Rock Hill Bakehouse adapts

By Zander Frost, Chronicle Staff Writer

In its 34th year, Rock Hill Bakehouse in Glens Falls employs 26 people, bakes 20,000 loaves of bread a week at peak summer, and is going great guns offering cinnamon buns, pain au chocolat and other pastries all done vegan-style.

Owner Matt Funiciello says they’re thriving but they face many challenges, including to his own clearly defined set of principles. He turned his whole business vegan and ran for Congress twice as a Green Party candidate in 2014 and 2016.

Matt said maintaining the quality of his product and compensating his workers well are his cornerstones, but says that “not charging so much for the bread that we appear as some kind of elitist mechanism is a huge challenge.”

“Our ingredients are almost 30% higher than they were two years ago, that’s a major expense for us,” he said. He said they were “already buying expensive flour to begin with,” from Canada.

“Our labor is about 20% more expensive than it was, to keep up with everybody else’s wages,” he said.

He said Rock Hill increased the minimum wage it pays to $18 plus tips, from the $15 minimum he established years ago. “For the first time ever, we found ourselves, to stay above restaurant wages in this area, we pushed for a higher minimum wage for ourselves,” Matt said.

With increased expenses, inevitably bread prices have to go up, prompting Matt to ask rhetorically, “How can you be in a supermarket with a $7 loaf of bread or a $6 loaf of bread?”

One answer has been to keep “our simpler breads that are much less ingredient intensive, lower in price.”

While sticking to his fundamentals on ingredients and pay, Matt did something that for him might once have been unthinkable. He purchased direct from China a set of large tilt mixers that he found on the sales website Alibaba.

“Having to adapt and compromise my principles,” he jokes.

Matt said the European equivalent of these mixers would have cost around $200,000. He got these for $13,500 each.

“That’s literally a quarter of the cheapest price we would have paid from any American distributor,” Matt said, which he notes “don’t have this level.”

He said access to this equipment is typically only attainable by larger bakeries and presented an unprecedented opportunity for Rock Hill.

“One of the hardest things to do physically, is to pull dough from a bowl,” Matt says. It weighs 500 to 600 pounds.

“You got maybe four or five minutes to pull that dough out before it needs to be full again and mixing the next dough.”

Matt says the work is “grueling” — and it’s difficult to find workers to do it.

“How do you get it out of the bowl?” Matt asks. “You use a knife and you cut it out, you pull it out with your hands. That may sound like it’s not that big of a deal,” but it is.

He said these new “tilt mixers” make the process far, far, easier.

He says he discovered the mixers on the Chinese website Alibaba, “which I’ve always thought was kind of a scam.”

Matt said they watched video that, to his disbelief, showed a fantastic product. He says he contacted American bakeries who vouched for it, too.

After a process that he said included talking to customs expediters at the port in New York City — the mixers arrived.

Matt voices concern that the workers making the product are themselves paid a living wage, but he says the reality is that if he ordered the mixers for the far higher European price, “they’re getting almost all their parts from China and assembling it in Europe.”

So he says the increase in price is not being shared by workers anyway.

Unlike, Matt says, buying a car from BMW, which he says commits to compensate its employees well enough that they can buy the cars they’re making.

Matt said he expects the cafe and bakery to be very busy this summer, with a surge in vegan demand after Birch Bark Eatery’s departure from Glens Falls.

Rock Hill Bakehouse & Cafe is located in the Shirt Factory Annex at 11 Curran Lane, off Lawrence Street in Glens Falls.

Gabriella Lanci, from Mexico, makes Rock Hill’s vegan pastries

Beyond its mainstay bread, Rock Hill Bakehouse owner Matt Funiciello touts the pain au chocolat, cinnamon buns and other treats — all vegan — made by Mexico City-born and -trained pastry chef Gabriella Lanci.

Matt says she came to this area to work at the Sagamore.

“We were losing our long-time pastry chef,” who was moving out of the area, Matt said, calling it a big hole to fill. “I’ve had literally two pastry chefs the whole time since South Glens Falls.”

Matt says, “I didn’t even have time to put an ad up because the next day” Gabriella approached him.

“I want to make pastries, that’s what I love. That’s what I went to school for,” he says Gabriella told him.

“It was absolutely like the universe saying ‘Here, Matt, and here’s the perfect person to do what Rock Hill needs to have done’.”

After one day, Matt says his departing baker told him, “I don’t even need to finish training. She’s amazing.”

Gabriella “is making these as a non vegan pastry chef who’s learning how to do these things from scratch,” Matt said, using coconut oil. “I’m just in awe, because that takes a lot of skill.”

Matt said Gabriella’s husband Tom Lanci is an old friend who now works “a couple of shifts” weekly at Rock Hill, too.
— Zander Frost

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