“No organization has done more for good bread in this country than the Bread Bakers Guild,” says Scott France, Macrina’s president and co-owner. “When Macrina opened in 1993, the Guild was just getting started. The artisan bread movement owes much to the Guild.”
Consider American bread in 1993. Soft supermarket loaves were everywhere. Bread with a crackling crust, made of nothing but flour, water, salt, and time, was hard to find and harder to learn to make. After culinary school, Leslie had gone to Europe to learn breads that required a long, slow fermentation before returning to Seattle and refining her craft at Grand Central Bakery before opening Macrina. Most American bakers made do with a few books, a scattering of classes, and whoever happened to be working down the street. In 1993 the Bread Bakers Guild of America brought together a group of people who discovered they were all trying to do the same thing. It gave bakers who had each been solving the same problems alone a place to find one another and compare notes.
Three decades on, it has nearly 2,000 members, including bakery owners, bakery employees, millers, farmers, suppliers, teachers, students, and serious home bakers. Its mission is to help craft bakeries and working bakers thrive, and it pursues that through classes, field trips, and gatherings. In 2025 those programs drew more than 2,500 registrations.
Macrina has been part of it nearly the whole way, both as a member and in leadership roles. Leslie Mackie served on the Guild board from 2012 to 2015. Scott serves today as its treasurer.
We never stop learning
Ask anyone at Macrina and you will hear the same thing. There is always more to know.
Sergio Castañeda, our production manager, takes baking classes through the Guild, as do other members of our production team. Fanny Alvarado, our director of operations, and Scott each went through the Bakery Leadership Circle, a months-long seminar in which bakery owners and operators from around the country work through the business challenges of running a successful bakery. In 2024 our whole leadership team went to Camp Bread, the Guild’s flagship gathering, three days of hands-on education and shared meals with bakers from everywhere. We plan to go again in 2027.
No secrets
Passionate bakers of any age learn from those with experience working with different styles and wheats. There are no secrets. Just a love of artisanal breads, bagels, pies, cakes, and pastries — and a desire to help others learn new techniques and recipes. A baker with a question can get an answer from someone who has been at it for forty years. Bakeries open their doors to visitors, including their competitors. Any Guild member who wants to visit Macrina is welcome, and many have.
That same spirit runs through the whole world of grain. When The Bread Lab up in Skagit Valley hosted a grain gathering this year, Sergio took a class there, and Leslie and Scott drove up for the dinner. Other Guild members filled the room. The Bread Lab is its own organization with its own focus, but the people are the same people, and the conversations run in the same direction. It is part of why we include organic heirloom wheats milled at Cairnspring Mills in our breads. You can taste the results.
What a cookie can do
Which brings us back to the shortbread.
Every Brown Sugar Shortbread sold from September 7 to 13 helps the Guild do what it does. Last year it ran classes on fermentation, lamination, whole grains, and baker’s math, took bakers into the fields and mills where their flour begins, and brought more than forty bakeries together for three days of learning. The Guild’s goal is a sustainable path into a baking career, and into bakery ownership, for anyone willing to do the work.
So buy a cookie. You won’t be sorry. And it helps raise the bar for bread and pastry at bakeries across the country. Macrina included.
