back to the product, we try to invent products that are not out there. And this brings us to the original pitas, which – the whole process was slow. As Guy said earlier, we made our products by hand in the back of the store, and when we went and built equipment to make our pitas, they were custom made for us to mimic that way, which was a lot slower process than conventional pita breads. The line that we have makes – I think – a quarter the amount of product that a conventional pita line does, just because it's flying through there in other pita lines. And the whole slow process is important to us, and important to the quality of the dough. There are a few other aspects – all natural ingredients, of course. The ingredients we use are not the cheapest in any way. The flour, the grain, etc.

The Breakfast Pitas, which were the base for the Morning Rounds today, came from an idea of putting together – we saw a German muesli bread, and all these bagels out there, and we decided to try to make a product with a muesli base with raisins and dried apples and a whole lot of grains. And we made that and it was a fantastic success for us at the time in the stores. It was the only one out there. The other two in the family, Apple Cinnamon and the Orange Cranberry, came later on.

And then our next successful products were the pre-sliced thin buns, which are called One Buns today. So this is 6 or 7 years ago. We developed this product for a private label in Canada, and came up with our own brand. And that was a smashing success, which drove us to grow even more. American companies like Oroweat, Arnold, saw our success in Canada and then 3 years ago came out with a similar product to ours, just before we came into the States with our offering. That was a little unfortunate. But today we focus and specialize in being a high-quality all natural product. We don't use chemicals or preservatives in any of our products. We use slower processes in making our bread. And it shows in the quality of our bread.

Guy: One more thing that differentiates our product from theirs is that the way we set up our machinery keeps it a kind of an artisan bake. So if you are talking about, let's say sheeting and die cutting a product – most of the buns you see on the market today are like that – and ours emulates much more a hand work. So you know, dividing the dough, then rounding it, then letting it rise and sheeting it, it's sort of a way again that emulates hand work.... When the dough needs to rest, we let it rest. And then for each line that we built, we actually worked with local manufacturers that built it to our specs, and we actually are very involved in defining what we need and in designing part of the equipment. So all of our machinery is built – it's slower than the ones out there. We've got great lines, and they are very efficient and very good, but very different from the ones that are out there.

FOTP: The thing that strikes me as being very interesting here is that, again, not coming from a baking background, not coming from a food background, not really coming from a manufacturing background, nevertheless you were able to develop a level of expertise and understanding of exactly how to tailor each step of the process – how long the dough had to sit, how you were going to get sufficient shelf life for the products without using any preservatives, how you were going to have those local manufacturers tool the equipment properly for you – so it must have been just an enormous learning curve for you each step of the way.

Alon: It was, and all Guy said is right, but knowing everything that would be ahead of us, a rational person probably wouldn't go ahead and do what we did. However, all of that was to our advantage, because not knowing how things should be, or how things are done, it didn't limit us. So when we talked to a manufacturer, usually you would say, "Hey, I want a pita line." And what we said is, "Well, we need to connect these two machines, but we need this and that in order to meet our requirements," which were that it had to be done by hand. So it let us be free of conventional methods for baking flatbread.

Guy: Ignorance is bliss.

FOTP: How do you divide the responsibilities at Ozery?

Guy: Alon is really the alchemist, the product developer, and has that sort of touch that, you know, you can't explain by reason. It's much more of a feel thing. And that's something that you either have or don't have. And luckily Alon has it. It pulled us in directions that were very different. I remember when he came up with the whole muesli concept, the Morning Rounds, I'm a little more of the operations guy, and I said, "Alon, what are you doing? It doesn't fit our lines. It doesn't make any sense. It's not a pita bread, it's not this, it's not that." But he did have the vision of having this little toaster-friendly breakfast item that people can just grab and go. And I've learned a lot since then, to be very open minded to things that are different, things that don't work on our lines, things that give us a huge headache making. We always try to find different things, and then sort of work our way on how to manufacture it.

Alon: And just to add to that, the combination of the two of us works very well. We're quite different, not only in character but how we think. So I do development, but I probably couldn't manage a store in the market too effectively, and therefore to plan the bakeries, to build them, the equipment, everything, the whole system, Guy is behind it and is quite remarkable. Today we have an 80,000-square-foot bakery running to the highest standards of baking in North America, and I think in the world, too. HACCP-approved, soon to be DRC-approved. It's a good combination.

FOTP: Tell me about what ingredients go into more commercial or industrial pitas or similar products that you avoid.

Alon: The whole thing with baked goods – what are the challenges? The challenges are mold, so you are looking to stop the growth of mold. And what most bakeries until today use is calcium propionate, or another form of a chemical mold killer. And they put it in the product. Most of our competition in the United States uses those products. The second is to keep it fresh feeling and looking, and they put different oils and chemicals to get that feel, the mouth feel, for a long period of time, a long shelf life. And today the whole market is that way. We've just been doing this for 14 years, approximately, by working slowly, by letting the dough rise, by not rushing things, by using sourdough for many of our products – that gives a natural quality to our products. Guy, you want to add?

