Acme Bread Company

Acme Bread's own account of its founding runs through Chez Panisse. Steve Sullivan was a 22-year-old busboy at the Berkeley restaurant when he became fixated on bread baking after reading Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery on a trip to Europe. He began bringing his own home-baked loaves to the restaurant for feedback; when the kitchen grew dissatisfied with the commercial bread it was buying, Alice Waters asked Sullivan to bake for Chez Panisse directly, a role he held for four years before striking out on his own.

In September 1983, Sullivan and his wife and business partner, Suzie Castello, opened The Acme Bread Company in a building owned by wine merchant Kermit Lynch, with Lynch and Waters both backing the venture. The bakery's founding mission, stated on its own site, was "to improve the quality of bread available in the Bay Area by baking and delivering carefully-made, crusty, long-fermented, hearth-baked bread to restaurants and stores." Acme moved to 100% organic flour in 1999, a commitment it has held since.

Acme sits at a specific point in the Bay Area's bread history: it predates the modern Tartine-style sourdough wave by roughly two decades and represents the direct link between the Chez Panisse-era push for slow-fermented, hearth-baked bread and the artisan-bread market that followed. The company expanded to Mountain View in the mid-1990s and to San Francisco's Ferry Building in 2002, and remains run in part by Sullivan and Castello's daughters, Becca and Rachel, alongside longtime shareholders.