The Catalina Bakery
The Plaza San Jose/Build A Miracle Bakery
The Catalina Bakery is our very own BAM bakery that was opened in 2022, after the construction of the business building, Plaza San Jose. Our business model for the bakery was created with the desire to benefit the greatest amount of people possible. We have a head baker who teaches classes to train bakers and develop baking teams. Our bakers not only learn and practice a useful skill, but also make extra money to support their families from the bread that the bakery sells to the bread sellers. There are 5-6 people who bake each day and prepare bread to be delivered to our bread sellers in 8 different BAM communities.
Our sellers can earn $20 selling 100 pieces of bread in a 2-3 hour period, which is similar to typical factory wages working 9 hours a day. If they sell 100 pieces just two days a week, they can earn $40. This is about a 40% increase in the weekly salary of the family, so although that may not sound like a lot, it is really a big amount for them.
The Panaderia Catalina now makes 9,000 pieces of bread each week. Each day, the finished bread gets put into tubs and then delivered by our driver to the many different communities where we now have 70 people selling bread and earning extra income!
Any bread not sold is shared with people in the BAM Grandparent Program. These seniors are welcome to eat the bread or to sell it for income. We even have a few who became sellers and now order bread regularly so that they can earn some extra money.
One story of many…
Cinthia is a woman who is on a waiting list for a home. Unfortunately, we are unable to build a house for her family at this time because they do not own their land (if we were to build a BAM home on land that is not owned by the family, the house could be taken away by the landowners). The day we met her, she explained that they have tried to pay for their land over several years, but her husband’s job is unstable; oftentimes he doesn’t earn anything for the week and their land payments go unpaid in favor of food for their children. They had to stop paying a couple times and then their payments started over from zero – and the cost of the land went up to whatever the owner determined was the current price and they restarted from there.
We visited her home around the time when we were looking for people to sell the bread they were baking at the Catalina Bakery. She said she would love to sell it, but didn’t know how she could manage the trays with her very active one year old. That problem was easily solved with a couple clicks on Amazon and a baby carrier delivered to our house the next day for us to bring to her.
She has since become one of our most enthusiastic sellers. It always makes us smile when we see pictures of her selling bread day and night with her baby on her back and see how hard she is working to help support her family.
