The Fresh CEO

The Fresh CEO

The saga of a bread-loving bootlicker.

Fresh out of Cal’s business school in the mid-1980s, Tom Frainier landed a job at Clorox in bustling downtown Oakland and was on his way to becoming yet another anonymous corporate dude. But then his mouth got in the way. So he quit and joined forces with his sister and brother-in-law at their fledgling storefront bakery in Kensington with the odd name: Semifreddi’s. He even moved in with them (and, believe it or not, they’re still talking). Today, Semifreddi’s delivers fresh artisan bread and other goodies throughout the Bay Area from a state-of-the-art new facility in Alameda. It’s a long way from the little storefront, but as I found out on a recent visit, even though he’s now a true captain of industry, Frainier still doesn’t act like one.

Paul Kilduff: You got the MBA and started working at Clorox. You bleach-dyed your hair with Clorox. But it just wasn’t your personality. What happened?

TF: [In] my last performance review there, everything was really good and they were saying some very nice things about me. But at the end, they said, “Tom has an image problem. He has an extremely quick wit but he sometimes uses it inappropriately.” And I said, “Sometimes? How about all the time?” I believe in having fun. I believe in laughing at work and being serious as well. But I just felt like I couldn’t do it. I saw myself 35 years down the road and I just didn’t want to spend the rest of my life there. It wasn’t a bad company. A lot of friends still work there. For me, it was time to go. I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was sort of like jumping off a cliff. I felt like the Tom Petty song, “Free Fallin’.”

PK: Yeah.

TF: And, luckily, the parachute opened. My sister and brother-in-law had a little tiny bakery in Kensington and they said, “Why don’t you come help us while you figure out what you want to do?” So, I went from making—in January of ’88, $70,000 a year plus restricted stock, which was real money back then—to seven bucks an hour, and I loved it. I remember walking in at 4 a.m., never baked a thing in my life, to Kensington. And the smells and the lighting in there— boom! I felt, “This is where I belong.” And within a week, on a handshake, I said, “I want to become your third partner. I’ve got energy. I’ve got some money I can invest.” And they said, “Cool.” And we all lived together on Milvia Street in Berkeley. We were working together and living together and [dealing with] the stress of trying to do a small business—we get along most of the time.

PK: When I buy products like yours, I say, “We’re having company and it’s a holiday so we’ll get some nice bread.” But sometimes I say, “How long is it going to last? Is it going to be like a doorstop in a day?”

TF: Well, you obviously went to Cal because you’re asking very penetrating and intellectual questions. We really wanted to be a daily bread and our breads do last longer than a day. We have the challah product, the cinnamon twist that lasts days and days and days. Our loaf breads, first day, yeah; second day, yeah. Next day, you might have to heat it up, then make toast and then do something else with it. I had a levain in my kitchen for four days and I made toast with it. It was just incredible.

PK: Why do you refer to yourself on your business card as the Chief Boot Licker?

TF: In the co-ops [dorms at Cal], we all had to do work shifts. And talk about a bunch of characters. There were 150 total oddballs, which totally prepared me for what I do now. The guy that was the work shift manager called himself Boot Licker and I thought that was very clever. I’m a big Who fan and they’ve used boot-licker in some of their songs. So I said, “Hey, CEO, Chief Boot Licker.” It is a constant reminder that I’m nothing without the people around me. And that as soon as you accept that, as the person in charge, you are really there to serve everybody else, it becomes a different way of looking at it and you keep your ego in check. I can give that card to the most conservative people in business and they love it because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re all doing. You’re trying to get something done. You’re not trying to piss people off.

PK: We are the world.

TF: Exactly. And I don’t really believe that I’m better than the janitor. Do I get paid more? Yes. Do my opinions count more? Yes. But at the end of the day, we don’t—and this is pretty much everybody that works here—we don’t think we’re better than somebody. Everybody deserves to be treated with respect.

PK: Semifreddi? Was that the name of somebody’s dog?

TF: Some people think it’s a name of a trucker. They didn’t have a focus group at the time. The [original owners] were at the Cheese Board and they decided to leave. They went to Italy and saw all these bakery windows with “Semifreddo” and they thought, “Oh, what a cool name.” So they took the plural and named it Semifreddi. Well, I don’t think they really ever knew what it meant. We were about two years into it and a customer came in and said, “You know what that means?” We said no. They said, it’s like half-frozen, half-cold. Naming a bread bakery Half Cold would be like naming a school We Don’t Know How to Teach, you know? But the name stuck. People remember it.

PK: Who’s your American Idol?

TF: My parents, first. Muhammad Ali. Anybody from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs to Michael Dell, these guys who kept America on the cutting edge of technology. Internationally, my all-time hero would be Richard Branson of Virgin. His whole philosophy is that large corporations provide no service to their customers. They market like they provide service but they [don’t]. He’s gone into industries and just changed them.

PK: You may remember this place called the Buttercup Bakery at College and Alcatraz. I applied for a job there and the last question was, “What would you do to change the world?” And so, being a college-age smart-ass, I wrote, “I would get people to buy more baked goods.”

TF: Hey, you know what? I like that.

PK: Well, I didn’t get that job.

TF: I would have hired you. It’s no longer there. And maybe that’s because they didn’t hire you.

PK: I could have changed that place. You would have hired me. That was the right answer.

TF: Exactly. I probably would have promoted you fairly quickly, too.

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For more Kilduff, visit the “Kilduff File Super Fan Page” on Facebook.


TOM FRAINIER Vital Stats

Age: 54

Birthplace: Buffalo, N.Y.

Astrological sign: Virgo/Libra. I feel like I’m a Virgo at work, but a Libra in my personal life. I’m kind of anal at work. But [personally] I’ve never balanced a checkbook in my life.

Three rules of business: Take care of the customer, take care of the customer, take care of the customer.

Favorite pizza: A Neopolitan at Arinell’s.

Exit strategy: Death. There’s no luggage rack on a hearse.

Blogsite: semifreddis.com

Faces of the East Bay