Once promising Tacoma bakery faces uncertain future amid claims of mismanagement

A Tacoma bakery that opened to much fanfare has been hampered by mismanagement and other issues, including the coronavirus, that threaten to shut it down for good.

Some former employees of the Tacoma Baking Company said they were not paid in full, did not properly receive tips and had trouble getting payroll documents from the owners. The bakery also was sued in February by an equipment lender for nonpayment.

“I’ve worked at places that have gone under for one reason or another, and I’ve had bad owners,” said Brandon Chinn, a 30-year-old Tacoma resident who was hired as a bakery technician in October 2019. “But I’ve never had money screwed around with in this way.”

Jessica DeVisser, the bakery’s main owner, told The News Tribune in an interview this month that paychecks were sometimes late, that some employees were compensated in cash and that tips were withheld due to inaccurate hour tallies.

Asked directly why the employees should bear the brunt of mismanagement, DeVisser replied, “It was the ownership’s fault because we were trying to find the best software — and it was less than graceful.

“Unfortunately employees were victims of that. We were trying to scramble and at the same time stay on top of business. We were transparent, but their patience ran out, and unfortunately we ended up where we ended up.

“On whether I believe it’s OK: I don’t. We made a mistake. We paid for the mistake. Where’s the limit to how much I have to pay for mistakes?”

Then the coronavirus hit, prompting government-ordered shutdowns that continue to rattle the restaurant industry.

The bakery sent out a text message to employees that read, “We are shutting down operations and officially broke. I’m directing all ex-employees to file a claim with LNI,” referring to the state labor board.

DeVisser told The News Tribune that staying open during the coronavirus crisis did not make financial sense and that delivery was not a viable model.

“It’s too expensive for us to produce,” she said in early April, adding that the bakery’s product suppliers required certain ordering volumes. “The end result is the same whether we’re open or closed.”

A broken promise

When it opened Jan. 4, the bakery — four years in the works — enjoyed long lines and plenty of press, including in The News Tribune. Customers seemed to appreciate the variety of freshly baked pastries, breads and kettle-boiled bagels.

But many lamented the prices and inefficient ordering process. Others noted a disconnect with the surrounding area, where 60% of households earn less than $50,000 a year.

Leaders in the Hilltop neighborhood, where TBC is located, were disappointed in the lack of outreach to the predominantly black community, including nonprofits that were displaced when the building at 1316 Martin Luther King Jr. Way was leased in 2017.

Brendan Nelson of the Hilltop Action Coalition did not see from the bakery the same good-faith effort that other eateries and organizations have put forth.

“They did their homework in the sense that, ‘Here’s what we think people want, and here’s what we’re gonna do,’ and it just didn’t work out,” Nelson said in an April phone call.

TBC also allegedly defaulted on an equipment loan, according to a Feb. 14 complaint filed with the Pierce County Superior Court. TBC allegedly owes more than $180,000 to a creditor, Tahoma Cafe LLC. DeVisser could only confirm that the two parties had reached a “solution.” She also insisted that the lawsuit was “unrelated” to the company’s payroll problems.

The law firm representing Tahoma Cafe confirmed that the two parties had reached a forbearance agreement but did not elaborate. That setup could either reduce or suspend payments for a time, which would then be tacked onto future monthly bills.

Social media firestorm

The bounced paychecks and delayed tips spawned a social media firestorm that began March 6 when three of the head bakers — Jay O’Neill, Katie Geissler and Ashley Baird — were fired, confirmed by emails shared with The News Tribune and by DeVisser in a phone call. All three are listed as owners on the bakery’s state business license. Only Baird returned a request for comment, saying that her attorney advised her not to speak further on the matter.

“We are still hashing out our relationship behind the scenes,” said DeVisser.

The situation worsened over that weekend, as Hannah Ritner, a barista who was hired mid-January, and Jaycee Crosby, who joined the company in October as a front-of-house clerk, shared posts on social media of their employment experiences.

Ritner outlined on Facebook that at least one paycheck had bounced and that she had been fired for her original social media post, according to her email exchange with DeVisser reviewed by The News Tribune. That March 8 post has been shared more than 1,700 times with 530 comments.

TBC addressed the chefs’ firing in a Facebook post on March 9, writing that “three working owners” had been “removed from operational duties last week.” Several employees pointed to this as the last straw of a string of abuses.

