Albuquerque's Fano Bread, facing inflationary pressures and other issues, enters a new reality

Stephanie Collins walked into the Fano Bread Co. bakery at 4605 McLeod NE on an early Tuesday morning to pick up some bread.

“Whenever I can get bread here, I’m really excited,” Collins said, remembering a time when she used to pick up the business’ baked goods at Albertsons. Her kids, she said, have food allergies — and at Fano Bread, nuts are out of the equation in the bake.

The more than 30-year-old local business is moving forward, but it’s facing a new reality. Fano Bread has downsized and reorganized, a significant shift from where the business used to be just a few months ago. The key ingredients to this shift: the increasing costs of supplies to make its well-recognized Artisan breads and a string of crime-ridden occurrences that hampered business operations.

Michael Rizzo, the owner of Fano Bread, said several issues — including, for example, increase in costs such as flour — made him reevaluate how the business should operate.

“On one hand, we just weren’t making the kind of margins that we need to make for it to be profitable, sustainable,” Rizzo said. “And on the other hand, I was getting burned out on certain aspects of the business. And I felt like it was time for a change.”

This new future includes customers coming into the shop to pick up orders instead of supplying the bread to grocers like Sprouts or Albertsons, considering Fano Bread has cut the number of businesses it works with.

The shop in mid-October announced on social media that it would begin accepting orders from customers for pickup.

Rizzo, whose father established Fano Bread in 1992, said the recent change in how Fano Bread does business is partly on him, moving slowly on analyzing the margins that moved as inflation did. He said certain supplies went up 30% to 50%. Or, more particularly, the cost it took to make a loaf of bread — and measuring it against what the business was selling it for — meant Fano Bread made mere cents on the dollar.

The company has also been the victim of crime — a hit-andrun put one employee out of work for the foreseeable future, a truck was stolen as well as some of their vehicles’ catalytic converters.

But why not close? Or sell the business? For Ivy Anna Rizzo, Michael’s wife and who also helps run Fano Bread, the answer is simple.

“There are generations of people in New Mexico who love our bread,” Ivy Anna Rizzo said. “We often talk to, like, a little grandma who’s been buying our bread for 30 years. I think there’s a feeling of loyalty — that we want to keep this a part of New Mexico’s culture.”

The recent shift has also meant the company has cut some employees and lost others due to the lack of available work. At Fano Bread’s peak this year, it employed about 18 people across production and distribution, Michael Rizzo said. Now, including him, the company employs about half a dozen.

The business also operates just one of its vehicles to distribute bread to others who will take it to stores across the city and Santa Fe, Michael Rizzo said.

And for the future, that’s how he wants to keep it, figuring out ways to get Fano Bread into the stores and restaurants it once did without operating as it had in the past.

The passion isn’t lost on the Rizzos. That’s why the company still exists in the form it does today. Michael Rizzo said his goal is to bring the company to a happy medium of sorts — not as big as it once was but also not as small as it is now.

That means, then, bringing back some of the customers it has worked with previously. For instance, Albertsons is looking to find a third-party distributor to bring Fano Bread into its stores once again, Michael Rizzo said. And the company has found new ways to get bread up to Santa Fe through the help of one other local business that makes trips up there.

Either way, for now, Fano Bread isn’t going anywhere. It’s just changing just like time does.

“I feel like we still do have our name. We’ve been around a long time,” Michael Rizzo said. “I’ve done it a long time (and) I feel like I could do it another 10-15 years.”