Dean Kim plans to move his Orange-based OC Baking Co. this year to a new 18,000-square-foot facility in the same city.
Its size is the second biggest thing about the building. The first is how the company’s neighbors have helped him.
“My new building had been getting broken into, and I’d be going there to check on something at 2 or 3 o’ clock in the morning,” he said, “and I’d see residents driving around to make sure everything was OK.”
Kim said that since he founded the bread wholesaler in 2010, the city has supported him.
“I love Orange,” Kim said. “I have my business in Orange, and I live in Orange.”
The company for now is in its original Freedom Avenue location of about 7,500 square feet.
The new facility—a former wooden-crate manufacturer on Glassell Street, he said—is 18,000 square feet.
Kim figures it will help boost revenue from about $4 million this year to $5.5 million next year.
OC Baking has 67 full- and part-time employees, up from six in 2010.
Kim said he has about 160 restaurant and country club clients, including The Ranch Restaurant & Saloon in Anaheim and Dove Canyon Country Club in Tustin, plus resorts such as the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, the Montage in Laguna Beach, and Resort at Pelican Hill in Newport Coast.
Orange Baking Co. won the 2015 Family Owned Business Award in the Up and Coming category at the Business Journal’s annual awards luncheon at the Hotel Irvine on July 29 (see related stories, pages 1, 4, 6 and 7).
‘Should’ve Failed’
Kim’s wife, Ming Hu Kim, encouraged him to start his business after he ran a wholesale baker for another owner for 15 years.
It took about $300,000 in savings, family loans, credit cards and “selling things like cars,” he said.
“I think all startups are very difficult, and technically I should’ve failed,” Kim said. “But we were very fortunate: I had a lot of good friends.”
He’d been collecting baking machines and equipment for years; that’s what the thieves were after at the new facility, because Kim has been storing his stash there.
“Bakers always stockpile equipment,” he said.
His early days were at Noah’s Bagels in Berkeley while in college in the early 1990s.
He’s been in Orange County for about 20 years, first working for the other employer, and then striking out on his own.
Comfort Food
The next big move is the one to the new production and warehouse digs.
He’s spent more than a year designing how production will move through its interior—“any chef in a kitchen will tell you that you need the right flow.” And his stockpiling has included new “state-of-the-art” equipment.
“With my first facility, I just wanted to get it open,” he said. “This one, we wanted to plan perfectly.”
OC Baking operates around the clock, and Kim said he’ll have no trouble filling the hours in the bigger space.
“Bakeries in general are recession-proof,” he said. “People always eat bread.”
He said trends over the years, such as the Atkins Diet—which eschews carbohydrates—and more recent turns toward “gluten-free” eating haven’t dented his business.
“Even during the Great Depression, people ate bread,” Kim said. “Bread is a staple and a comfort food.”
He said the company is more “artisan” than most.
“It’s not a commercial, ‘Wonder Bread’ process,” he said.
Chefs from client restaurants visit the facilities and make special requests.
“[They say], ‘I need this or this,’ and I know exactly what they want,” he said, including elements such as “crust, crumb, flavor profile, a soft exterior or crusty,” and so on.
“I like them to see the bread, find out, see what they want,” he said.
“A customer like Pelican Hill, for instance, you have to do development for them because they want to be unique,” he said, “and it changes all the time: One day it could be a mini challah, the next day a garlic ciabatta.”
Kim said seeing the work is essential to understanding why he loves and does his work.
“That’s the best thing for you,” he said. “You have to see the chef working in the kitchen, [and] if you want to know me, you have to come to my bakery.”
