Warren Baking Co. bakes up a Valley staple

By Kalea Hall

khall@vindy.com

WARREN

The bread baked at Warren Baking Co. has come out of the same oven since the mid-1920s.

This oven is not like most ovens, however. It’s a traditional brick oven built into the 1920s building at 2216 Youngstown Road SE.

The oven was constructed with enough bricks to build a two-story ranch home, and it can bake 30 sheet trays of bread that warms the soul just like a home does.

The oven shows the important history of a local company formed by an Italian immigrant, sustained during the Great Depression, the collapse of the steel mills and the turn of a century.

“No one who opens a business knows what they are getting into,” said Patty Abbey, third-generation owner of the business. “They need to do a lot of research and planning and investigating. People have wonderful ideas, but it may be a trend that doesn’t last long.”

Warren Baking Co.’s bread has been no trend. It’s been a staple in the community that loves its crusty texture preferred by many Italians.

“They like the old-world type of bread rather than the soft doughy bread that the American bread is,” Abbey said.

A true Italian started this company.

Dominic Iacozili came to the U.S. in 1910 from Italy. Before starting Warren Baking Co. in 1923, Iacozili worked in a variety of industries. He built railroads and baked bread. He and his wife, Nicolina, settled in Warren and opened their own baking company in the flats on Clinton Street.

The business did well with its fresh, crusty, homemade Italian bread, but a flood hit, which led Dominic to search for a new location on higher ground. He purchased land and had a bakery built.

“When this [bakery] was built, there wasn’t a telephone and refrigerator,” Abbey said. “They had a telephone and an ice box at the house. That’s where they took orders and kept the yeast.”

Nicolina’s cousin, Dominic DiVincenzo, came to help her husband run the business.

In 1928, Dominic died in an auto accident, leaving Nicolina to raise their three children and to run the business with DiVincenzo.

“She had a very hard time,” said Abbey, granddaughter of Dominic and Nicolina. “She was a widow when my uncle was 5; my dad was 4 and my aunt was a year and a half. Two years later, the Depression hit.”

DiVincenzo and Nicolina ran the bakery through the Depression, making sure people didn’t go hungry. They did home delivery, stocked the bread shelves at the stores and filled the bread baskets at restaurants.

“My grandmother had to be tough to get through that,” Abbey said. “She was very determined. All those people who lived through the Depression had a lot of determination.”

Dominic and Nicolina’s three children, Gus, John and Nancy, all helped in the business. During World War II, John and Gus joined the Navy and left Nancy to help run the bakery. Gus was trained in motor repair and fought in the Battle of Okinawa. John served as a baker in the Florida islands in the war’s Pacific Campaign with the patrol torpedo boats. When they came back, Gus took over a service center built next to the bakery in the 1930s, and John took over the bakery.

“At that time, Warren was growing,” Abbey said. “We had all the steel mills. We had a lot of stuff going. We were servicing all of the restaurants and grocery stores.”

Abbey and her late brother Bill Iacozili took over the business in the mid-1990s.

The bakery continued to be known for the quality of its “Dominic’s Italian Bread,” but its desserts, including wedding cakes, are also prime products.

The small baking company had a lot more small businesses to service from the 1940s-1990s than it does today.

“When this town was really booming, we were baking 400 to 1,200 loaves of bread a day,” Abbey said.

Today, the bakery makes 200 to 500 loaves every day except Tuesday.

“We have generations of customers,” Abbey said. “We have very devoted customers. We’ve been able to pick up new customers.”

Customers include a laundry list of area restaurants. The mom-and-pop restaurants and this mom-and-pop bakery support one another.

“It’s local, and they have been around forever,” said Paul Tambures, owner of Vasilios Restaurant and Pizzeria in Cortland. “We have been in business 32 years. They treated us right in every single way.”

The customers love the Warren Baking Co. product.

“They love that it’s local and fresh every day, and that’s important,” Tambures said.

Leo DelGarbino, owner of Leo’s Ristorante in Howland, says both the people and the product are good to work with.

“You can smell that fresh bread, and that’s about as good as it gets,” DelGarbino said.