Today we’d like to introduce you to Isaac Sanborn.
Hi Isaac, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Baking started for me with Mark Bittman’s classic cookbook, How to Cook Everything. In my grad school days, I did a lot of cooking for roommates, and I loved making the No-Knead Bread from that book. A friend from my church (Church of All Nations, or CAN, in Columbia Heights) noticed my bread photos on Instagram and gave me some sourdough starter! I didn’t know how to make my own, but he was generous enough to just gift it to me. I started learning how to make sourdough bread with Ken Forkish’s book, Flour Water Salt Yeast. I bought a couple of Dutch ovens and made a lot of bread- not always good!- every week.
One of the elders at our church noticed how much bread I was making and told me I should start selling it to church members. We have a really strong culture at our church of incubating small businesses. My friend, KC Kye, had already launched a Korean hot sauce company, K-Mama Sauce, and I had learned many lessons about running a company from him, both as an early worker at that business, and as a friend and investor. So it was the most natural thing in the world for me to start my own company, Uprising Bread Company. I got a lot of advice, both from KC and from our senior pastor, Jin S. Kim. I used the church kitchen to bake every week, I used church vehicles to drive to and from events, I used the church printer to print out my labels and signs. The support I got from CAN was really crucial to my early success as a small business owner. The goal has always been to build something that can give back to that community.
KC encouraged me to branch out and try selling at farmer’s markets. I applied for the New Brighton Farmers Market, got in, and loved it! That was the summer of 2019. I did the indoor winter market too. Governor Walz announced that COVID had reached pandemic status during the last winter market in March 2020!
I decided I wasn’t going to do the farmers market that summer, just for safety reasons. There was so much we didn’t know about what would happen. I switched all my sales over entirely to subscription and delivery for the next two and a half years.
In the past year, I’ve taken on three apprentices from among the young adults at my church. I’ve been teaching two of them how to bake for over a year, and the third one just joined at the beginning of the summer.
With the pandemic hopefully coming to a rocky ending, I decided to start doing sales at markets again this summer, this time at the Northeast Minneapolis Farmers Market. Things are going great, and I’m loving the work I do and the people I work with!
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Early on, I made a lot of mistakes as a baker. When you’ve botched almost every batch of bread for three months straight, you start wondering if you’re just doomed to make terrible bread forever. I’m glad I didn’t give up, but I was close several times. Baking sourdough bread is such a sensitive craft. You really need to adjust a lot of factors based on what you’re seeing and feeling in the dough. It just takes time to learn! I’m glad I can pass that experience on to my apprentices so they don’t have to learn the hard way like I did.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
We’re a small local bakery that specializes in sourdough bread. We offer many flavors and ingredients in our bread, but all our bread is sourdough, meaning it’s naturally fermented and we rarely use commercial instant yeast. It’s also all hand-mixed and hand-shaped, which is quite unique. We don’t have a brick and mortar location, so we just sell at farmer’s markets and offer subscriptions with delivery service.
My goal is for the bakery to become a worker’s cooperative or something more socialist in its economic structure. We’re very committed to worker’s power and solidarity with other working-class organizations. Thus the name! Uprising isn’t just a brand. It’s a vision for the future.
One more very unique thing about our company is our staff. We’re a queer, people of color, and woman-led company, and that’s an important part of our identity as a company. Our company is diverse because our church is diverse, and because the working class in this country is diverse. Those are the kinds of people who should be in charge of things, starting with our workplaces.
So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
1. Doing meaningful work that makes the world better than I found it. I think a lot of jobs out there are really degrading. I’ve had a lot of those jobs, where you just feel like a replaceable cog in a machine. And the machine (or the company) isn’t helping our community, it’s hurting. Even in a company that’s providing a valuable service or product, there’s so much exploitation baked into the capitalist system that it’s hard to tell whether it’s doing more harm or good. I feel really good about making sourdough bread. It’s healthy, it’s delicious, it’s valuable. And I feel really good about our way of doing business. There’s nearly no income disparity between me and my apprentices. Whatever profits we make as a company accrues to our business account, and we decide what to do with that together.
2. Creating a good, nurturing space for young people to learn more about who they are and what they love doing.
This ties in with the other answer, but has more to do with the work environment. A lot of work is very stressful, bottom-line-oriented, and dehumanizing. You’re as valuable as the profits you’re able to produce for your boss. I don’t treat my apprentices that way. I really value them as people, and I relate to them as a mentor more than as a boss. I want them to feel like they can say no, take a break, or try something different when they feel that way. I think, your 20s are a really important time to get new things, learn from mistakes, and explore your interests. So I’m trying to make Uprising Bread Co. a dynamic, anxiety-free, interesting place to work!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.uprisingbread.com
- Instagram: @uprisingbread
- Facebook: @UprisingBreadCo
Image Credits
Irina Huang
JinSoo Kim
Stephan Dornauer
Isaac Sanborn
