Natalie Clifton has been baking nearly her whole life. It started in high school, turning out cookies and brownies for friends over the holidays and signing up for every home economics and culinary class she could. Her grandfather, who she was close to growing up, taught her the basics and handed her the kitchen whenever she wanted to practice or invent something new. In college, sorting out what to do with her life, she found her school’s culinary program and graduated with an associate of science in culinary arts and baking and pastry. The pastry side was always the passion. She’s worked in bakeries professionally for almost 15 years, the last of them at Macrina, where she joined in 2024 as quality assurance general manager.
Natalie grew up in Orange County, California, where she met her husband in high school and where both of her daughters were born. Her father had moved to Olympia around the time her oldest was born, and a visit when the baby was about a year old left the family taken with Washington. A few years later, looking for a role outside California, she was offered an opportunity in Seattle. With her dad nearby to help scout neighborhoods, they made the move in October 2018 and haven’t looked back.
As quality assurance general manager, Natalie works alongside the other GMs to keep product quality and consistency high across the board, from the Macrina cafes to the wholesale accounts. Much of her focus is on day-to-day operations and on building the processes that will carry the bakery through its next stretch of growth, in customers and in what’s on offer. It’s a job that touches everything. She works with teams across the company and sees the full arc of a product, from raw ingredient to packaged goods. Macrina is always improving and growing, she says, and she gets to work at the center of it, developing new products, sharpening existing processes and helping roll out new systems across the production floor.
Macrina is unlike any bakery she’s worked in. The range of products keeps all kinds of customers happy, and the people, in her experience, genuinely care about the product, about each other, and about what they do every day. She’s noticed that whenever she mentions where she works, the reaction is the same: real, unprompted excitement. “I’m excited to work somewhere that makes such an impact on its communities, customers and employees,” she says.
Natalie lives in Puyallup with her husband, Bryan, to whom she’s been married 16 years, and their two girls, Stella and Layla. The household also includes a cat named Elvis and a dog named Cupcake. They spend whatever time they can near the water, and at home they cook, bake and garden together.
