Confident people are appealing. Confident people get things done. It is a difficult task to ignore the gravitational pull of someone who believes in themselves and their goals. This is probably why when Clinton Prager came up to me at the La Jolla farmers market over the summer and asked if I wanted to trade a tub of my company’s guacamole for two of his baguettes I had to say yes. There was a quiet confidence in his stern, yet friendly, facial expression that made me trust him. In my mind, guacamole and bread are completely incomparable so at first I was absolutely against the idea of trading. Clinton’s confident demeanor made me second guess myself. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I made that summer.
It is impressive how something as simple as bread can be so unexpectedly delicious. Now, I am no sourdough scholar or connoisseur of ciabatta, but this bread was unlike anything else I had ever tasted from either a bakery or restaurant. Which begged the question: Why? What was different about what they were doing that distinguished themselves so noticeably from other bakeries? It wasn’t until after I interviewed Louie Prager, Clinton’s older brother and the brainchild of Prager Brother’s Artisan Bread, that I discovered it wasn’t just what they were doing differently that made them standout but the reasons why they were doing it in the first place.
A lot of motivation stems from a counter-cultural outlook shared by Louie, his brother, and many other young adults who are diverging from hegemonic customs in order to live a more sustainable lifestyle. Many business owners would likely prioritize profit above other aspects of their business. Not Louie. Tucked within an unassuming business park, he invited me on a pleasant Saturday to come visit their Carlsbad bakery. When I arrived, the store room was filled with a small contingent of atypically joyous locals pleasantly waiting to purchase his goods. Louie led me inside the bakery portion of the warehouse and I hadn’t even reached my third question before he went on a tangent specifying his company’s goals and vision. “It’s about community and restoring our food system. That’s what motivates us to keep going.” By no means is this to say that they are not profitable. The money is simply being reinvested within the company to keep up with ever-increasing demand.
The Prager Brothers are in their second building since operations officially began in May 2013. Not only is their new space larger than their previous one, they now also have their own industrial mill. But after only being in this building for a year and a half, they have already outgrown it and are preparing to move into a third location. Fortunately for the business, they have had a supportive landlord who has helped them along the way. “Our landlord believes in our greater vision,” stated Louie, “We didn’t buy this building, nor did we pay for the build out.” Despite their positive fortunes, Louie reminded me that success is a process. As he washed bread trays in the sink he remarked, “We really pride ourselves in that this is a truly grassroots business and that it did start in our own backyard.” Shattering through the cliché, he continued, “These dishes right now, I used to wash these on my lawn watering the grass while I did them.” I’m not sure if it gets any more grassroots than that.
Wearing a grey t-shirt beneath a white apron splotched with flour gone astray from the baking process, the thirty-year-old Louie doesn’t come off as a stereotypical baker. Juxtaposed against towering machines, tables, and industrial bread trays, it’s much easier to picture bumping into him on a long hike in a national park or walking along the beach after a surf session than watching him meticulously inspect the quality of fresh dough with an employee. He has a thin build and dons a mesh snapback worn backwards that attempts to cover the curls which peak out from the hat’s edges and gasp for breath. His speech is methodical and slow, yet his sentences often trail off and remain unfinished as his mind jumps to the next point.
A habitual meditator, he admires those who seek a serene place mentally from where they can make decisions more clearly. “The world is a noisy place both literally and internally. I think we all have an overactive mind so I look at people where that is their focus.” Graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a degree in plant biology, Louie unfortunately wasn’t able to turn that into a career. Raised in Carlsbad, he never anticipated he would end up back here after college. “I didn’t think I’d move back to southern California. I didn’t even want to do this. It was more of because I didn’t have a job and was sitting at home unemployed.”
Despite not wanting this to be his career, baking was a passion of his throughout college. “I worked for a friend of mine who owned a pizzeria for literally two weeks and it really wasn’t worth my time. During those two weeks, he introduced me to this hot cheese pizza right out of the oven and I was like ahhh I gotta make this!” From there Louie built a wood-fired oven for $175 in his backyard with scraps of clay he found at Mira Costa College, plywood, and some mortar. “For the first year basically, I was just making ovens for pizza and then I started to try to make loaves of bread but never with any success. I kept trying and finally figured it out.” It wasn’t until he had constructed ovens in his parents’ backyard, at his residence in San Luis Obispo, and then at his first house in Los Osos that he met his mentor, an elder baker by the name of Richard Webb. Louie learned much from Webb and voraciously read as much as he could on the art of baking out of personal interest. Webb encouraged Louie to not pursue baking as a career, citing its difficulty, so Louie obliged and continued to focus on obtaining a career in biology. Life works in mysterious ways.
As Webb foreshadowed, a baker’s life is not easy. Two years ago, Louie and his brother were working 16 hour days throughout the week in order to produce the top-quality bread they strove for. Using a natural leaven and unprocessed, organic ingredients, these long hours were necessary to produce the style of “Old World” bread they have since become popular for. Now, with a capable team of employees to support them, they each get a couple of days off a week with their busiest shifts only lasting a brief 14 hours. The business has grown extensively over the last two years with the bakery producing 12 different types of bread that amount to around 600 loaves a day, in addition to a few hundred pastries and cookies. This increased output, however, doesn’t come without keeping the greater vision in mind.
Louie’s decision to study plant biology heavily impacted the company’s ethos. “Looking at something ecological allowed me to see a bigger system and really understand how our food is grown and how that impacts our natural world. I think that’s the hugest challenge to mankind. If we destroy our natural resources, we are destroying our well-being. The way we produce food often destroys our environment so we need to figure out ways to make food without destroying our natural environment.” In order to combat the degradation of the Earth, Prager Brothers aims to be as transparent as possible with their ingredients and distributors. Their grains are shipped in from a small-scale farmer, their sugar comes from Paraguayan fair-trade cooperatives, and their dairy products come from a family dairy known for their environmental stewardship and humane treatment of animals. “I think that’s why we’re successful,” Louie reflected. “Everything is so far removed from the customer today and that has benefits for businesses because they can implement practices that they don’t want people to see.”
The more I talked to Louie, the more I appreciated his vision and divergence from the status quo. He places a lot of energy into the community and truly cares about the long-term survival of ourselves and the planet. He softly boasted that there are no other bakeries in San Diego who are training bakers, restoring the craft, and empowering people to learn how to work with dough. In the future, he wishes to expand this knowledge from only his employees out into the greater community. “We hope to offer fresh-milled flours to home bakers to create some sort of community baking center where people can get classes and purchase ingredients.”
He had strong words for companies that abuse the growing trend for sustainable products. “Larger companies are trying to use the sustainable image to have consumers believe that they’re helping with the environmental crisis that we’re facing right now and they’re actually not helping at all.” Instead of spending money to market your product as sustainable, he argued, why not invest that energy into producing food that is good for people and the Earth. Though he is skeptical that companies will actually do this, he is still optimistic for the future.
“Humans are creative. We’re the only creature that really has that ability. We can create solutions,” he spoke with a familiar poise. It might have been on a different face, but this was the same confidence I had witnessed months ago from Clinton that ultimately led me try their bread for the first time. “I think we can slow down our impact and create some positive change. I think the Earth can grow back,’ he professed calmly. That conviction was certainly not unfounded the first time I caught a glimpse of it and I have no reason to believe that it will be any different this time around.
