A crostata di zucca — a squash tart — from Monica Von Thun Calderón’s Grandaisy Bakery travels from New York City to Japan on a 14-hour flight every Thanksgiving. It’s a family tradition so beloved, the man in line tells Von Thun Calderón that he can’t make the trip without one.
Such a compliment transcends what any foodie could ever hope for, but bringing people together through baked goods is exactly what Von Thun Calderón set out to do when she started Grandaisy in 2006. Twenty years later, the TC alumna has built something that is more than just hers. Grandaisy — a bright, unassuming gem in TriBeCa — belongs to the community that turns to Von Thun Calderón and her skilled team of 50 for pastries to warm cold mornings, challah to start Shabbat dinners, and her famous Roman pizza (lauded by New York magazine), because eating well is about more than just having what you need but savoring what you want.
And while Von Thun Calderón herself is not a baker, her journey to running a successful small business is deeply informed by her background in TC’s Anthropology & Education program, through which she researched the ties between coca leaf production and education in her family’s home country of Bolivia.
The Grandaisy Cake (see recipe below). (Photo: JD Closser)
“Once you’re an anthropologist, you’re always an anthropologist,” says Von Thun Calderón, who has prioritized the education and well-being of the Grandaisy team as part of her people-first approach to both life and business. “That [perspective] wasn’t obvious or popular when we were talking about this twenty years ago. . . . You make something good, you treat people well, people come and enjoy it, and then you can keep going.”
So how does one build a thriving, community-driven bakery in a competitive market? Von Thun Calderón sat down with TC Today to give us the recipe.
Ingredients
- Hands-on, global experience as an anthropology researcher & scholar
- Passion for handcrafted bread and how it brings people together
- A business model that puts people first
- An inspiring grandmother
- Butter, flour and vision
If you're going to make something work, you have to be ready to work a lot. And so it has to be something you like.
Step 1 - Find inspiration in your truth. Von Thun Calderón’s earliest memories of baking and cooking took place in her grandmother Daisy’s kitchen, where the matriarch baked torta de capas (a layered coconut cake) and cookies for “every kid on the block.” When the family relocated to Denver, Colo., after living in Bolivia for years, Von Thun Calderón and her brother re-learned English, and with their Spanish accents, “grandmother” was challenging to say. The nickname ‘Grandaisy’ was born, and Von Thun Calderón honors her grandmother with the bakery, where her family’s torta de capas recipe is a notable favorite.
Step 2 - Be open to possibilities. While teaching English as a second language for her first job after college, Von Thun Calderón noticed her students excelled in their language practice when they could engage with their passions in the classroom. Anthropology, Von Thun Calderón believed, could unlock new possibilities as an ESL teacher, and so she embarked on her graduate work at Teachers College with the intention of teaching ESL at the community college level.
While at TC, a job with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) brought her to Italy for a year to conduct research on the children of immigrants. There, Italy’s culture around community and food captivated Von Thun Calderón, and when she returned to New York, she helped start Sullivan Street Bakery in 1994.
Von Thun Calderón in the kitchen of Grandaisy Bakery. (Photo: JD Closser)
Step 3 - Work hard at what you love. Von Thun Calderón’s life consisted of 18-hour days in the early years of her small business journey. But she wasn’t exhausted; she was invigorated. “If you're going to make something work, you have to be ready to work a lot,” says the TC alumna. “And so it has to be something you like.”
Was Von Thun Calderón ever afraid it wouldn’t work out? “Even to this day, if anything isn’t working, it just means I need to work more on some level.”
Step 4 - Build a strong team. Over the past 20 years, Von Thun Calderón has scaled Grandaisy through restaurant wholesale while remaining true to her vision of building a community-first bakery. When asked what advice she has for aspiring business owners, Von Thun Calderón is resolute: “Hire people who are smarter and better than you at everything that you can. Hire people that can help you fill the gaps of what you can’t do.”
Step 5 - Stay nimble and keep going. As Grandaisy celebrates its 20th anniversary, Von Thun Calderón is looking to expand the business’s restaurant clientele. She’s hoping to travel to Bolivia with her mother, now in her 80s, and she’s learning about “emergent strategy” — a framework by Adrienne Maree Brown that suggests humans can learn from the natural world how to handle change more effectively. Navigating shifts is not something new to Von Thun Calderón. (“You have to be really resilient,” she says.) But it’s that openness to change that leads you to the most unexpected of places — like hearing about a customer taking your tart on a plane to Japan.