A father’s pitas, a downtown shop and a decision to sell wholesale.

Ozery Family Bakery is a Canadian bakery brand known for pitas, buns and its Morning Rounds, a line of round fruit and grain breakfast breads. Its story begins in a sandwich shop. The Globe and Mail, in a feature by Gillian Livingston published on 9 June 2020, wrote that the company had come a long way from making pita bread by hand in the back of a sandwich shop in downtown Toronto in the late 1990s.

The Globe named the people involved. It said Alon Ozery started the business after his father, Al Ozery, had been making many different kinds of pita bread every day in the back of the Pita Break restaurant at Yonge and Wellesley streets. The flavour was baked into the bread itself, Guy Ozery told the paper, naming flax, zesty oregano, garlic and onion among the varieties. BakeryandSnacks.com, in an article by Douglas Yu dated 2 February 2017, described the same start: before the bakery was launched, it said, the brothers Alon and Guy Ozery ran a small sandwich shop in downtown Toronto, making sandwiches with pitas baked on site.

The company dates itself to 1996. On its own blog, in a post dated 12 September 2016, Ozery said it had held a family picnic for its team that August to celebrate its 20th anniversary. In a press release published by NOSH on 28 June 2019, Alon Ozery said the company had been in the business for over 20 years.

The turn from restaurant to bakery came from the customers. The Globe reported that people began buying the pita bread on its own, and that as demand grew the family had to choose between opening more Pita Break locations and selling the bread wholesale. “We decided to go wholesale,” Guy Ozery told the paper, adding that the company grew slowly into the chains. He named two Toronto food stores, The Big Carrot and Pusateri’s Fine Foods, as early customers that were still buying from Ozery in 2020.

Two brothers, a Vaughan bakery and a family business.

The two brothers have shared the leadership. In the Globe and Mail feature of June 2020, Guy Ozery was described as the company’s chief executive and, in a photo caption, as co-chief executive. Ozery’s press releases from 2019 describe Alon Ozery as founder, as chief executive in June of that year and as co-president in November.

The bakery now works at a larger scale. BakeryandSnacks.com wrote in 2017 that Ozery supplied distributors, retailers and food-service customers in the United States and Canada from a facility in the greater Toronto area, and the Globe located the bakery in Vaughan, Ontario, in 2020. Guy Ozery told the Globe that the company had worked with local firms to build custom automated production lines designed to imitate handwork. “It’s one of the secrets as to why the products are so good,” he said.

The range now goes beyond pita. The Globe listed pitas, pre-sliced sandwich buns, fruit and grain morning buns, brioche buns, Moroccan-style frena buns and lavash crackers, sold in Canadian grocery and health food stores and, in the United States, at retailers including Publix, Safeway and Sprouts Farmers Market. The paper also said the company delivered direct to stores in Ontario and Quebec through in-house and independent distributors.

Morning Rounds have been shown at trade fairs. BakeryandSnacks.com reported in February 2017 that the family-owned bakery had unveiled a single-serve Muesli Morning Rounds at the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, and named cranberry orange, apple cinnamon, cinnamon and raisin, and date and chia among the other flavours. In the same article, Alon Ozery said Ozery was a family business and planned to remain one, and that he saw no plans for the company to be acquired by a major packaged-goods company. “Our plan is to use our company to do more good in the world,” he told the publication.

Design and documentation.

Packaged bread and Asian-style grocery goods sit side by side in many American supermarkets, yet they reach shoppers through very different kinds of packaging. A sliced loaf usually travels in a soft, printed bag gathered at the neck and closed with a twist tie or a small plastic tag, so the bag itself has to carry the name, the variety and the colour cues that help a shopper pick one loaf from a long shelf of similar ones.

Asian-style sauces, by contrast, are often sold in glass or plastic bottles with a wrap-around or front label, while dried and fresh noodles come in flat bags, trays or boxes with a window or a photograph of the cooked dish. In both cases the label has to work at arm’s length, in an aisle where many similar products compete for attention.

Each guide in this group sets out what independent sources record about a brand — who started it, who has owned it and where its products are made — separately from what the company says about itself, and treats the palette shown here as an unofficial interpretation rather than an official specification.

A 2019 rebrand that spelled out the whole name, and a new seal on the pack.

The current look dates from 2019. In a press release published by NOSH on 28 June 2019, the company announced new packaging and branding that would roll out in retail locations from July that year. The release said the new design was meant to reflect the brand’s upbeat and vibrant personality while pointing to its heritage.

The change that reached the logo concerned the name. The release said the full “Ozery Family Bakery” name would now appear on the logo, as a homage to the family’s tradition and to its roots in a little sandwich shop in downtown Toronto. “We started as a small family-owned bakery and wanted to convey that distinct messaging to the people who trust” the brand, Alon Ozery said in the release. He added that the company hoped the new look would make the brand more approachable, and that it was excited to see how people would react to the rebranding.

The front of the pack was also reorganised. According to the 2019 release, it would carry a Vegan and Kosher seal and point out the use of real fruit and the absence of artificial preservatives, colours and flavours, claims the company makes about its products. Alon Ozery had described the range in similar terms to BakeryandSnacks.com in 2017.

A further mark followed. In a second release published by NOSH on 20 November 2019, Alon Ozery, described as co-president and founder, said the company focused on its products and consumers, its communities, its team members, the planet and the business.

The same 2019 release described the new packaging as sleek and eye-catching, designed to put the product’s attributes in front of shoppers, and listed Amazon, Whole Foods, Safeway, Sprouts, H-E-B, Costco and Publix among the places where Ozery Family Bakery products were sold.

For a design guide, Ozery shows how a bakery can turn its own origin story, a father’s pitas at a downtown sandwich counter, into the wording of its logo. Compare it with Sunbeam, a bread brand built on a painted character, and Dave’s Killer Bread, an Oregon bakery brand that also puts a family story on the bag. For this guide we use olive green, toasted wheat, berry red, deep olive and flour cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ozery Family Bakery’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.