Bella Lopez came to Macrina in March 2019 for the overnight packer job, drawn by hours that fit her life then. In the interview Scott Romine from HR told her she was overqualified and pointed her toward an office opening instead. She interviewed for customer service and was hired soon after. She grew from there. In December 2021 she became assistant manager of the wholesale office, and general manager in September 2025. She now tracks issues across the company, working to minimize mistakes, and serves as donations coordinator, working with Leslie Mackie on the bread, pastry, and merchandise Macrina gives to organizations around the Pacific Northwest.

The pull toward serving people is older than the bakery. Before Macrina she was the lead office liaison at a real estate company, doing the early groundwork for buyers before handing them to a lender. Before that she spent several years at World Vision, a Seattle nonprofit. “My passion for serving others has shown in the previous work I’ve done,” says Bella. “I came to Macrina having developed skills that help me connect with the community through our many donations.” 

Bella grew up around Burien and Federal Way, and spent her childhood traveling between there and California to see family, making memories she now passes on to her own kids.

Today she runs the wholesale side of the bakery and looks after its customers, overseeing the wholesale office and the accounts receivable department. The office holds four customer service reps. No two days are the same. Around the steady work of calls, emails, and entering orders into Cybake, something new always turns up: an order to troubleshoot, a redelivery to coordinate, samples to taste. She calls the office the hub of Macrina. When a problem comes up, people bring it there, and if the answer is not in the room, the office finds someone who has it.

Plenty has changed since she arrived. She saw the heavy order volume before COVID, then rode out the shutdowns with Macrina, essential workers keeping an essential business open and inventing new products to meet what the community needed. Staff have turned over, as they do, but she has watched many long-tenured people keep growing with the place. Her proudest moments are about people rising. In October 2025 she promoted one of her reps, Megan, to a lead role the office had never had, showing the team that growth here is real. She has cross-trained her team across departments too.

Her favorite thing about Macrina is the people, who carry the same values and care into the job. Bella lives in Federal Way with her two daughters, turning eight and four this year, the little gremlins who keep her ready for anything. Off the clock she is with family and friends: paint nights, hikes around the Pacific Northwest, concerts, new restaurants, and trips to Disneyland or the coast. In the quiet hours she reads, writes, paints, draws, and when she can, naps.

Scott Romine started at Macrina in 2013, driving deliveries overnight. About a year and a half in he moved up to shift lead and stayed there a couple of years before the night schedule wore him down. He found a home in the office as a customer service rep, still close to the delivery side, running routes and keeping the vans up. That connection led him into hiring for the department. When Macrina grew enough in 2019 to need a full-time HR person, Scott had the experience and got the job. He has been in HR ever since, promoted to general manager in 2023 and to the leadership team this year.

His title now is human resources manager, and the work reaches every corner of the company. He oversees one person directly, but the job puts him alongside everyone, from general managers to crew. No two days look alike. He keeps the bakery compliant with labor law, walks employees through their benefits, makes sure open jobs get filled, and helps sort out the hard situations that come up in any workplace. Helping people is the part he likes best. When someone has a question about benefits or a problem on the floor, being the one who can smooth it out is what keeps him coming back.

He has watched the place grow from the inside. Scott helped move the bakery from the cramped SODO space into the much larger warehouse in Kent, and they did it without losing a single day of production for the wholesale customers who count on them. Back in SODO you could barely thread through the metro racks to pack the bread. He figured they would never fill the Kent building. Now the talk is about space being tight again.

His proudest moments run alongside the hard ones. Guiding the bakery and its people through the pandemic. Getting Macrina fully staffed again in the years after. Moving HR off a bespoke system onto real software. What he loves most, though, is the people. Macrina’s core value of staying positive is the one that sticks with him. Nobody wants to spend their days somewhere negative, he says. It is bad for the soul. What sets the place apart is plain in the halls. Walk through the bakery and people smile and say hi.

Scott lives within walking distance of downtown White Center, in a house he and his wife bought in 2022, a stone’s throw from where he grew up. He shares it with his wife and their cats. When he is off the clock he is usually out skateboarding. Winters he walks Alki and plays video games.

Aaron Rose turned 19 a month into his first job at Macrina, packing bread in 2015. He made delivery lead before his first anniversary, then assistant manager a year after that. In 2021 he started splitting his time with the maintenance team, went full time by late 2022, and was soon promoted to maintenance general manager. The trade was already in him. His father was a pipe fitter and then an HVAC tech, and Aaron grew up on the jobsite beside him. 

Today he oversees the facilities, equipment and machines at every Macrina location. The maintenance team is two people, Aaron and his assistant manager, Amos, plus whoever they can and need to pull in to keep the bakery running. He starts wherever he’s needed and bends his schedule to whatever department needs him most. Much of the work is after hours and out of sight. He plans repairs and preventive maintenance as far ahead as he can, though something new always lands on the list. The variety is what he loves. Instead of one trade repeated daily, he gets all of them: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, control voltage, mechanical, and on down the line. Every machine is its own puzzle, with wiring diagrams and components and failures that can only be learned through experience. 

He’s watched the place grow from the inside. A decade ago, maintenance ran out of a cramped corner behind the SODO café. Making every inch count was key. Now there’s a wholesale warehouse in Kent with room to spare. People have come and gone, but Aaron still sees some of the same delivery crew who were there his first day, and the volume of bread moving through is nothing like back then. 

His favorite thing about Macrina is that every manager seems to be pulling toward the same vision. “We want success for each other, and everyone here is a great resource for help,” he says. A close second: the pastries. The culture, he adds, is nothing like a jobsite. It’s more a “let’s work together” than a “just getting the job done” kind of place. 

Aaron lives in Burien with his wife and three daughters. His hours still move around, with a night shift here and there, but it suits his present lifestyle better than his delivery days when nights were the whole job. Between his family and the bakery, he figures he’s found the balance. He skateboards with his kids, gardens with his wife, and travels with all of them. After the work around the house is done, of course.