Bonnie Alton never considered sharing space in her Great Harvest Bread Co. kitchen until she got a call one day in 2019.
The woman said she was helping her favorite baker, Mai Ker Hang, find a place to create her signature fruit-filled cakes. Would Alton consider renting out her Selby Avenue bakery in the evenings to Fruitee ‘n the Cake, Hang’s pop-up bakery business?
“They had looked and looked, and everyone was saying ‘No’ to them,” Alton said. “I thought about it for a little bit, and I talked to Brian, my husband, about it, and I said, ‘You know, we can do this. The kitchen just sits empty at the end of the day.’”
When Hang went to tour the bakery, she found Alton working in the back. “I told myself, ‘If only this woman is my mentor, I will go a lot farther and grow a lot faster,’” Hang said. “I think God sent her to me. I am so fortunate to have met her.”
Fortunate, indeed.
On Friday, Hang purchased the business from Alton. She is believed to be the first Hmong owner of a Great Harvest Bread Co. franchise in the U.S.
Alton, 67, said Hang, 29, is the perfect person to continue her legacy of philanthropy and community building — oh, and bread-baking, too.
“My work at Great Harvest has been a catalyst for building community,” Alton said. “There is so much shared hospitality that can happen with bread. We come to the production table each day with generous spirits that are enriched by the work we do together and the community we get to serve.”
Hang began helping Alton during the 2020 holiday season and said she “got hooked on the idea that I could combine these two businesses and own the bakery I have always wanted for my work.” She asked Alton to let her know if she ever decided to retire and sell the business; the two began seriously talking about a sale in March.
“I really love everything about the Great Harvest environment — how loose it is, how fun it is,” Hang said. “Everybody is friendly. So I talked to Bonnie, and I said, ‘Bonnie, if someday you retire, can I carry on your legacy?’ I told her, ‘I assure you I will not fail you.’”
From refugee camp to budding baker
Hang and her husband, Tou Lee, spent three weeks in August at the company’s franchise headquarters in Dillon, Mont., learning all things Great Harvest — from fundamental baking to made-to-order baking to running a retail store. The couple, who live in Maplewood, have three young daughters: Liora, 5; Odilia, 3; and Sarai, 1.
Hang’s father was a soldier in the “secret war” backed by the CIA in Laos during the Vietnam War. After the war, the family fled to a refugee camp in Thailand, where Hang was born and spent her first 11 years.
“We were a very poor family, with very little money,” she said. “I remember one year crying on my birthday because I knew I would not have a cake. I watched as my father searched in his pocket for money and found only enough to buy me new sandals and a little bun I could eat on my way to school. That day, he chose to eat nothing so I could have a birthday to remember.”
In 2004, Hang and her family arrived in Minnesota. Hang had to quickly learn English, which “was not an easy language for me to learn,” she said. “In school, I struggled to adjust and fit in.”
She got to try birthday cake for the first time when she turned 12 in December 2004. “It was the most beautiful cake,” she said. “It was from Cub Foods. It said, ‘Happy Birthday Mai Ker.’ It had purple frosting. It was a whipped cream marble cake — chocolate and vanilla.”
It was the most delicious thing she had eaten during her 12 years on Earth. So began her love affair with cake.
By the time she was a freshman at Harding High School in St. Paul, Hang had begun teaching herself how to bake cakes for family and friends.
“My sister and I, we really love cake,” she said. “We came to the idea that we wanted a cake that was not too sweet — that we can eat and enjoy and that we don’t feel nasty after. She said, ‘Can you learn how to bake a cake from scratch?’ And that’s when I started to mix and match and do all this research.”
Hang’s cakes are filled with fresh fruit — including strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, blackberry, kiwi, mango and coconut. “The fruit balances out the sweetness and reduces the sweetness from the cake,” she said.
When her sister brought one of Hang’s cakes to work one day, a co-worker at St. Jude Medical asked if Hang was taking orders. “That’s how I got my first customer,” she said. “I was a senior in high school.”
