Making dough
By : Gregory Keller
Anytime day or night, Peter Mitsch can be found bounding through the Swiss Bakery in the suburb of Marki, checking the progress of baking bread, rolls and pastries that tomorrow will be eagerly devoured by the most discriminating palates in the capital.
Mitsch runs his bakery, Inter Europol Piekarnia Szwajcarska, with partner Wojciech Smiechowski. The bakery runs 24 hours a day, pumping out 3 million loaves, danishes and other assorted breads each month. The outfit now employs 130 people. Anyone who has ever tasted the olive bread with oil at Restauracja '99, the crisp, crusty ciabatta at Italian restaurant Parmizzano or a light, flaky croissant over breakfast at the Bristol has tasted Mitsch's work.
"There's never a typical day for me," Mitsch said. "Sometimes I'm here all night."
In five years, 45-year-old Mitsch and 37-year-old Smiechowski have increased revenue more than 15 times to zl. 17 million ($4 million) this year, in part by becoming the bread of choice for Warsaw's most demanding chefs. From four-star hotels like the Marriott, Sheraton, Bristol and Sobieski to the most exclusive restaurants like Restauracja 99, Boat House and Belvedere, all buy their daily bread from Mitsch.
Mitsch's bread has become so renowned, in fact, that he plans to expand the business by opening his fourth retail outlet, upping sales to supermarkets and exporting frozen bread to Germany.
Chefs said Mitsch's success is due to a combination of the high quality of his bread, his willingness to do anything to ensure customer satisfaction, consistency, reliability and overall friendliness. He also runs the most modern bakery in Poland, one that cost DM 10 million to set up. The bakery's technology allows him to make new kinds of breads and modify existing ones, which other bakers currently cannot. Those factors make it easier for restaurants and hotels to pay Mitsch to bake their bread rather than produce it themselves.
Mitsch is such a stickler for quality, in fact, that he monitors the entire daily production process from a PC in an office to which only he and the production manager have the key. Custom-made software allows him to check the vital statistics of every batch of bread for the previous 400 days. This helps him troubleshoot, so if a customer comes to complain that a particular batch on a particular day was not quite right, Mitsch can call the statistics up on screen and see what went wrong.
But the most important reason behind Mitsch's success is the bread itself.
"His bread is the best. Simply the best," said Kurt Scheller, executive chef at the Sheraton Warsaw Hotel and Towers and one of Mitsch's most demanding customers.
Scheller said he calls Mitsch frequently with requests to make a different type of danish or to bring him a rush delivery of bread to feed an unexpected party. "I have his private phone number. If I need to, I can call him anytime of the day or night. Ask him how much I call."
Nearly all of Warsaw's top chefs do the same. "We can say all the hotels buy from Peter," said Robert Sowa, executive chef at the Hotel Sobieski and president of the Polish Chefs Association. Mitsch is on a first-name basis with all the chefs, and that friendliness extends all the way down the production line. Walking through the 4,500 square-meter bakery, he greets each dough mixer, roll cutter and loaf baker with a handshake and "czesc Marek!" or "czesc Pawel!"
"Sometimes he invites me for a beer, and when I arrive I see eight or 10 chefs all there," added Sowa, who daily buys 2,000-3,000 servings of bread from Mitsch.
Chefs said it was Mitsch's personal touch that kept them his loyal customers. "If I want the danishes a different size, or the bread made a little differently, I can call him and he'll do it for me," Scheller said.
Sowa has had the same experience. "If I call and say I need bread with olive oil and basil, he says, 'OK., we'll try.' Or if I ask him to add dried tomatoes to the bread, he says, 'OK., we'll try.'"
Mitsch ensures the quality of his bread and pastries through a combination of his high-tech monitoring system, his own watchful eye on the dough, but most of all, through his diligent training of the staff. "I train them well, and leave them to it," he said. "You must be able to trust them, because you can't always be watching over them."
Baker from birth
Mitsch comes from a family of bakers. He said he started baking "at age four," scampering around the small bakery owned by his father in a small town near Heidelberg, Germany. His grandfather founded the bakery in 1928. After studies in which he specialized in making pastries, he began a globetrotting career that took him to the kitchens of fine hotels in Asia and the Middle East. Later Mitsch settled for 15 years in Switzerland, joining Heistand, a large Swiss baking concern, where he eventually became a member of the board.
A jovial man with a chef's girth, gray hair, rosy cheeks and gold-framed glasses, Mitsch would resemble Santa Claus if he only possessed a white beard. He came to Poland for the first time in 1994, sent by Heistand to oversee an improvement in the production and quality processes of the firm's Polish operation. "I planned to stay only six months," Mitsch said.
