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General Information: Overview: Press Clips: 60 Minutes Segment

SIMON (voice-over): The Greyston Bakery is located in an old building in a section of Yonkers, where the well-heeled do not walk -- where inside a few cramped rooms, the bakers make gourmet cakes which are served at the finest restaurants. Cheesecakes, chocolate cakes, mousse cakes. They also bake wedding cakes and cakes which have been served at the White House. It`s a $5 million a year business, but the bakery doesn`t hire people to make cakes. It makes cakes to hire people -- people like Rodney Johnson, a former drug dealer. He got his GED in jail and his first legal job here at Greyston. (on camera): You were making $5 an hour when you started working at the bakery?

RODNEY JOHNSON, BAKERY EMPLOYEE: Yes.

SIMON: What were you making in the streets?

JOHNSON: A good week? Two, three thousand.

SIMON: How did you manage to stick with the job paying $5 an hour when you could make a couple of thousand a week in the streets?

JOHNSON: I had a child. I wanted to show her something different.

SIMON (voice-over): And he says his drug dealing taught him some useful job skills.

JOHNSON: When it comes to having a job to get done, you know, we try -- at the bakery, we try to meet that quota. You know, in the streets when I had "X" amount of drugs, I tried to meet that quota.

SIMON (on camera): It`s business.

JOHNSON: Business.

SIMON: But...

JOHNSON: At the end of the day, I don`t have to worry about police coming. I don`t have to stash crack. I don`t have to run into buildings - - things of that nature.

SIMON (voice-over): No, Rodney makes cakes and brownies now. He says he owes much of his turnaround in life to Julius Walls, the CEO of the bakery, who gave him and others like him a chance.

(on camera): You are employing people who are generally considered by most businesses in this country to be...

JULIUS WALLS, CEO, GREYSTON BAKERY: Unemployable, hard to employ. We want to get the crumb structure a little tighter, you know, to give a better mouth feel.

SIMON (voice-over): Walls was studying to be a Catholic priest, but left that calling to have a family and enter the business world. He now calls Greyston his ministry, and he believes anyone -- anyone -- deserves a chance to work.

WALLS: We get people who are straight out of prison. We have people who are just coming out of substance-abuse programs and need an opportunity to make a go of their lives. We have people who are returning to work from the welfare rolls.

SIMON (on camera): And rehab centers and probation officers know that you`re a man to call.

WALLS: Yes, absolutely.

SIMON (voice-over): The bakery has a unique hiring policy. Every other Wednesday is open-hiring day. Applicants gather outside the bakery.
(on camera): If you`ve got one job opening, for example, and you`ve got two applicants and one of them is a clean-cut high school kid and another one is off the street, how do you make up your mind? How do you do it?

WALLS: It is somewhat by chance because we number the applications, and so...

SIMON: Whichever guy showed up first.

WALLS: Whichever guy showed up first.

SIMON (voice-over): Most new employees start out as apprentices working on the brownie line, where the work is repetitive and the temperature can get up to 90 degrees. About half drop out, but the other half go on to get full-time jobs with decent pay and benefits.
(on camera): Why run it for profit? Why not just run it as a charity?

WALLS: We understand that most people that come to work for us aren`t going to stay with us forever, and they`re going to have to go out and work for someone else. And we want them to understand what it means to have a real job.

SIMON (voice-over): The bakery employs some 65 people -- people like Dieulane Philogene, who left Haiti as a child and became a homeless teenage mother.

(on camera): Dieulane, how old were you when you came to this country?

DIEULANE PHILOGENE, BAKERY EMPLOYEE: Eleven.

SIMON: And you`ve been on your own since.

PHILOGENE: Fourteen, 15.

SIMON: Was life was pretty rough?

PHILOGENE: Sure. At some point, I ended up being in a shelter and stayed there for about a good couple of months or so. And I didn`t think that was a good thing for me either, and I got pregnant and left school.

SIMON: How did you land at Greyston?

PHILOGENE: I applied, and they told me to keep in touch. And so, I went to Greyston every morning, and I stood in front and waited until a position was given to me. And one day, they told me they had a full week`s work for me, and, oh, I was so excited.

SIMON (voice-over): Today, Dieulane works in accounting at Greyston and provides a stable home for herself and her two children. And Rodney, who`s been at Greyston nine years, is the production manager of the entire bakery.
(on camera): Does it make any difference that you`re making very fine bakery products as opposed to doorknobs?

JOHNSON: There`s a little more love and finesse put into a cake as opposed to a doorknob, unless it`s an elegant doorknob for a mansion. But, no, I like cakes. Cakes are good. Cakes have been good to me.

SIMON (voice-over): Specifically these cakes, with names like Peanut Butter Explosion, Venetian Wine Cake, and their bestseller, Triple Chocolate Mousse.

(on camera): How many calories do you think are sitting on this table?

WALLS: Zero.

SIMON: Zero. That`s what I was hoping you`d say.

WALLS: This is such an interesting cake. This is a "lotus-in-mud" -- as in lotus flower in muddy waters.

SIMON: Is this the flower?

WALLS: That`s the lotus flower, handmade.

SIMON: And what might that be, butter cream?

WALLS: Butter cream. Again, made from scratch and made with real butter. And this cake...

SIMON: You sure it`s real butter, or should I probably try again?

WALLS: You should try it again. Yes, check it again.

SIMON: Perhaps, yes.

(voice-over): Greyston cakes retail for about $35 and are sold at gourmet food shops, on the Internet, and at upscale restaurants.

(on camera): Do these famous restaurants where you sell your cakes know who`s making them?