Hang’s brother, Ying, created a Facebook page and named the business Fruitee ’n the Cake. “He just wanted a fancy name for the cake, and he wanted to include something with ‘fruit’ in there,” she said. “It was supposed to be Fruitien, but that was hard for people to pronounce.”
Hang’s burgeoning business started taking off. She would go to school all day and then bake until midnight. She continued that schedule, she said, while attending St. Paul College and Metropolitan State University, graduating in 2015 and 2017, respectively.
“One day, I had a customer come in, and she said, ‘Oh, your cake is so good. I eat cakes from many places, and I really like yours. Have you ever thought about having your own bakery or having a commercial kitchen?’” Hang said. “At the time, I was looking for a commercial kitchen, and she started to contact places for me. She started making calls, and that’s how I met Bonnie.”
As Hang’s business grew, she expanded to have a two-door glass cooler space in the front of Great Harvest, which meant customers could come in and pick up special orders or buy cakes and cake slices out of the cooler.
Hang said her favorite cake is her coconut cake. “I use a young coconut; I don’t use coconut flakes,” she said. “The cake is our soft sponge, and it’s iced with fresh whipped cream with coconut flavor, and the inside has chopped young-coconut filling.”
Her favorite Great Harvest products are the cinnamon-chip bread and the chocolate-chip cookies.
Once Hang officially takes over on Tuesday, customers may find new items on the menu, but no major changes are planned, she said. “Everything will still stay the same,” she said. “I tell Bonnie all the time, ‘You are the greatest human I’ve ever met. You are the greatest mentor I have come across.’ If I had known her 10 years ago, I might have had a bakery sooner.”
Bonnie’s bread story
Alton grew up in Bagley, Minn.; Forest City, Iowa; and Valley City, N.D. She went to Concordia College in Moorhead, graduating in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in business and marketing.
She worked for a number of small businesses for 15 years before taking a job as a director of marketing for a law firm in Minneapolis. “It wasn’t a good fit,” she said. “My choice was to jump out of a 34th-story window of the Piper Jaffray building or chart my own course.”
In 1994, a marathon-training buddy happened to mention that Tom Amundson and Sally Weissman, owners of the original Great Harvest Bread Co. in Minnesota, were looking for a partner to open a store in St. Paul. Alton, who loved to cook, was familiar with the bakery, located in Minneapolis’ Linden Hills neighborhood, as it was a favorite stop for her and her running buddies after runs around the lakes, she said.
“They hired an employment psychologist to evaluate all of us. I had to take an MMPI and jump through a bunch of hoops,” she said, referring to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a written psychological test. “But we ended up deciding it would be fun to work together. The whole chain of events was serendipitous.”
Alton started looking at locations around St. Paul. “I would go into businesses and interview people and say, ‘I’m thinking about opening a store in St. Paul. What can you tell me about the business community?’” she said. “The thing that I heard over and over again, from the small businesses that I was talking to, was that people in St. Paul are a little skeptical of something new, but if they like it, they will be loyal forever. I have found that to be true.”
Alton found an empty space in a newly remodeled L-shaped building at 1049 Grand Ave. “It was a blank shell,” she said. “We were the first people in it. There was a gentleman who got on the bus across the street by where Traditions used to be — where Chase Bank is now. He watched for months until the sign came up the day we were opening. He was our first customer. He came in and bought a cinnamon roll.”
The location was across the street from Wuollet Bakery, but Alton said that was never an issue. “There’s always enough pieces of the pie for everybody — that’s the way I’ve always looked at it,” Alton said. “No one wants to eat the same baked goods every day, so variety is great.”
Great Harvest remained on Grand Avenue for 10 years. When its lease was up, Alton started looking elsewhere. “We had a really strained parking relationship with that building,” she said. “And Selby was kind of getting its legs.”
Alton bought out Amundson and Weissman before she moved the business to its current location at 534 Selby Ave. in January 2004.
