Allan Appel Photo
When one of this winter’s monster storms hit New Haven, the postal service wasn’t able to fulfill many of its daily rounds. But neither snow nor sleet stopped New Haven’s newest bakery from delivering muesli loaves and stollen to local stores.
The fresh bread came from Whole G or Whole German Breads, LLC, which recently made its flour‑y, aromatic debut on Hamilton Street.
“Bread is a service to the community, it’s not just a business,” says Andrea Corazzini. Corazzini and his wife Kiara Matos officially began selling their artisanal muesli bread, feigenbrot, or fig bread, and a range of multigrain fitness loaves, and more than a dozen other products back this fall. An official factory opening is being planned soon.
Whole G already has four employees and bakes 150 loaves daily. The owners hope to grow to 20 employees and 2,000 loaves a day.
They also want to have schoolkids come and learn that beyond Wonder there exists a world where bread contains hazelnuts, oats, and the healthful seeds of flax, sesame, poppy, sunflower, and pumpkin.
Or as Corazzini says, basically “a box of granola in a loaf.”
They rise (the Whole G people, not the bread) at 3 a.m., go the gleaming bakery at 105 Hamilton St. fitted out with the latest digital German ovens, mixers and other equipment, and finish baking by 6 or 7 a.m..
Then they deliver by ten daily to a half dozen markets in New Haven, Hamden, and Fairfield. That included the Xmas blizzard and last week’s storm — even though it turned out not all their customers were open for business..
“We’re novices [about who would be open], but we’re very responsible,” said Corazzini.
A native of Abruzzi in Italy, Corazzini met his wife and partner in the business Kiara Matos in Caraccas, Venezuela, where he had been involved in the textile business.
Seven years ago he switched careers to what he described as the more “human dimension” of baking healthy and tasty staffs of life for very local consumption.
When it was clear to them that Venezuela was too politically unstable to raise a family, they had to decide where to emigrate.
Matos remembered attending Albertus Magnus College here 20 years ago, when she was 17. She had a good New Haven experience.
Her “second parents,” Elizabeth and Jerry Coffey, with whom she lived during that period, turned out to be good friends with Charles Negaro of the community-minded Chabaso Bakery. (Click here to read a story on Chabaso’s work with the Fair Haven Health Center.
When it came time to emigrate from Venezuela, Matos told her husband “I will go only to New Haven.”
Negaro offered at first to partner with Corazzini and Matos. “He offered unconditional help. He really gave me the final push,” Corazzini said.
Negaro was looking for another storage site and took two-thirds of the Hamilton Street building.
Corazzini and Matos took the other. After an expensive build-out early in 2010 and importation of the latest equipment, the breads began to rise.
The company does some baking for Chabaso and Atticus to help with the cash flow, but Corazzini is increasingly staking out a separate territory, he said.
That would be breads made with organic ingredients, with the wide range of techniques and range of German breads, and delivered daily.
“If you want fresh every day, you have to limit yourself in radius” in terms of customers, he said. Currently that radius is six miles, which includes the Whitneyville Market in Hamden, and several markets along Orange Street, and Edge of the Woods.
Corrazini said he hopes to expand the radius to 30 miles to include, for example, Bishop’s Orchard in Guilford.
With both fine baking and spiffy marketing and packaging, Whole G aims to counter the stereotype of the German as heavy and dense.
These shnitt brotchen, rolls akin to Kaiser rolls, are dense but nearly weightless, he explained. Americans don’t know about them but soon will, as they’re a new Whole G product.
As to the packaging, Corrazini said, he hopes aims to counter what he called the stereotyped image of the German as “a fat lady with beer in both hands. We’re imagining the BMW of breads.”
He said the company has also taken a page from the marketing of blue jeans. In epochs gone by you used to have to try them on to see if they fit, but now there are wide-legged jeans, narrow, and so forth. Tailored, designed’ no trying on.
Corazzini said he has done the same with a multi-grain “fitness” bread, each loaf presented each in its own jauntily colored bag. One is for the person who wants the whole grains and whole seeds, the most healthful creation with rye, wheat, sourdough, and maize
Another version is what Corazzini called “more hedonistic,” that is with whiter, creamier flour. And then there’s a third designed for those who “want to stay lean without compromising taste.”
With so many loaves to choose from, potential customers were confused, so Whole G simplified.
The muesli goes for $5.99, the feigenbrot for a dollar more.
Many of the ingredients are organic; raisins are of the dark black variety specially purchased so as not to be coated with sulfur dioxide. The operation is certified kosher.
Corazziini said that for every 1,000 pounds of bread sent to the large stores, 300 pounds are cleared from the shelf every day into the garbage.
Whole G’s goal in addition to selling enough loaves to be viable is to bake just enough for each community to have minimal “returns.”
He recently introduced an orange cake created out of the returned muesli breads. Such a process is common in Germany, he said.
This year he also hopes to bring kids from the New Haven Public Schools in to see the German tradition and perhaps offer some training.
There are limits to public service. “During the next blizzard,” Corazzini said, “I hope to remain in bed.”