WALLS: Some do, some don`t know at all. I mean, the most interesting thing about most of the famous restaurants, who I can`t name, is because they actually put the cakes out and say they made them.

SIMON (voice-over): If Greyston is an unusual place, it had an unusual founder. Bernie Glassman, from Brooklyn was a Jewish aerospace engineer who said goodbye to all of that and became a Buddhist priest with a bent for social activism.

BERNIE GLASSMAN, FOUNDER, GREYSTON BAKERY: I wanted to show that people that are homeless, if they`re given the chance and the right training, could not only work in our labor force, but can produce the high- niche items of our society -- they can produce items that only the French chefs could create.

SIMON (on camera): Did it go very smoothly at the beginning? Were there a lot of problems, a lot of obstacles?

GLASSMAN: We had a tremendous amount of obstacles. We almost went broke a few times.

SIMON (voice-over): The bakery, which started in 1982, struggled for years, until it struck up a deal with Ben and Jerry`s, the Vermont ice cream company with a social conscience. Ben and Jerry`s hired Greyston to make extra-thin brownies for ice cream sandwiches. It was the biggest customer the little bakery had ever had. And, according to Ben Cohen -- the Ben in Ben and Jerry`s -- there was a problem with the first batch of those extra-thin brownies.

(on camera): What went wrong?

BEN COHEN, BEN AND JERRY`S: The brownies all stuck together, and they clumped up into this 50-pound block of brownie. When we got these huge blocks of 50-pound brownies, it was really hard to pull them apart. And mostly, we got little bits of brownies. And we said, well, what can we do with these little bits of brownies? And we said, well, we`ll try shoving them in chocolate ice cream and make chocolate fudge brownie ice cream. And that`s how the flavor came into being.

SIMON (on camera): Eureka, the birth of a flavor.

(voice-over): In fact, today Greyston`s brownies are in three of Ben and Jerry`s top-selling flavors, including, of course, chocolate fudge brownie. The bakery makes 11,000 pounds of brownies a day just for Ben and Jerry`s.

(on camera): All of the bakery`s profits go into the Greyston Foundation, a non-profit organization that runs programs for needy families in Yonkers, whether or not they work for the bakery. The foundation`s funding doesn`t only come from the brownies. It comes from grants, from other business ventures and from private donations -- and the idea is that giving people jobs is fine, but it`s not enough.

(voice-over): People also need decent housing and daycare for their kids, or how else could they keep their jobs? And the foundation offers even more, including a computer class for school-age kids and a clinic for people who are HIV-positive. Angela Rodriguez came to Greyston`s HIV clinic more than four years ago, after she learned that she`d been infected by her husband, who has since died of AIDS.

ANGELA RODRIGUEZ, GREYSTEON BAKERY EMPLOYEE: I wanted to die. At that moment I wanted to die, and I went into a deep depression, because I didn`t know how to handle the situation.

SIMON: She was terrified of the future, and furious at her late husband.

RODRIGUEZ: And when I came in, I was a very angry person. I would take out my husband out of the grave and kill him again. Every time I got angry, I would take him out and kill him and put him back. And, you know, this anger just kept building up and up and up.

SIMON: Well, she got her anger down after working with counselors at Greyston, and she also got her life back on track. She works at Greyston now as a part-time receptionist. She`s taking some college courses and hopes to become an HIV counselor.
(on camera): Has Greyston given you hope for the future?

RODRIGUEZ: Oh, Greyston has gave me more than hope for the future. Greyston has given me my life back.

SIMON (voice-over): Another success story for the Greyston foundation is Jamilla Shabazz and her family. She was unemployed for years, not because she didn`t want to work, but because she was afraid to leave her kids alone in the drug-infested neighborhood where they lived.

JAMILLA SHABAZZ, RECEIVED ASSISTANCE FROM GREYSTON FOUNDATION: Where I was living, my children, one, they could never go outside and play because it was too dangerous.

SIMON (on camera): Dangerous because?

SHABAZZ: Because of the drugs, because of the guns, and the fighting constantly.

SIMON (voice-over): That all changed when Jamilla and her family moved into a safe, clean, low-rent apartment owned by the Greyston Foundation. It also came with an unimaginable luxury -- daycare.

SHABAZZ: The daycare was great. It was a great feeling to know that your children are safe.

SIMON: Jamilla found a job working with kids, and her oldest son, Kevin, got a scholarship from the Greyston Foundation to help pay for college.
(on camera): What kind of future do you see for you and your family now?

SHABAZZ: My daughter, my son, they`re going to do well. I`m blessed. I`m very blessed.

SIMON: The little bakery that started it all is about to become a bigger bakery, which will presumably help more people. The Greyston Bakery is about to move into a new building, designed by architect Maya Lin, whose past projects include the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.

MAYA LIN, ARCHITECT: We were going to try to get light to filter through all levels of the bakery.

SIMON: The building she designed is nothing like the cramped space the bakery is in now. She wanted a clean, well-lighted place with high ceilings and low construction costs.

LIN: I couldn`t resist getting drawn into it. One, because of what they do; two, it`s sort of a very happy, very fun, very challenging design problem.

SIMON: When it`s finished, Greyston hopes to be able to employ nearly twice as many people and quadruple its profits.
(on camera): It`s interesting that what you`re really into are good works, and you`ve discovered that running a profitable business is a better way to do good works than running a charity.

WALLS: That`s right. Do good and do well. It`s called a double bottom line. Our social mission is as important as our business mission. Our people are as important as the dollars we make.

SIMON (voice-over): And he hopes people will keep that in mind when they`re shopping for desert.
(on camera): Let them eat cake, huh?

WALLS: Let them eat cake.

 


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