Bakers Score Hole in One : Bagel Makers’ Quarters Are Small but Business Is Booming
Western Bagel Corp. may dominate the Los Angeles bagel market, but the only way for a visitor to enter the sprawling factory is through its hole-in-the-wall retail bagel store. The counterman doubles as a receptionist.
After filling an order for a dozen bagels one afternoon, he wiped poppy and sesame seeds off his white apron and fetched Steve Ustin, whose father founded the company 38 years ago. Ustin led the way back to where machines pump out 14,400 bagels an hour.
Via wholesalers and retail markets, which often package the bagels with their own labels, the doughnut-shaped rolls end up on restaurant tables, deli platters and in family kitchens throughout the city.
“We’re a mom and pop operation, and we’re going to stay that way because we’re not big-business-type tycoons,” Ustin said, entering a small, cluttered office filled with Ustin family pictures. One large photo shows his baby daughter clutching a bagel as if it were a rattle. The family owns thoroughbred racehorses, and one named Sir Bagel stares out from an oil painting. Another is called A Bagel a Day.
Improvements Planned
The ambiance may be mom and pop, but big changes are planned at Western Bagel.
If all goes according to schedule, visitors this time next year will no longer have to bother the counterman: There will be an entrance area more befitting the 17,000-square-foot plant of a company that sold $5 million worth of bagels in 1984. The Ustins plan to start a $2.5-million expansion within two months that will increase the plant’s size by 70% and add enough machinery to double production.
The Ustins are going to remodel the plant’s exterior, which these days looks like a cross between an old warehouse and a truck stop. The blue silo that rises above Sepulveda Boulevard will be joined by a new, larger one. The present one is for flour, the other will hold sugar.
The retail store at the bakery will still be open 24 hours a day, but the Ustins hope to make their local product recognized far beyond Los Angeles. Western Bagel trucks bearing the company logo--a pistol-wielding cowboy whose legs and lower torso are formed by a bagel--will travel up the Pacific coast as far as Oregon and east into Arizona and Nevada.
In the age of the croissant, the Ustins believe that the democratic bagel still has not reached its full potential.
“I feel that there are so many people out there who don’t know what a bagel is,” said Western’s founder and Steve’s father, Dave Ustin, 65, who evangelizes for the bagel in the emphatic intonations of his native Bronx, N.Y.
“We never gave the bagel any thought as an image. The bagel is a food for the average person. Everybody can eat a bagel, rich or poor, every color, every religion. It used to be an ethnic food, but not anymore.”
The Ustins are not the only ones with ambitious plans for the bagel. In September, Chicago-based Kraft Inc. bought Lender’s Bagel Bakery Inc. of New Haven, Conn., the largest bagel bakery in the United States, with $50 million in retail sales in 1983.
Calling it the first purchase of a bakery devoted purely to bagels by a major American food corporation, the Ustins and others in the bagel business see in the sale the potential for a new promotional era for the bagel. (The November issue of a bakery trade publication showed a mock wedding of a seven-foot-high Lender’s bagel and a giant package of Kraft’s Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese.)
There are many small retail outlets that bake their own bagels and several other wholesale bagel bakeries in the Los Angeles area, but Western Bagel has no local competitors that come close to its size.
Dave Ustin said Western is considering going into the frozen bagel business using machinery installed during Western’s expansion, which eventually will enable the company to go national. Fresh bagels cannot be marketed over great distances because their shelf life is only four days, he said.
Ethnic Origins
Over the years, the Ustins’ pattern has been to take increasingly bigger bites of the bagel trade. Bagels were the family’s only business, and succeeding generations advanced the ambitions of those before--beginning in the days when the bagel was a thoroughly ethnic product, then growing when a family friend invented an automatic bagel maker.
The first Ustin to bake a bagel was Dave’s late father, Louis, a Russian immigrant who came to the United States around the turn of the century. Louis Ustin intended to become a rabbi, his son said, but instead wound up making bagels in a Bronx bakery, where he dreamed about one day having a bakery of his own. He never did.
Back then, bagel making was a manual art. “A good bagel baker could make each bagel the same weight, and they would close the circle by hand so that it wouldn’t open up in the boiling water,” Dave Ustin said.
Dave Ustin started working in the Bronx bakery at age 13, stringing together dozens of bagels, which, necklace-like, would be hung from the door knobs of customers to whom he delivered them.
“In those days, there was a bagel bakers’ union in New York,” Dave Ustin said. “We were sitting in the union hall sometime in 1946 after a regular union meeting and some gentleman was there from Los Angeles, and he told a group of us that there were great opportunities for bagel bakers in Los Angeles.”
That year, Dave Ustin and two friends moved west and opened Western Bagel Baking Co. in downtown Los Angeles. The store had about 800 square feet of space.
About 1955, Dan Thompson, a Los Angeles high school shop and math teacher, walked into the bakery and announced that he and his father were working on an automatic bagel maker.
In 1965 Western, which moved to Van Nuys in 1958, was the first bakery in Los Angeles to buy an automatic bagel maker, Thompson said. The Thompson machine--competitors have since invented other types of bagel makers, but Thompson insists his was the first--forms the bagel shape by rolling the dough around a cylindrical device.
Western has nine Thompson bagel makers, and there are plans to buy about eight more. The bagel makers work together with other machines that mix the dough, cut it, shape it into little balls and carry it through a long chamber--where the tough dough relaxes enough to submit to the shaping force of the bagel maker.
‘Pizza Bagel’
About 30 employees assist the process, which includes dropping the raw bagels into vats of boiling water. Poppy and sesame seeds and numerous other toppings--from cinnamon to cheese and tomato sauce, for the “pizza bagel”--are added to make 17 varieties of bagels. Then they are baked in a huge oven.
Dave Ustin still works at the bagel plant, but he said, “Steve has really had a lot to do with our expansion, this big change that’s coming.”
Steve Ustin, 36, said his first encounter with a bagel was when his mother handed him a stale one when he was teething.
“I’ve loved it ever since I can remember,” Steve Ustin said of the bakery business. “I used to go down with my dad and play with the dough when we were downtown. I learned how to make the dough and work the ovens and make bagels by hand.”
At his bar mitzvah, every plate had a bagel. As a teen-ager he took dates on tours of the bagel factory. When he was married the reception started with cocktail bagels. “My whole life has been with bagels,” he said.
Sales Have Doubled
The immersion is paying off. In the past five years, he said, the company’s sales have doubled. Six months ago the company hired its first professional sales manager.
The Ustins say they plan to add retail outlets beyond the ones in Woodland Hills and Westlake Village. Retail sales, however, account for only 10% of their business.
Steve Ustin said they also are about to hire a new advertising company. He will not disclose details of the projected advertising, but he talks in non-stop bagel slogans such as “the California bagel is a soft bagel.”
The contrast he draws is with the New York bagel. The New York bagel, experts on both sides of the continent say, is a tough bagel.
“New Yorkers are hard so they like a harder bagel. We wouldn’t know what to do with a soft bagel,” explained Leo Steiner, who helps manage Carnegie Deli in New York.
“The California bagel is a softer bagel because it’s baked in a pan that’s then put in the oven,” Steve Ustin said. “The New York bagel is baked directly on the surface of the oven. That makes it harder on the bottom and all the way through.”
Steve Ustin said the goal of the advertising campaign will be to get more people to eat bagels. “Come back in a year from now, and you won’t recognize us,” he said. “Who knows, we might even have a receptionist.”
