What is Mandel Bread?
So – you say you’ve never heard of mandel bread. Mandel bread is in the simplest terms “Jewish biscotti” and mandel means almond in German. It is similar to Italian biscotti, German zweiback, British ship’s biscuit, and American hardtack. Some people call it mondel brodt, mondel brot, mondelbrodt, mondelbrot, mandelbrodt, mandelbrot, mondel bread, etc. Actually – I have NO idea what the proper spelling is but I always thought the American way to spell it was mandel bread. Minor detail – I was never good at spelling!
“Mandelbrot, kamishbrot, and biscotti: three twice-baked cookies. One is Italian. The others are Eastern European Jewish. Is there a connection? Perhaps. “We’ve thought about the connection,” said Peter Pastan, chef-owner of Obelisk, a tiny pix fixe Italian restaurant in Washington D.C. “Mandelbrot is all over Eastern Europe and in Italy everybody has a different recipe for biscotti–some with fennel, some are crunchy; the ones around Siena are ugly but good.” Mr. Pastan, who comes form an American-Jewish family, studied cooking in Italy before opening his mostly Italian restaurant. With a large Jewish population in Piedmont, Italy may have been the place where Jews first tasted biscotti and later brought them to Eastern Europe where they called the mandelbrot, which means literally almond bread. In the Ukraine, a similar cookies not necessarily with almonds by made at home, thuskamish, was served. In Italy they are often eaten as a dessert dipped into wine or grappa. In Eastern Europe Jews dipped them into a glass of tea, and because they include no butter and are easily kept they became a good Sabbath dessert.”
—Jewish Cooking in America, Joan Nathan [Alfred A. Knopf:New York] 1998 (p. 354)
A Funny Coincidence?
I think it is ONLY fate that my mom and I want to become the Queens of Mandel Bread, the biscotti and staple cookie of Eastern Europe. You see, my paternal great grandfather was a chocolateer in Poland before the Holocaust. According to my aunt, my family actually had a chocolate factory that was seized during World War II. No wonder one of my favorite movie when I was a child was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Think how helpful those Oompa Loompas would be with our mandel bread business! And my maternal great grandfather was a baker in Canton, Ohio after coming to the United States also from Poland.
The idea for Marla’s Mandel Bread?
Just about a year ago, I decided that I might want to start my own business one day.
So the first question I asked myself was, “What marketable skills do I have that people would pay for and that I am passionate about.”
The only problem was feeling like I had NO marketable skills that I could turn into my own business. I went through a list of everything I was good at and enjoyed – and couldn’t make a career out of any of them (umm – Olympic shopper probably wouldn’t make a good business).
Taking action
It was at that point that I became the co-chair of the junior board of ORT America in Chicago and was asked, with my friend Lori, to build the group up from nothing. In just a few months, we had assembled a committee, held two successful events, and gotten the word out about the organization. My involvement with ORT helped me realize that my #1 marketable skills were my ability to network, convince people to get involved in something, and build an organization from scratch.
ORT only furthered my drive to start my own business because I knew I could do it. Everyday I would think of new “business” ideas and my #1 sounding board was my mom. I must have called her 10 times a week with new ideas for 6 months. I’m lucky she didn’t disown me during this period – I’m sure I was driving her crazy. Although I have been told that my previous ideas were NOT viable – I won’t share them here given the small chance that one day I’ll be looking to become the Queen of something else.
By September of 2007, I was fully in entrepreneur mode. Almost all I thought about was starting a business – but I still had not come up with a business idea. It was only serendipitous that in October 2007, in a streak of after-work boredom, I cooked a batch of my mom’s famous Mandel Bread recipe.
My mom was given a Mandel Bread recipe (which has since been changed to yield the product we make today) by a friend. For some unknown reason, my mom’s mandel bread always turned out just a little different (and much better!) than everyone else’s. She could give the exact recipe to a friend, and the friend would not be able to make a batch that was even close to her product. Just call it the Marla Touch.
Mandel Bread quickly became my mom’s signature food. I don’t think a week passed for 20 years where my mom was not baking mandel bread. I used to take a bag to sleep-away camp with me, hide it under my bed, and make it last for four weeks. There has officially never been a holiday in my house without mandel bread. Our neighbors and friends come to our house, go into our kitchen, and search for mandel bread. My mom actually cannot leave it out in the kitchen because it would be GONE before she had a chance to package it up and take it where it was meant to go. I could go on and on, but hopefully you have the idea.
Well – I must have inherited the Marla Touch because my batch of mandel bread came out just like my mom’s. Not wanted to tempt myself with the entire recipe, I brought it to work the next day and got the same response as my mom has received for 20 years – AMAZING.
And that is when I remembered that for 20 years, people have been telling my mom that her calling was to start a company called Marla’s Mandel Bread. I literally had forgotten about this joke, and suddenly, the memory became my “Ah-Hah” moment. I had the recipe, a natural business partner I really liked and a relatively untapped market. Do you know of any major national mandel bread providers – I don’t.
I immediately called my mom to share the good news that I wanted to start a business. As usual, my mom was very supportive. She did recently tell me that she thought I was crazy and was sure that after a week, I’d be sick of the idea. It took some convincing on my behalf, but soon my mom was also getting excited about the idea and we were talking about it on a daily basis.
I think that the hardest part about starting a business is finding that Ah-Hah moment where you know what you want to do. Some people do have a natural marketable passion, but most do not. The most important thing (I think – and I’m no expert!) you can do if you want to start your own business is to get into entrepreneur mode. This means taking your goal seriously and believing that you can launch a business, even if you don’t know what you want to “be when you grow up.” It also means looking at the world and asking, “What do people need and what do people want”. It is best to ask this question about everything. I used to think of the 100 ways that I could do something better than someone else. While this did not directly lead to the formation of my business plan, it got me into the right mindset to have an Ah-Hah moment.
Once I had a business plan, I leaned on my experience in finance and natural curiosity to go down the path of starting the enterprise. The first question I asked after my Ah-Hah moment was, “Is someone already doing this, and if so, can I do it better than them.”
Thanks to the Internet, this information wasn’t hard to find. Yes – there are mandel bread companies out there, but to my knowledge, there is no one big and branded. While I haven’t decided how big I think Marla’s Mandels can get, I did know that I wanted to be the one to bring branded mandel bread to the masses.
Once I believed I had determined a viable business idea, I immediately started putting my thoughts on paper in the form of a business plan. Using a very simple powerpoint presentation, I brainstormed for pages about things like:
Why would someone buy mandel bread?
Who do we want our customers to be?
What do we want our logo and packaging to look like? Where do you buy packaging and labels?
What channels do we want to sell into? Do we want to sell to retail stores, have a website, have a storefront?
How would I market this business?
How much would all of this cost?
What are the legal requirements to starting a business?
Do I need a license to have a food business?
Where would I bake my products? Would I have to invest in my own facility?
And then I started do research on these question, first on the Internet and then I started asking questions of anyone who could help me out.
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