During shelter-in-place, when it seemed everyone started baking sourdough, Anderson got to work trying to recreate that loaf. The finicky process of fermenting the sourdough starter to produce the right amount of rise and baking the loaves at the perfect temperature became meditative for Anderson. He found baking helped him process the emotional trauma of the pandemic and incidents of police violence that sparked protests in 2020.

“I didn’t even know I was going to love to do it, until the act of doing it calmed my mind and kinda healed part of my heart,” he said. “The act of actually making sourdough made me happy and so I just did it more and more. And when it made me happy, it made other people happy. I could spend my whole life doing this.”

Months after he started baking sourdough, he started selling loaves out of his backyard in San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood. Soon, people lined up for the coveted bread, and Rize Up Bakery was born.

Today, Anderson’s loaves are sold at San Francisco grocery stores including Rainbow Grocery and Gus’s Community Market, and is found on menus at buzzy restaurants including Flour + Water, ABACÁ and The Morris. To match the demand, Anderson moved to a commercial Kitchen last fall, hiring a slew of new bakers to build his company.

A racial divide in the baking world

Before the pandemic, Anderson worked in professional kitchens and in private catering. At some of his restaurant jobs, he noticed a racial divide among staff.

“I’m a 6-foot-3 Black guy. You walk into a kitchen and I stand out like a sore thumb,” he said. “There was this weird color line where it’s like all the brown people come in and get everything ready and then all the white folks with tattoos show up and they make twice as much and they’re the ones you see.”

When it came to hiring for his bakery, he wanted to do things a different way. Most of his bakers have no professional experience in kitchens. Many joined after following Anderson on Instagram.

“It’s expensive, because most of the people that I hired didn’t have very much experience, so we’re teaching them from the ground up,” he said. “The people here chose to be here. They weren’t headhunted, they weren’t offered a lot of money. They said ‘I want to do this with you.’”

Susie Breuer worked in the fashion industry for more than 30 years, but right before the pandemic, she decided she wanted a career change.

“I wanted to make something which was compostable and didn’t just land in landfill,” Breuer said. “I’d always enjoyed cooking. I want to work towards a product that nourishes people, that is also better for the planet than a pile of clothes that we don’t need.”

She now handles Rize Up’s recipe development and prepares all the inclusions that go into Anderson’s creative loaves. She chops the scallions and shops for the gochujang that go into the K-Pop loaf. She also sources the curry leaves that go into the Masala loaf.