Schwebel Baking Co. still growing at 110

By KALEA HALL

khall@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

It all started with bread, a brazen attitude and a bike.

And 110 years later, the Schwebel Baking Co.’s mantra of “Youngstown-born, Youngstown bread” remains ingrained in the company and in the Mahoning Valley.

“Our heart is here, and that has never changed and will never change,” said Lee Schwebel, vice president of the company.

Joseph and Dora Schwebel started the business in June 1906 out of the kitchen of their home on Center Street in what was called the Hazelton section near Youngstown and Campbell.

Both Joseph and Dora came here from Austria-Hungary at different times, met and married. Joseph was a baker by trade.

“It’s something in the family that he picked up, and he was good at it,” said Lee, Joseph and Dora’s great-grandson.

Joseph’s speciality was rye bread, and the company still uses his recipe today.

Joseph would bake all night. In the morning, Dora would hop on her bike and sell from neighborhood to neighborhood.

“When the Europeans came over, they wanted that bread,” Lee said, explaining that the bread represented the comfort of home.

Four years after they started, Dora and Joseph were able to purchase a horse and buggy and they hired their first delivery driver. Soon, they had a storefront with fresh hot cross buns for sale and a larger space to bake their products.

Dora ran the business, and Joseph ran the bakery. Together, they were formidable leaders in the city’s baking industry.

Then the unthinkable happened: In 1928, appendicitis killed Joseph, leaving six children and the baking business to Dora.

She was told it was time to quit. But Dora was no quitter.

“She’s the heroine of our story,” Lee said. “Without her, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here. She had the fortitude to keep going.”

Through the Great Depression, Dora pushed on and doubled production, moving into a new bakery in the mid-1930s. She promised suppliers they would be paid, and they were. Soon, suppliers started to send flour to her on credit.

Dora kept her eye on the future for the business and saw the need to expand and relocate from its Center Street location. Steel mills in the area clouded the air and sky with dust.

“Some mornings I would come to work and cry,” Dora said in a 1956 Vindicator article about the company’s 50th anniversary. “The dust blew from piles of ore at the mills to the bakery. I determined to move into another area. And I am a determined woman.”

The new area Dora selected was on a 4.5-acre lot at the corner of Midlothian Boulevard and Lake Park Road. In August 1951, the public was invited to tour the new plant. Dora called it an “airy, white palace.”

Dora died in 1964, but her legacy of love for the business and for bread continued.

“She’s inspiring just as a woman in that time period with a desire to succeed and to build a multimillion-dollar business with nothing but persistence and drive,” said Bill Lawson, director of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society.

In 2009, Dora was inducted into The American Society of Baking’s Baking Hall of Fame. Those inducted are “recognized for their achievements in organizational growth and development, equipment design and innovation, advancements in ingredient technology and processing or related service to the commercial baking industry,” according to the society.

Her grandson – Lee’s father, the late Joe Schwebel, will be inducted this year. He was company president from 1985 until he died in 2012. Joe learned from his grandmother and kept on advancing the company she saved. The company once relied on the Youngstown area for business, but now Greater Youngstown makes up only 8 to 10 percent of the business.

The bakery has customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky and Michigan.

In the beginning, there were 40 loaves baked a day, and now it's upward of 1 million packages of bread per day. Inside the Midlothian plant, multiple lines make the bread.

But this isn’t the only place where the bread rises to life: Schwebel’s has two other plants – one in Solon and another in Hebron, Ohio.

The goal is to bake today, deliver tonight and have it in your store the next morning. The company employs 1,400 to make it all happen.

“It’s got to be fresh,” Lee said.

Schwebel’s story, starting with Joseph baking away and Dora riding her bike to sell hundreds of loaves and persevering through the Great Depression, is seen as a symbol of success for the Mahoning Valley.

“They have done very well in managing and having that strong family feel to the business,” Lawson said.

“That doesn’t happen all the time with businesses. I think they have been pretty consistent. That’s commendable.

“The real story is Dora Schwebel and how she kept that legacy going.”