This is the section that pays for itself if you run a second supplier for price leverage, because on this page there are at least two pairings where that leverage does not exist.
La Brea Bakery is the clearest. Its own story is a good one: the pastry chefs at Campanile Restaurant could not find artisan bread good enough for the restaurant, spent a year on a recipe, and opened a bakery on La Brea Avenue where the bread sold out by 11am. That was 1989. Today La Brea Bakery is one of five brands of Aspire Bakeries, alongside Otis Spunkmeyer, Oakrun Farm Bakery, La Francaise Bakery and Pennant. Both La Brea and Otis Spunkmeyer appear in the standard directory listings of Los Angeles wholesale bakeries as separate businesses. They are not separate businesses.
The ingredient side has been consolidating too, and it is the reason that half of this page is only six names long. Allied Sales and Distribution of Vernon was a specialty bakery ingredient distributor and importer with, by the acquirer's account, more than 53 years of experience. Capitol Food Company acquired its assets and goodwill on 27 February 2022, and alliedsales.com now serves a Capitol Food page announcing the fact. A Vernon ingredient house with half a century of trading is now a redirect. Separately, the Los Angeles Business Journal reported in August 2017 that BakeMark USA was sold out of Pico Rivera by its parent CSM Bakery Solutions to the London investment manager Pamplona Capital. That is a 2017 fact and BakeMark's own site says nothing about who owns it now, so we are reporting the sale and not making a claim about today.
One company on this page has built its business on the opposite proposition, and it is worth quoting because it describes the trade from the inside. Chaumont's wholesale page says that most wholesale bakeries take orders by email and voicemail, and that it built its own ordering platform instead, given to every account. Standing orders, per-item opt-outs, a forecast-aware option to cut a day's delivery, self-service cancellation and waste reporting. That is a wholesale bakery telling you what the default looks like in this trade.
