Biscottis, cannolis, tiramisu, and over two dozen types of donuts fill the displays of SanRemo Bakery by the hundreds. In the back kitchen, Ed Bozzo and his staff are filling the baking sheets and ovens with pastries by the thousands.
Ed, along with his brothers Nick and Rob Bozzo, have been running SanRemo Bakery in Etobicoke for the last 25 years.
The business was passed down from their father, Natale Bozzo, who opened SanRemo Bakery in 1969.
“We managed to create a system in which all three of us have our own departments,” says Ed, the head baker in charge of the kitchen. Nick manages the business and store paperwork, while Rob manages the store.
“We’re able to communicate, we talk about the changes, we actually work (in our own departments) instead of always being in each other’s face,” says Ed. “The relationship between us is great.”
Ed works six days a week from 1:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The long, early hours in the kitchen accommodate the large amount of daily customers SanRemo Bakery receives.
Ed suffered a back injury several years ago from powerlifting and has had to go to the gym to strengthen his back so he could continue to work.
He has since found working out as an escape from his intense work schedule and goes for 45 minutes to an hour daily, regardless of how long he has already been working that day.
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“I’m like, ‘Wow, you know what, this is a good stress relief,’ and I never looked back.”
-Ed Bozzo
Besides his own personal challenges with back pain, Ed says two of the biggest struggles he faces include finding employees who are willing to dedicate their time to the success of the bakery and equipment breaking down in the middle of the night.
He says that accepting the challenges directly is the best way for him to overcome them.
“Some of them make us and some of them break us, but you gotta stay with a positive head. You can’t let the situation take over,” he says.
Despite these challenges, Ed’s passion for baking brings him back to work.
“I love bringing people together. I love the creative part of it. Baking is an industry where it’s all chemistry; you have to really know your stuff,” he says. “When you can apply your knowledge and actually create products that bring smiles to people’s faces, it drives me every day.”
SanRemo Bakery is a small part of a large Canadian industry. Sales of baked good in Canada reached about $7.5 billion in 2017 and are estimated to grow to $8.9 billion by 2022, with breads accounting for nearly $5.7 billion of the forecast, according to Euromonitor International and Agriculture Agri-Food Canada.
Colleen Cross, editor at Canadian Pizza magazine, says most members of the food industry she’s interviewed are passionate about their work and build healthy competition between restaurants.
“Many of the people (in the food industry) I talked to got into it and are in it because they just get excited about what they’re making and that they’re sharing it with customers,” she says. “It’s friendly competition, definitely, but they’re driven. Everybody wants to do their best, they have this standard in their mind.”
The City of Toronto is a contributing sponsor of the Bakery Showcase, the Baking Association of Canada’s only B2B event for industry players in Canada. The trade show includes educational seminars and workshops.
The Bakery Showcase was last held in Toronto in 2018, which the City of Toronto backed with a $1,695 sponsorship. This year’s trade show was held in Montreal, but it will return to Toronto’s Congress Centre in 2020.
The City’s Economic Development and Culture division selects one trade show to sponsor each year as part of Toronto’s support of the food and beverage sector, a spokesperson said.
Ed sees “never ending growth” for SanRemo Bakery in spite of the challenges he’s faced and he plans to keep baking and serving food to his community.
“When you step back and you go somewhere and you’re recognized for your business, it’s satisfying. It’s a feeling that you can’t even describe.”
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