In responses to hundreds of comments that poured into the Facebook flare-up, TBC repeated that it had rectified these “issues” and that it was in the midst of adjusting prices and its organizational structure. It also addressed the conflagration on its Instagram, saying, “As a locally owned business, we have our growing pains.”

The company then deleted dozens of public messages on these threads and by the morning of March 9 had disabled its Facebook page. It was reactivated around 2:45 p.m. that day, after an all-staff meeting, to share its “final public statement because of workplace privacy policies.”

The company’s social media pages have been dark as of March 13.

“Every time we were going to defend ourselves, we realized it was a losing argument,” said DeVisser in response to questions about that week of harried social media posts. “We would have to sit on social media 24-7. It opened a door that every single grievance — from pricing to product to how long people stood in line, things that we were reevaluating in the first 60 days — and then it became this massive rat’s tail of a problem.”

The claims against Tacoma Baking Company

In addition to bounced checks, workers said they had to chase managers for weeks in person and by phone or text message to receive their pay stubs and that they were sometimes paid in in cash for their wages and promised bonuses without accompanying paperwork.

Per Washington state law, employers must provide pay stubs that show the rate of pay, hours worked, gross wages and all deductions along with the paycheck, whether on paper or digitally.

As Ritner explained and her emails corroborated, her first paycheck was missing hours, at her $15 per hour rate. A second paycheck was not honored by her bank.

When she finally received her payment, in cash with no paperwork, days had passed.

“That was frustrating,” she said in an interview. “I would have liked to have been able to confirm that.”

DeVisser said in an email that “about 10 checks had been directed towards an incorrect account.”

Chinn, the baker who quit after issues with the management team seemed impossible to resolve, said his final earnings in mid-March were paid in cash without a pay stub.

Laurie Still, who was hired as a pastry chef in October also said several paychecks bounced, and then she was paid in cash.

“That was a huge red flag for me,” she told The News Tribune in a phone call.

Still and others say they still have not been paid what they are owed.

Until the bakery actually opened, Chinn’s checks had cleared without trouble, as did those for Crosby. Both described receiving checks from multiple banks, and for Chinn’s check in early March, his bank told him it would be held for two weeks.

DeVisser pointed to miscommunication between those handling payroll and those ordering ingredients.

“Eventually you’re so tired; lines are crossed,” she said. “People aren’t communicating well. I write a check from payroll for wages at the same time my business partner writes a check for Sysco for $30,000. It’s a number of different things that don’t work out well, and a business that moves really fast. Employees got stuck there in the middle.”

Still said that at one point the kitchen staff was told it could not place an order with Sysco, a food service wholesaler, because TBC owed them thousands of dollars.

After two weeks in business, Jan. 4 to Jan. 18, employees had not yet received their tips, which was confirmed in a Jan. 24 email provided to The News Tribune. It addressed the chatter among workers that the money was held in a separate “saving account” and that it was “difficult to accurately calculate the amount of tips you are owed as our time tracking has been squirrelly.”

DeVisser, when asked about tip tracking, pointed to the transition between point-of-sale and clock-in systems as the reason for the delay.

According to the state labor department, tips and service charges — the latter of which TBC listed on its receipts — must be paid when they are earned or in that pay period’s check.

In a Jan. 29 team email, DeVisser said “about 20 percent” of employees’ checks were “directed towards the wrong account and were not honored.” They had instead been compensated via PayPal or in cash, she said in the email.

“The tips are there,” DeVisser recounted of the gratuity holdup. “I just can’t distribute it until I know exactly what your hours were.”

A good idea gone bad

As employees’ frustration grew and their consternation spilled into the public sphere on social media, TBC closed to the public on March 9 to train staff and explain operational changes, according to a Facebook post. The company wrote that traffic and parking issues due to LINK construction on Martin Luther King Jr. Way and the coronavirus outbreak were hampering business.

Current and former employees told The News Tribune the meeting focused not on training but on recent firings and “misinformation” circulating on social media.

At least two employees said in March they filed complaints with the labor department.

“We wanted to work toward a solution; that’s all I wanted,” said DeVisser.

Chinn and other current and former employees described a work environment that was at times toxic and often chaotic, with no systems in place for front-of-house workers in particular to follow. They described a new business where service training was all but nonexistent and managers lacked leadership qualities and spoke often in harsh tones.