Instead, he met his future wife and decided to make Poland his home. Heistand had been here since 1989 in a joint venture with Inter Europol, owned by Smiechowski's father. The joint venture broke up in 1995, and Mitsch, who had been responsible for production and client development, left Heistand and threw in his lot with the Smiechowskis.
In their first year flying solo from Heistand, Mitsch and Smiechowski nearly tripled the bakery's revenue, to zl. 7.1 million ($2.54 million) in 1996 from zl. 2.6 million in 1995 ($1.04 million). Mitsch would not disclose profit for this year or past years.
Mitsch's ability to drag all of his clients with his move guaranteed the new business's success. "Heistand started offering its bread to the hotels at half my price, but after two weeks the hotels were calling me, 'Peter, would you please sell us bread again?' They make good bread, but they have trouble with the consistency of the quality," he said.
Mitsch said that now, when a new restaurant opens up in Warsaw, he doesn't make a sales call to push his bread they call him.
Supermarket share
To compete with Mitsch's outfit, Heistand is building a new, zl. 37 million ($8.81 million) production plant, which it plans to have operational in the first half of 2000. In 1998, Heistand had revenue of zl. 10 million ($2.86 million) compared to Mitsch's zl. 15 million ($4.29 million). Heistand and Inter Europol now compete against each other for market share in the small retail, supermarket and wholesale categories, but Mitsch has the restaurant and hotel market nearly cinched up.
"We have 90% of the hotel market," Mitsch said. Besides Warsaw, he also sells bread to the Radisson Hotel in Szczecin and Willa Decjusza in Krakow. Sixty percent of production is fresh bread for delivery by Inter Europol's own trucks within Warsaw, and the rest is frozen bread. However, Mitsch said more than 50% of his revenue, and the fastest-growing part of his business, comes from sales of frozen, pre-baked bread to retail resellers, such as supermarket Mini Europa.
Inter Europol is also in talks to start exporting bread to Germany. In addition, the bakery has three of its own retail shops in Warsaw, with a fourth one opening this week in the Targowek district. The first shop, opened in 1995 on ulica Dobra in the Powisle neighborhood, now sees 400 customers daily coming through its door, Mitsch said.
The fastest-growing part of the business, though, is pre-baked frozen dough, which Mitsch sells to supermarkets, hotels and gas station mobile marts. "People want the opportunity of fresh and just-in-time bread," Mitsch said, explaining the success of this part of his business.
Inter Europol has positioned itself at the premium end of the bread market, Mitsch said. "We don't want to compete with people who are only interested in price, it's impossible to maintain the quality that way."
Consistent quality is a common theme in the comments Warsaw's chefs make about Mitsch.
"If I made the bread in my own kitchen, today it would be like this, and tomorrow like that," the Sheraton's Scheller said. "With Peter, the quality is 99% stable."
The Sheraton takes two deliveries of Mitsch's bread every day, fresh bread at 5 a.m. for breakfast and dough in the afternoon to be baked by Scheller's staff. He gets five or six different types of danishes, eight types of rolls, three or four kinds of loaves and also ciabatta, "an Italian bread very good for sandwiches," Scheller said.
Mitsch and Smiechowski last July moved their operation to a new, 4,500 square-meter building in Marki, a town on Warsaw's eastern edge. They had outgrown their previous 700 square-meter bakery.
"We had to move, we were already at full capacity producing 20-22 hours per day and we still had to turn away a few orders," Mitsch said.
The new bakery is made with an eye to expansion, and so far is only running at 30% of the building's capacity. Four silos outside hold 140 tons of flour. Inside, the centerpiece of the bakery is a DM 1 million, custom-made machine for making rolls. It's a 15-meter-long, four-meter-high conveyer contraption that took eight months to build and can kick out 12,000 rolls per hour. It's the most expensive machine in the bakery, and Mitsch gets obvious joy showing off its inner workings to visitors.
"It's very flexible. It can make nearly every shape of bread, from 30 to 100-gram loaves," he said.
The combined demand from restaurants, hotels, supermarkets and retail outlets result in the bakery producing about 200 different kinds of breads and pastries. The whole process from dough to bread goes through seven steps over three hours for a typical loaf, but Mitsch's personal favorite, sourdough bread, takes 24 hours to make. Some special breads going to top hotel restaurants, like the vegetable bread at the Marriott, take three days to make.
Moving to the new, much larger bakery was the fulfillment of a five-year dream for Mitsch, and he said he would start thinking of new goals next year. For now he is busy cranking up production, which he aims to double to 6 million pieces per month next year.
"That's not a dream," he said. "It's going to happen.
