Brownie points - Westfair Communications

At Greyston Bakery on the grittily industrial and changing Yonkers waterfront, the latest sweet-tooth-sating brand comes packaged with a trademarked slogan for consumers: “Feed Your Conscience.” For $2.49 per three-ounce serving, that is, you can help feed profits to the bakery that in turn feed the various community development programs of the bakery”™s nonprofit owner, the Greyston Foundation in Yonkers.

The product, Do-Goodie Brownie, comes packaged too with a testimonial from Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, founding partners of Ben & Jerry”™s Homemade Ice Cream Inc. Â “The only brownies we ever eat!” they proclaim. They might have added that Greyston also supplies the only brownies used in Ben & Jerry”™s chocolate fudge brownie ice cream, the socially engaged Vermont company”™s third-best-selling flavor.

The bakery at 104 Alexander Ave. in southwest Yonkers launched its Do-Goodie Brownie only late last month. The social conscience and mission suggested by that marketing slogan began at Greyston 25 years ago.

Founded in 1982 by Bernard Glassman, a Brooklyn-born Zen Buddhist priest and former aerospace engineer, Greyston Bakery opened as a for-profit enterprise run by Glassman”™s Zen meditation community in a former pasta factory in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Glassman sought “to marry his spiritual practice with his social principles,” said Julius Walls Jr., president and CEO of Greyston Bakery Inc. and senior vice president of the Greyston Foundation. To that end, all bakery profits support the foundation”™s range of neighborhood and community services, primarily in Yonkers, that provide child care, health care, housing, education and community gardens for low-income residents, senior citizens, the formerly homeless and AIDS victims.

In 1988, Glassman moved the Greyston enterprise to Warburton Avenue in Yonkers, “a community that other businesses were abandoning,” said Walls, who has put the bakery in the black and spurred business growth and greater efficiency since joining the company in 1995. “He (Glassman) wanted to come in here and provide an economic spark, as it were.” Â While the bakery began hiring local residents in a neighborhood of chronically high unemployment, the foundation in the early ”™90s built some of the first low-income housing in downtown Yonkers “and some of the first permanent housing for formerly hopeless people built in America,” Walls said.

In 2004, the bakery moved into a $9.8 million, 23,000-square-foot building on Alexander Street designed by architect Maya Lin, whose career was jumpstarted in 1982 by her competition-winning design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The bakery property has only minimal fencing, thus reinforcing Greyston”™s close relationship with its Yonkers community.

The bakery currently employs 45 to 50 workers in a business that is “somewhat seasonal,” Walls said, with brownie production surging in the quarter before consumer demand peaks in the summer ice cream season. With its open hiring policy, “We hire the first person to apply for a job regardless of their backgrounds,” the CEO said. Although some workers travel from Mount Vernon and the Bronx, “The vast majority of our employees are employees who can walk to work.”

“People come here to grow,” said Walls, a local preacher for the AME Zion church and former Roman Catholic seminarian who too at Greyston has married his spiritual practice with his business skills. “We don”™t change them. We give people an opportunity to change their lives. One of our slogans is, ”˜We don”™t hire people to make brownies, we make brownies to hire people.”

The brownies made here are included in several Ben & Jerry”™s ice cream products in both the domestic and European markets. Walls said 25 percent of the bakery”™s business is overseas through a contract with Unilever, of which the Ben & Jerry”™s company is a wholly-owned subsidiary. The bakery also supplies day cake for the Haagen-Dazs ice cream brand that is used in its sticky toffee pudding flavor.

Its brownies go into “one of the fastest growing flavors in the Ben & Jerry”™s and Unilever line,” Walls said. “In fact, it”™s slated for global growth, which is good news for the people back here in Yonkers” and their prospects for employment.

Greyston started its open-hiring practice in 1997, the same year that Walls was named CEO and president. In the last decade, the company increased its payroll from 30 to 35 employees to about 60 employees during peak production while becoming a more efficient, consistent and reliable manufacturer and thus more competitive in the bakery industry, Walls said.

“In 1997, we were a break-even business,” he said. “Since 1997, we”™ve gone from a $2.5 million business to a $6.5 million business.”

The new product being rolled out this winter was inspired by a report on Greyston Bakery and its social mission that aired on CBS “60 Minutes” in 2004. Within eight minutes after the report ended, Greyston got 60,000 hits on its Web site, followed by another significant spike in Web visits three hours later when the program was shown on the West Coast.

“What we learned was that people wanted to be in relationship with us,” Walls said. “The consumer that”™s going to support us is a consumer that”™s discriminating in many aspects,” one who cares about choices in foods and beverages as well as “the environmental and social impact of where their money is going. They”™re also willing, quite frankly, to pay for that,” he said.

The strategic result is the “Feed Your Conscience” marketing campaign and the Do-Goodie Brownie, four varieties of which are made from “all natural ingredients” that include Belgian chocolate, pure cane sugar and cage-free eggs. The product is distributed to natural foods and specialty stores on the East Coast, including Balducci”™s, and parts of the Midwest and already has been picked up by chain grocery stores in upstate New York and by Whole Foods in Boston.

The company has invested $250,000 to develop the product line. “We”™ll invest considerably more in 2008,” Walls said. “Someone starting this from scratch would probably have to do significantly higher that that” in start-up costs. “We came to the table with brownie manufacturing experience.”

The bakery plant sits near the center of an aged, largely vacated and environmentally contaminated industrial zone for which Yonkers city officials last week unveiled a master plan to redevelop as a waterfront corridor of public parks and esplanades, high-rise and townhouse residences and small retail stores and restaurants. As Walls noted, Greyston was the first private company to relocate and build in the economically blighted area.

City officials publicly backed up what has long been the Greyston Foundation”™s commitment in Yonkers: Greyston Bakery stays.