DeVisser refuted that characterization, saying, “Some complaints were the normal course of business” and that certain workers’ tales were “egregiously wrong in their interpretation.”

“People don’t always talk politely,” she said of food service settings. Neither she nor Pieter DeVisser has worked in this sector before, she added. “This is the reality of the workplace. You don’t always get the extra added touch when a manager is in a hurry.”

Asked if perhaps she and her ownership team had gotten in over their heads, DeVisser replied that the tensions had arisen from “impatience.”

“We should have been more patient with ourselves and the process,” she said. “I think we forgot to help our employees understand our visions … I think it’s wrong in retrospect to believe that employees would have the same excitement. People are people: they need their paycheck. I owe them that money, and it was never done maliciously. We tried our best to fix it.”

The bakery opened with ambitious goals — to become a wholesaler, to open an adjacent catering business and floral shop, to be a community hub in a neighborhood that needs investment. Chinn and other employees believed in the mission but watched the execution stumble.

“It was just straight up that they didn’t act on any of the stuff they said,” he said. “They were way more concerned with making the bakery operational than making it exist in the long-term.”

As Still put it, “It seemed too good to be true.”

Hilltop not happy

As TBC’s management issues spilled into the town square in early March, so did the prospect of gentrification.

In the spring of 2019, the bakery’s windows were vandalized with the words “get out.” TBC first leased the building in 2017 from Roberson Properties and spent the next three years gutting it and installing heaps of new infrastructure to support its new life as a bakery.

DeVisser said the building was “very unsafe” at the time, without heat and updated electric or plumbing. The Robersons wanted the building to be updated, and “that’s what we did together.”

Not everyone agrees this location was ideal for the concept.

In response to the conversation swirling on Facebook, Shelbi Virgil posted a photo taken outside the building at 1310-1316 Martin Luther King Jr. Way when it was still occupied by Fabitat, a community art studio supported by the incubator Spaceworks, Write253 and 2nd Cycle, a nonprofit that connects youth to bikes as a means of transportation and empowerment, where Virgil works. The post has since been taken down, but in it she contended that the lot “was not a vacant dump” as some have claimed.

“Bagels are not going to improve the quality of life for Hilltop youth and residents the same way our neighboring organizations did,” she wrote. “Sure, we all found new spaces eventually, but how many youth became disconnected in the amount of time it took for us to figure things out?”

She later told The News Tribune that when Roberson bought the building, “there was no conversation” and investors just started showing up to tour it.

DeVisser said that she and Pieter DeVisser, now her ex-husband, tried to reach out to community groups but were approached as “just being white people.”

“We weren’t trying to stoke the flames. We weren’t trying to overshadow,” she said.

The bakery donated leftover goods to groups like Nativity House and the Emergency Food Network, she said.

Nonetheless, community leaders, including Nelson at Hilltop Action Coalition, felt that TBC’s outreach was minimal to nonexistent. Nelson said he was surprised to read about the bakery’s opening in late 2019 in Tacoma Weekly. He didn’t fully blame TBC for displacing the nonprofits using the space at 1310-1316 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, acknowledging that the landlord was disinterested in working with them.

“At the end of the day, it came down to the dollar,” he said in April.

He was put off by the bakery’s apparent lack of communication, adding that other small businesses in the area “have done really well by the community, and the community is sticking behind them.”

When TBC opened, he was also put off by the prices: “It’s not a place I could frequent.”

According to DeVisser, the bakery was in the midst of an across-the-board price adjustment to address that line of concern. Nothing would be priced over $8, and bagels would cost about $2 instead of $3 or more with cream cheese.

In her interview with The News Tribune, she expressed regret that people perceived them as profiteers or otherwise believed the product was purposely priced to be exclusionary.

“We’re not perfect. We are very human. The process and intent we had is still there — it’s still pure,” DeVisser said.

Yet people who worked for her — including the professional bakers who created rustic breads, intricate cakes and croissants — might have believed in the concept, but they no longer trusted the foundation.

Whether the business reopens once the height of the coronavirus crisis passes is “really muddled,” said DeVisser.

At this point, leaders like Nelson don’t see a path forward for the bakery in its current form.

“Our coalition will stand with the community,” he said. “If you’re not going to really invest and be a part of the community and treat people with dignity and respect and do things equitably, we can’t get behind that.”

This story was originally published April 24, 2020 at 5:00 AM.