Bittersweet move
Alton, who lives in St. Paul’s Crocus Hill neighborhood, said the decision to retire is bittersweet. She knows nearly all of her customers by name. She’s been invited to weddings, grad parties and christenings. She was the first boss of many of the neighborhood teens.
“My great joy is working with people,” she said. “We are always interested in being the first employers of young people because we can show them the value of work and the meaningfulness of work in a way that I think is different from some other employers.”
Hang asked Alton on Thursday morning for a copy of Great Harvest’s employee handbook. “I said, ‘We don’t have one, we live it every day,’” Alton said. “You do not have to tell people what to do when they are engaged in something they love.”
Part of the company’s mission statement is to “give generously,” and Alton has taken that to heart. She has served on the boards of the St. Paul Area Chamber Foundation, Grand and Selby Avenue Business Associations and Open Arms Minnesota. She donates leftover baked goods from Great Harvest to the Salvation Army food shelves.
For years, Great Harvest opened its door one Sunday a year — when it was normally closed — and let a school or nonprofit organization run the store and keep the sales. Great Harvest provided the ingredients and helped volunteers make the bread as “Baker of the Day.”
The nonprofit groups — primarily public and Catholic schools — raised money to build playgrounds, gym floors and other amenities. Alton can bike around St. Paul and see the results of her philanthropy: a playground at Global Arts Plus Elementary School; a Peace Park at J.J. Hill Montessori School; a child development center at Jeremiah Program; a playground at Obama Elementary School; and a playground and new gym floor at St. Thomas More Catholic School.
“I am a person who learned pretty early on in this business that the only real answer is ‘Yes,’” she said. “If one of my colleagues really would like to have this day off or a morning off because they’re going to a concert the night before, I mean, anything, I’m always going to figure out a way to say ‘Yes.’ And if someone is asking for a donation, I might not be able to do everything they want me to do, but I’m going to do something.”
During 30 years, she’s seen many changes and dodged many curveballs, including recessions and dietary swings.
“We started out in a recession, and then they decided to pave Lexington with those cobblestones, so the roads were closed,” she said. “And then we had 9/11, and then we had the Atkins diet and then everything kind of went back to normal for a while and then everyone decided that they needed to be gluten-free, and then we’ve got a couple other recessions built in there — the 2007-2008 was probably one of the toughest ones — but, I mean, we all felt it. And then COVID.”
Alton said the secret to Great Harvest’s staying power is “having a product that has a nutritional value for families and children and using ingredients that are real food.”
Her favorite Great Harvest products? “I am very simple. Honey Whole Wheat Bread is my favorite everyday bread,” she said. “If I have another option, it would be our Santa Rosa Sourdough.”
Alton and her husband, Brian, love cooking, entertaining, playing pickleball and bicycling. They’ve done RAGBRAI, the epic annual 465-mile bicycle ride across Iowa, and biked 172 miles from St. Paul to their friend Megan Ryan’s cabin in Cable, Wis., on the solstice in 2017.
“We started at 6 a.m. and arrived at 9 p.m. in the dark,” she said. “When we got to Hayward, I walked into a Cenex station, grabbed a quart of chocolate milk and a frozen Snickers bar. I looked at the clerk and said, ‘The guy coming in behind me will have to pay for this. I just need calories right now.’ I went outside, sat on the step right in front of one of the doors and consumed it all.”
The couple, who have been married for 25 years, own a 40-acre property near Grantsburg, Wis., where they tend a 9-acre prairie. Between them, they have three children and four grandchildren.
Alton said she plans to help out at Great Harvest when Hang needs help, especially during the busy holiday season.
“I’ll miss the daily interaction with my co-workers, but I also will miss all of the friends that I have made who come in regularly,” she said. “Everyone knows there’s going to be a lot of tears, but I look forward to seeing my customers in different settings.”
Now that she is retired, Alton said she plans to spend more time with her husband and grandchildren — and sleep in. For 30 years, she’s had to be up at 5:15 a.m. almost every morning, but that’s not a complaint.
“It has been the joy of a lifetime to do this work,” she said.
