NORWALK, Ohio — Trina Bediako pulls on a hairnet and a lab coat – both pink – before walking down the hall at a rambling office-and-manufacturing complex in Huron County.
She opens one door, then another. And the smell of fresh-baked bread fills the air.
“That little bun, right, this big,” she says, mimicking a circle with her hands. “Folks … could never imagine all that we go through to get that thing just right … The color. The size. You know, the shade of brown.”
You’ve probably never heard of New Horizons Baking Co.
But if you live in Northeast Ohio – or anywhere else in the United States and Canada – you’ve probably eaten something the company made. The family-owned bakery supplies English muffins and hamburger buns to thousands of McDonald’s restaurants, while filling breakfast menus and supermarket shelves for other well-known brands across the country.
“We call ourselves the baker’s baker,” says Bediako, the CEO.
In May, the Women Presidents Organization recognized New Horizons as one of the fastest-growing woman-led companies in the nation. Based in Norwalk, the Black-owned bakery now has more than 750 employees in Ohio and Indiana.
Through expansions and acquisitions, the business has moved beyond bread – into frozen pancakes, soups, sauces, spices and energy drinks. McDonald’s once made up 90% of the company’s business. Now the fast-food giant accounts for about 40% of its sales.
“Another one of my corny baker jokes is you can’t have all your buns in one basket,” Bediako says.
‘A lot of job opportunities’
Northeast Ohio is home to more than 500 food and drink manufacturers. Those are companies that make, process and package everything from raw ingredients to full meals, according to research from Team NEO, a regional economic-development organization.
Some of those businesses are household names, like the J.M. Smucker Co., based in Orville; Swiss food giant Nestle, with facilities in Cleveland and Solon; and Daisy Brand, which churns out sour cream and cottage cheese in Wooster.
Others are like New Horizons – brands you’ll never see on labels at the grocery store. They make food for other companies, from restaurants to retailers with in-house labels.
At a McDonald’s drive-thru in North Ridgeville on a recent Friday, customer Jennifer Kelley was surprised to learn that some of the baked goods come from only 40 miles away.
“It makes me actually happier to know that,” she said. “Because when they’re made locally, then they’re fresher. … You don’t realize how much stuff is in your backyard.”
Sylvio Mecone hears that reaction a lot. He focuses on the food industry as a senior director of business development at Team NEO, which has a 14-county footprint.
“Here in Northeast Ohio, you’re within a day’s truck drive of 150 million consumers. So it’s a really good place to be if you’re a food business,” he says.
Based on employment, Northeast Ohio is the eighth-largest region in the country for food and beverage manufacturing, with more than 23,000 workers, Mecone says. Food is a $4.5 billion industry here – and it’s holding steady, with the potential to grow.
“A lot of job opportunities,” Mecone says, noting that those jobs range from machine operators and inspectors to managers, programmers and engineers.
“Some of it’s automated, with visual equipment,” he said of making, processing and packaging food. “But some of it is just, you know, old-fashioned kind of eyes and hands.”
At New Horizons, English muffins travel along conveyor belts and slides.
High-tech machines inspect the muffins to make sure they’re the right size, shape and burnished color. But workers are watching, too. It’s a finely calibrated dance.
One interruption – a glitch, or a brief power outage – can throw off an entire day.
Bediako picks up an English muffin and gently pulls it apart, pointing to the crevices inside. “You want the holes. The porosity,” she says approvingly.
In Norwalk, the company makes English muffins for McDonald’s and other retailers, along with seeded buns for Big Macs and Quarter Pounders. At a plant in Columbus, New Horizons recently added a high-speed production line that can make 9,600 buns an hour.
“The sheer size of some of these facilities and the complexity of the operation is just impressive,” Mecone says. “Lines of ovens and conveyors, and it looks like chaos. But it is truly a work of art.”
‘You better do it right – all the time’
Bediako never planned to spend so much time thinking about bread.
Her father, Tim Brown, started out as a Wonder Bread salesman in New York in the 1960s. The family moved around as he rose through the ranks at Continental Baking Co. In 1995, with partners, he had the opportunity to buy New Horizons – a 28-year-old business.
In 2002, he called Bediako and asked her to consider a big change.
At the time, she was living in Connecticut with her husband, a native New Yorker, and their three children. She had a job in marketing and communications.
“I’m like, sure, I don’t know anything about bakery,” she says. “But thanks, dad. I’m coming. So we packed everybody up. My youngest child, Rachel, was 6 years old.”
Now her husband works at New Horizons, too. So do two of their adult children.
“We don’t talk about business at the dinner table. Kills an appetite,” she says.
Bediako started out in human resources and worked her way up by shadowing her father and learning the industry. That also meant getting to know McDonald’s, which works with only a handful of bakeries across the United States.
“There's no contract,” she says of supplying baked goods to McDonald’s, which she described as a transparent and demanding customer. “There’s a handshake. So you better do it right – all the time.”
New Horizons makes English muffins sold at McDonald’s locations stretching from Brampton, Ontario, all the way down the East Coast to Georgia. The buns go to McDonald’s restaurants in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana.
The bakery also produces English muffins for Wendy’s and Dunkin’ in all 50 states and Canada, along with muffins sold at Starbucks and Walmart across the United States.
Bediako became CEO in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic.
People still needed to eat, of course. So New Horizons kept on baking – and avoided layoffs. But in a competitive labor market, the company had to make some changes.
“I make a lot of decisions every day. But I don’t make the buns and muffins,” says Bediako, who worked with her team to offer alternative schedules – three 12-hour shifts, followed by four days off, with pay for 40 hours each week.
She says productivity is up. Turnover is down. And morale is better.
“It’s not your father’s bakery,” Bediako says. “It’s not. My dad had 60 years in the business, and this is a whole different landscape. Covid showed us that we had to think differently, strategically. Plan differently. Give different consideration to the needs of the staff. And look at our business in a different way.”
The company moved into dry ingredients in 2021 and expanded into soups, sauces and dips last year, through acquisitions. Now Bediako is catching her breath. She’s getting that pancake line up and running for frozen Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches.
And she’s thinking about what’s next.
It might be waffles. Or maybe something sweet.
“The world is changing,” she says. “People’s palettes are changing.”
But the humble products that built this business aren’t going anywhere.
“There’s a whole lot of value,” she says, “in a bun.”
