Our Mission Statement

Appears in
Zingerman's Bakehouse
Zingerman's Bakehouse

By Amy Emberling

Published 2017

  • About

AMY: An important part of the Bakehouse story is our mission statement. We created it in 1994, and it’s been a solid guide through years of opportunities and challenges. What is it exactly? It’s a written statement that answers these questions:

  • Who are we?
  • What do we do?
  • Why do we do it?
  • Who do we do it for?

When done well a mission statement encompasses the most important values of a business and is a shorthand expression of the organization’s purpose. It is general enough that it never needs to be revised. It’s essentially timeless. We think mission statements are most effective when they are created by many people in an organization (not handed down from on high) and are relatively short so that people can actually commit them to memory and recite them. No worries about keeping them top of mind when they’re in everyone’s mind. We created ours one afternoon with the twenty-some employees of the Bakehouse at the time and have used it to keep us on track with the choices we’ve faced ever since.