How does an aspiring marketing professional become one of New York’s top bakers? Like many of our students, Amy Scherber was a career changer, motivated by her passion for food.

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Amy introduces ICE Culinary Management students to her Chelsea Market store.

In the 1990s, New York was far from the bountiful paradise of bakeries that we find today. When Amy’s Bread opened in Hell’s Kitchen, it was a pioneering force in a bread wasteland, a powerhouse concept that has flourished over more than twenty years of business. It’s no wonder that when Culinary Management instructor Alan Someck decided to take his Culinary Management students on a bakery fieldtrip that Amy’s was the obvious choice.

After a brief tour and tasting at Amy’s Chelsea Market outpost – including her signature semolina bread with golden raisins and fennel seed – students got to ask the nitty-gritty questions. As it turns out, Amy had just signed a lease for another space when the opportunity to open in Chelsea Market came on her radar. She lost money in the deal, but knew that the then-empty warehouse would provide the opportunity to fulfill her vision: to open a bakery where customers could see the bread-making process. Today, most of Amy’s baking has been outsourced to a large space in Long Island City, but she intends to maintain this transparent mission. The oven from her original Hell’s Kitchen location was recently installed in the Chelsea Market space, and her staff will resume on-site bread baking in the near future.

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Shoppers look on as Amy takes ICE students behind the oversize windows of her signature store.

Amy also shared insight into the trials and joys of expanding her business. Certain products, like her olive twists, were as much a product of exhaustion and accident as proactive innovation. That kind of exhaustion can fuel creativity, but many bakers fail to overcome such odds. As Amy explained, the price margin in bakeries is much smaller than in restaurants. For example, her strawberry shortcake – made with high-quality ingredients such as greenmarket berries – can only retail for a meager $4-5, whereas a restaurant might charge $12 for the same product. Moreover, starting a new small business is more expensive than most owners anticipate, as it takes time to build credit.

In addition, Amy explained that it’s important to know your stores. Her West Village customers buy the most coffee, Chelsea Market moves the most bread and Hell’s Kitchen is a hotspot for sweets. But where other owners might stop there in calibrations, Amy strategizes to the day. If Wednesday afternoons show a trend toward increased sweet consumption, but Monday is more of a morning bread crowd, she adjusts and re-adjusts to fit her customers’ needs. And let’s not forget – on top of retail customers, she has over 300 wholesale accounts to attend to.

When asked expressly for advice, Amy urged Alan’s class of budding entrepreneurs to spend time working in the type of business they would like to open themselves. While aided by her study of Economics in college and time baking in restaurant kitchens, Amy admits she wishes she had spent more time working specifically in bakeries before starting her business. Last but not least, she underscored the importance of a coherent concept. Even if someone has a fully-developed business idea, it is essential that the consumer can effortlessly grasp it – from the name to the decor, the service style, the product, etc.

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ICE Culinary Management students, Amy Scherber and Professor Alan Someck.

Looking out onto the eager eyes peeking into Amy’s oversize windows, it’s clear that she applied this final lesson early on. Her famous oversize windows breed a connection between staff and those they serve, an honesty and intimacy that has been an underpinning of Amy’s philosophy from day one.

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It’s been a little over a month since my graduation from the Culinary Management program at ICE and it has been a busy month!

The holidays are something special for many food businesses. Last year, we were hardly ready for our first holiday season. When Macaron Parlour was mentioned on the Today show, orders started pouring in and we were overwhelmed. We packed and mailed out dozens of boxes of macarons every day, made deliveries throughout New York and held down a table at the Big Social Holiday Market the week before Christmas. We could barely keep up.

So this year, we started talking about our holiday business plans in August. We decided that our goal was to be in the Union Square Holiday Market. And now, I am not sure we ever would have been able to do Madison Square Eats or the Union Square Holiday Market without the ICE Culinary Management program. Sure, I didn’t need the program to handle the kitchen production (that is what I did the Pastry & Baking Arts program for!), but the class helped with everything else. Once I understood the business side, I embraced it. So, here I am, typing this while manning our booth at Union Square. More…

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And thus it ends! October 31 marked the last day of my Culinary Management program here at ICE. It’s hard to believe that six months have gone by so quickly! I remember how nervous I was about committing to the schedule while working a full-time job, and yet I did it. I didn’t miss a single day and it was completely worth it.