Guy: Yeah, on the side of, not the recipe but the way that you make it, I was talking a little about trying to emulate as much as possible an artisan way of making pita bread, which is the hand way of making pita bread. Today, most of the bakeries that you see will die cut a sheet and cut the product, and then it goes to another proofer. And in order to try and get the product where it should be as far as fluffiness, they use a lot of, I don't know the field very well, but emulsifiers or different techniques of fluffing it up. We do try to keep it true to the way it's been done by hand. Listen, our last line is a beautiful line. We invested a ton of money in building the line. If we would do it the conventional way we would spend about the same amount of money and probably manufacture four times the amount we are manufacturing right now. But every time we build a line, the criteria has to be not only that we improve efficiency and output, but we improve quality.

FOTP: It really is a very unusual company you've created.

Guy: The important thing for us [is that] it's not only a company to manufacture products and put money in our pockets. It's sort of a project that is much bigger than that in our eyes. We look at it as a vehicle to extend our values and beliefs. And that's why we put many things in place in the company that we didn't necessarily have to, and you don't see other bakeries doing. I remember two of the greatest moments that both Alon and I felt the proudest of the company: the first was when we could have health benefits for team members. And that was back in the old days, I think it was 8 or 9 years ago. And that was a beautiful moment for us. Because again it's trying to affect in a positive way anyone that we deal with. And the second was when we started getting our profit sharing, when the business was doing well. And everybody in the bakery was receiving that. And then we have different programs like an interest-free loan program – we have sort of a pool and people can draw out of that. There are also different committees that we have set up so people are involved in what they are doing.... We don't only talk it and preach it. We actually live it. And we are proud of it. We enjoy sharing the story because we would love for other companies to do the same things. It's not something that we hide; it's something we promote, and we believe that companies should run this way. And we believe that the business side is going to be taken care of, too, because when people are happy where they are, and care about what they do, they are going to take care of the business in a very special way.

FOTP: Now is your Dad still around?

Alon: He's around, but not around us. He is spending his time in different places in the world right now. He's 76. We're a very close knit family, and that's one of the reasons we do see success. Because even if we have disagreements and challenges, at the end of the day we talk them out and we all know that everybody is in it to succeed and for the benefit of the business. And therefore, if that's how you see it, if that's how I look at Guy and that's how he looks at me, eventually we will learn to give up sometimes.

FOTP: He must be enormously proud of what you accomplished. Does you Dad every call or send e-mail saying, "I just found some great product and you guys have to figure out how to make it?"

Guy: Sometimes.

Alon: Our challenge is not what to do, it's what not to do. We have a list in our drawer of, I can't say how many products that we'd like to try and start manufacturing. And reality tells us to hold it and maximize. Reality, and [our sales guys] Paul and Ari, who yell at us that we have to focus.

Guy: Well, I join Paul and Ari in yelling at Alon.

FOTP: Morning Rounds have been a huge hit in Canada?

Guy: We saw how it changed the market over here in our fresh distribution in Ontario and Quebec. I remember when we came out with it, there still wasn't exactly a breakfast category in bakery. And over here it did change that category.

Alon: People call us or e-mail us or Facebook us or whatever, saying "Thank you for these breakfast pitas or these Morning Rounds." You'd be amazed the comments these products get out of people, which surprise us sometimes.

FOTP: You make several usage recommendations on the package, but do you have any sense for how most people really are using them?

Alon: They are called Morning Rounds, and from our experience we think people use them as a breakfast item, but also other times during the day. We recommend to toast them. It brings out that natural great flavor and tastes that work very well. They slice it open and use it as a flat bagel. Put some cream cheese or butter or peanut butter or whatever on it. Some just toast it and eat it as it is. The flavor profile is that good and satisfying. We have athletes that eat this before a run. It gives them the energy – it's partially whole grain, so it gives them a longer boost of energy.

Guy: The best way to use it that we recommend is to freeze it as soon as you purchase it. Because we don't use any preservatives, the shelf life is relatively shorter than others. The moment you freeze it, it does preserve the freshness. I know it sounds a little bit weird but that's the way it is. And throwing it in the toaster oven, like Alon says, enhances the experience of the bakery. You get the smell. It's amazing how it comes out compared to when you don't do it. So we recommend very much to toast it.

FOTP: What are your favorite products? If you have a minute in the morning, what are you going to eat?

Alon: I love the breakfast muesli with a little cream cheese on it when it's warm. So it's all sliced open, you put a little cream cheese on top. There's the coldness of the cream cheese, the warmth of the bread, and then there's a sourness of the cheese going with the sweetness of the raisins and the sourness of the apple, plus all the little grains inside, so that whole mix is fantastic in my mouth.

Guy: There is nothing like taking an orange cranberry Morning Round, slicing it in half, putting it in the toaster and then putting in it a little bit of butter, and just eating it like that.

Alon: Guy, I think you are wrong. I think you need first to toast it and then to slice it.

Guy: [laughs] I think there is nothing like that. And although Alon is the product developer and the talent guy, he doesn't know what he is talking about.

FOTP: Well, I want to thank you guys very much. You guys are fantastic. It's fun to meet people like you, to write an article on a company where I really like the people behind it, there's a good family story, you are smart, you are innovative, you're articulate...all of those things make the job fun.

Guy: So why are you talking to us?

FOTP: I have no idea.

from the October, 2011 edition of Fresh Off the Press