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.