In these last few weeks, we received a lot of information to help us complete and finish our business plans and now I know that the timing was intentional. For example, if the attorney, Jack A. Gordon from Kent, Beatty & Gordon, LLP, came in to talk about his practice two months ago, we would not have known enough about our own needs for our business to ask the right questions. Since he came two weeks before the end of the program, we could ask him detailed questions on setting up our business structure, investor contracts, leases and non-compete agreements. More…

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This past few weeks, I feel like I have been everywhere, but here on DICED! I have been running around and there is very little time to sit down. My feet are thanking me right now!

There’s only four weeks left in our culinary management program and I can feel that what we’re learning is getting more substantial. We are getting down to the nitty gritty and learning about some of the things that can make or break our business.

The most interesting and also most intimidating part of the program so far has been financial statements. We have been looking at numbers for businesses that have been successful and businesses that have failed. In class, we tried to build our own financial statements based on an Italian place in midtown. We talked about who’s coming in at different parts of the day and whether they will sit at the bar or the dining room. We decided on the number of covers we’ll be doing for lunch and dinner, what the average check would be and how much would be spent on food and how much on beverage. Then we talked about the type of staffing we would need, what hours they would be working, and how much they will be paid. Once we put everything together, we had an idea of what our profit margin would be and our numbers came out a little too optimistic. Steve Zagor said that in our first year, our food and beverage costs won’t be very good because we are figuring out what works for us, so we went back and readjusted. Then we spoke about what type of numbers will look appealing to investors. More…

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Hurricane Irene may have been a bust for me, but its impact on the food industry wasn’t. For me, Friday was spent trying to prepare for the worst — from talking with others to try to figure out whether to close and what time to close, to figuring out what will happen on Monday if the power goes down over the weekend. We closely tuned into the news and weather reports to figure out when the storm was going to hit and employees were asked about how the closing of the MTA would affect their ability to get to work. I stayed later than usual at Smith Canteen on Friday in order to prepare for a shorter day on Saturday and got in earlier the next morning. I was in and out in just a few short hours and worried for the next two days about what would happen if the freezer broke. When I polled my other food friends, I learned that some volunteered to stay overnight in hotels in order to make sure the hotel guests were able to order room service during the storm. Many worried about how they would be able to get to work in time for their early morning shift if the subways were still down. I heard stories about how despite the early morning chaos and the great sales in the beginning of the day on Saturday did not make up for the loss in sales for Saturday night dinner and Sunday brunch. The truth is, even though everyone has to eat, the food industry is very much impacted by what goes on outside.

Before the madness of the storm, we met with Chef Ted to get a chef’s perspective on food costs in early August. He broke down beef and fish in order to give us a visual perspective of what types of portions come out of them and we used those portions to calculate food cost. It was fascinating watching him break down parts of beef to get a sense of what comes out of each section, but even more so to see how much gets trimmed away and how to use those trimmings so they’re not a loss. Finally, I understood why a steak is so expensive. More…

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Hello, August! August means that we have passed the halfway mark of the Culinary Management Program.

The funny part about this program is that I think it mirrors my life a little too closely. When I started my current job, I was challenged to find local purveyors for most of my products. When it comes to chocolate, this was a real challenge. Then John Schaffenberger came to speak to the class about his experiences in the food industry and his most famous business venture — Scharffen Berger chocolates. He brought up a very interesting point — when it comes to chocolate, you really want something that tastes good. For example, when it comes to Fair Trade, even if something claims to be fair, you don’t know what the realities really are unless you visit the farms. Also, Fair Trade is an idea and he said that you can’t eat an idea and expect it to taste good. When you’re in the food industry, there is a very fine balance between following idea trends, but also maintaining the integrity of taste.

Then I had to calculate food costs for all of my baked goods at Smith Canteen at the same time that we were being tested on purchasing and calculating food costs in class. While I discovered my food costs were mainly in the teens (when your main ingredients are flour, sugar, and eggs, it’s not surprising that it’s so low), I began to question how bakeries aren’t more profitable! The more I thought about it, even with a food cost that’s 19% — if it only costs you $0.19 to make a chocolate chip cookie that you will sell at $1 — you will have to bake and sell at least 25 cookies just to make $20. This $20 is going to be used for several other costs like labor, rent, and insurance. You’re going to have to sell lots of cookies! More…

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Summer break is here!  While, in my previous school experience, summer break meant at least two months off, this time, it means the first week of July off. Beggars can’t be choosers, right? We’ve been doing so much in school, I could definitely use some time to catch up on something I call sleep.

In the past few weeks, we learned about financing a restaurant and setting up the corporate structure. When Simon and I opened up Macaron Parlour, I felt like I looked through hundreds of descriptions of corporate structures and was still confused. For example, why open as an LLC when we have to determine what other corporate structure we want to be taxed as? What is an S-Corp? I’m not going to lie, it’s still a little confusing, but I’m glad we covered it in class.

