Today we’d like to introduce you to Emma Smales.
Hi Emma, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers.
My great-great-grandfather, Rudy Schaaf started the pretzel bakery in 1906, it changed locations and names a few times until his daughter, Emma Smales found the current location at 210 Xenia Ave in 1926 and changed the name to Smales Pretzels Bakery. My great-grandmother ran the bakery with help from family until my grandfather, Charles Smales, came back from World War II and took over. He ran it until the 90s when my uncle Chuck (Charles Smales jr) took it over. My dad Lawrence (Larry) Smales then took control in the early 2000s. I became the owner when I moved to Dayton in 2015. I grew up in Los Angeles county, went to college at Sonoma State, and then completed my master’s of public health at California state university Northridge. In my last year at grad school, I visited my dad and realized the bakery wasn’t going to last much longer if someone didn’t intervene. After graduation, my fiancé (now husband) and I moved to Dayton and started running the pretzel bakery.
We made small changes at first, we had a lot of things that needed to be fixed. Walls, roof, flooring, etc. Then we bought a new dough-cutting and rolling machine, the old one was purchased in 1961 and was on its last leg. We couldn’t qualify for a business loan because we had just LLC. It was previously a sole proprietorship. So my mom took out a loan against her 401k so that we could buy a $40,000 machine. My grandpa actually died on the day the new machine was installed. He would have loved to see it work.
We painted the building and had a mural painted on the front so no one can miss the building now. Since then we have increased hard pretzel production and are in multiple grocery stores in the Dayton area. We bought a food truck in 2021 and have started offering freshly baked soft pretzels at private events. We now have 6 employees, my husband is the general manager, and I work full-time in public health.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
It has not been a smooth road. It was hard being considered a “new business” when we LLCed since we had actually been around for 100 years. The building is also really old so we have had to spend a lot of money on upkeep. The machines including the very large oven are old and break a lot.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
We are a pretzel bakery that has been making soft and hard pretzels the same way for over 100 years. We hand-twist every pretzel and they only have 4 ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and salt.
We are a fifth-generation owned family business. We ship hard pretzels all over the country.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
Whenever we would visit my dad in the summers, we would always work in the bakery. I remember ringing up people’s orders and having to do math since we didn’t have a cash register. Sometimes grandpa would bring us bags of burgers from the hamburger wagon. And we always went swimming after the bakery closed at 1 pm.
Pricing:
- Hard pretzels (bag of 25) $8
- T-shirts $18
- Sweatshirt $29
Contact Info:
- Website: Www.smalespretzels.com
- Instagram: @Smalespretzelbakery
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SmalesPretzelBakery
Image Credits
Knack Video + Photo
