Women Baking Pioneers Did It Their Way

They faced enormous odds in building businesses during challenging times, but somehow they succeeded.

Pioneering women leaders in commercial baking developed iconic brands with robust followings as they founded and grew companies. They overcame major hurdles in their own unique ways. These included identifying nontraditional solutions, teaching themselves about the business world and navigating within male-dominated industry sectors. They achieved all this in eras when women were typically expected to focus on traditional roles such as mother and wife.

Podcast Spotlights Female Leaders

The latest edition of American Bakers Association’s podcast Bake to the Future spotlights two unique female leaders. They are Dora Schwebel, who co-founded Schwebel Baking Company in the early 1900s, and Margaret Rudkin, who started Pepperidge Farm in the late 1930s.

The podcast takes an innovative approach by melding stories with historic audio clips and an archivist interview. The broadcast coincides with Women’s History Month and was moderated by Hailey Blumenreich, Marketing and Communications Manager, and Katie Juhl, ABA’s Director of Marketing and Communications.

Dora Schwebel Builds Family Business

Schwebel Baking Company is today is a highly successful independent, family-owned wholesale baker with four baking facilities and 30 distribution centers across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia.

The company was started by Dora and her husband Joseph in 1906 in Youngstown, Ohio. They began selling rye bread from their kitchen and delivering it to their neighbors.

However, a string of challenges awaited that would severely test Dora. Joseph passed away suddenly in 1928, leaving Dora to raise their six kids. Then, the U.S. stock market crashed and Dora came under pressure to keep the business going as customers ran into credit problems.

Dora summoned up masterful skills in learning to navigate the business world. At one point she successfully appealed to a large mill for a brief payment delay in order to keep her supply coming. The mill executives were impressed with her honesty and determination — qualities that helped Dora keep the business running and position it for growth in the coming decades.

Margaret Rudkin Creates Pepperidge Farm

Another unique female leader, Margaret Rudkin, built a very different kind of baking company in Pepperidge Farm. Her story was relayed in the podcast by Sarah Rice, the Senior Corporate Archivist at Campbell Soup Company, which now owns the Pepperidge Farm brand. 

Margaret and her family encountered big challenges during the Depression. They took a big financial hit from the stock market crash, especially because Margaret’s husband Henry worked on Wall Street. In addition, Henry became involved in a sporting accident that limited his ability to work.

Meanwhile, it was an unrelated incident that drove Margaret to the baking world. One of her sons developed severe food allergies and she began baking minimally-processed whole grain bread to feed him. The bread was a hit with her son’s pediatrician, who allowed Dora to sell it out of his office waiting room. That was the start of what would become Pepperidge Farm in 1937 — named after her Connecticut home. Production gradually moved from Margaret’s kitchen to her garage and stables, and finally to a commercial baking facility. Margaret proved to be highly innovative at creating ideas for new products as she steered the company, and she prioritized the hiring of women as the organization grew, Rice said.

Women Pioneers Demonstrated Adaptability

Women pioneers paved the way for the next generations of female baking leaders —and they did it without established roadmaps to follow. Rice described how Rudkin leveraged her qualities of flexibility and improvisation to create a unique path for success — and it seems the same could be said of Dora Schwebel.

“Margaret was just a quintessential problem solver,” Rice said. “You know, she didn't think of herself as anything particularly special. In her mind women always had to juggle lots of things — whether it's trying to get your kids out the door to school or just your plan for the day to inevitably go awry. You have to be really flexible and ascertain what the problem is, figure out the easiest, simplest, and in most cases cheapest way to fix it — and just move on.”