ICE alum Jason Apfelbaum from Chef & Co. also stopped by to chat. He said that a single class speaker who came in 1998 to speak to his culinary management class influenced him so much, his dream expanded from buying a small hotel to starting a catering business out of his apartment. That business eventually became Chef & Co and from there, Jason has been all over the place — from opening Cibo Expresses in Delta airports, to being a partner in Guerilla Culinary Brigade and opening pop-up restaurants. He is a prime example of how expansive the food industry is. More…

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Whew. ServSafe is now under my belt. My Culinary Management class took the exam early this month and we just got our scores back a few days ago. I’m happy to report that I passed. The refresher course has actually come at an ideal time as I just started a new job at Smith Canteen. My first few days involved trying to figure out how to arrange storage so that we were in compliance with health codes.

In the past weeks, Steve taught us about the restaurant experience for guests and opportunities for us to be great. He included ideas like having the chef visit all of the tables in the restaurant. He said that many people find being able to chat with the chef and be able to convey all of their ideas and concerns directly to the person in charge of the food is a great touch. However, he warned that the chef shouldn’t stand and hover creepily over diners without saying anything, because that becomes a negative experience. Last year, at Le Bernardin, I saw Eric Ripert glide out of the kitchen and come and visit one of the tables. Even though he didn’t visit my table, I remember how the entire dining room atmosphere changed and how thrilled I was to see that he was in the kitchen. More…

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Three years ago, I crammed for the New York Food Handler’s Certificate. The potential illnesses in particular left a lasting impression on me — how was I ever going to eat again? For months, I only ate home-cooked meals — overcooked, dry chicken, salads so over-washed that they were broken and wilted and many, many bowls of cereal.

It took a long time to start eating out again. Even 3 years later, I stare down the cashier to see if he handles my food with the same dirty hands he uses to take my cash, I go through a box of disposable gloves over two days and tie my hair in a bun so tight that I have a headache when I let it loose. I try not to think about all of the diseases I can get from my food. Yes, I will always send back a pink chicken, but I still love my eggs sunny side up. If I think about it too much, I can’t finish my meals.

For the past few weeks, I have been reintroduced to the world of unsanitary conditions and foodborne illnesses via preparing for the ServSafe exam. Yesterday, my alarm went off in the middle of a nightmare. I had been dreaming about catching mice when I heard something tapping. When I looked over, I saw a pink lobster jumping across the floor. Then my alarm went off and I was scared awake. It was only an hour later, when we started covering rodent infestation in class, that I realized I had a dream about a mice infestation and an unsafe runaway lobster. Although we’ve finished reviewing all of the chapters and ServSafe videos, I expect that for the next few weeks I will continue to have dreams about jumping pink lobsters. More…

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The past two weeks have been all about visiting guests and field trips. I remember that as an undergraduate, guests and trips were rare. In fact, I remember loathing trips because they involved awkward subway and bus transfers and getting shuffled around museums like a crowd of tourist sheep. I could never hear the teacher talk and I was always getting elbowed by some sightseer trying to inch closer and worse, I would end up in the corner of their photographs, looking sullen about having to wake up early for the trip.

But fortunately, this was different. Jasmine Dadlani and an associate visited us from Cramer-Krasselt marketing and communications agency to talk about current food trends. They discussed the underlying trends and what drives them, such as pop-up restaurants and using guerilla-marketing tactics like Twitter to drive customers to your business. It was very interesting to get the professional perspective behind things I have been noticing in the food industry!

Next, Vin McCann came in to talk about leases and costs. His work history ranges from turning real estate into international franchises and opening a small hotel in the Adirondacks. He has experience in all aspects of the field from catering and quick service to fine dining and consulting. He spoke about what makes a good location for pedestrian traffic, vehicular traffic, and about judging the competition and market health in an area. I asked about whether my hometown would be a good place to open a bakery and his answer was probably not! Good thing it was no more than an idea.

Last week, we paired up with another Culinary Management class (and Vin) and visited Peter Esmond, the Director of Operations at Rouge Tomate. We took a single train from 23rd to 60th and walked less than 2 blocks (score!). Like true VIPs, we walked in during their pre-opening hours and had a quiet private tour of the space and the kitchen (no elbowing involved). This time, I got to take a tourist photo with Peter as the centerpiece and Steve standing in the corner. Already, it was better than any other field trip I have ever taken. More…

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