Photograph by Wedig + Laxton
It was the second day of Ramadan when I visited Sugar Bowl Bakery’s manufacturing facility in Tucker, so I happened to be fasting—and was greeted immediately, as I got out of my car at the far end of the factory parking lot, by the irresistible scent of baked sugar. The smell only got stronger as I approached the building, and I wondered how I’d make it through a two-hour tour of a factory that mixes, bakes, and packages nearly 1.2 million cookies a day. If I was tempted, it turned out, I wasn’t alone: Many of the employees working there were also observing the Muslim holy month.
Much of the staff at Sugar Bowl are refugees and immigrants from countries including Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A small prayer room, with a half-dozen Islamic prayer mats on the floor, is right next door to the breakroom, whose signs are translated into French, Amharic, Arabic, Dari, and Pashto. “We just celebrated 33 days without any safety incident,” Jairo de Jesus, the facility’s director of operations, told me. He’d planned on celebrating by organizing a meal for everyone, but decided to hold off until Ramadan ended.
Photograph by Wedig + Laxton
Photograph by Wedig + Laxton
Sugar Bowl was founded in 1984 by Andrew Ly and his four brothers, who’d left Vietnam by boat, eventually making their way to California. They worked odd jobs until buying their own bakery in San Francisco, and have been growing their business ever since. Today the company’s line revolves around four main products: palmiers, apple fritters, madeleines, and brownie bites, which it sells to major retailers including Walmart, Kroger, and Trader Joe’s. Still headquartered in California, Sugar Bowl opened its second manufacturing facility in 2020 just off Lawrenceville Highway, to much local fanfare. (The Tucker facility makes all but the palmiers.) The company, still owned by the family, is proud of its diversity; in 2013, President Barack Obama cited Sugar Bowl as proof of the American dream in a speech on immigration reform.
Its diversity attracted de Jesus, a native of Brazil who has worked in food manufacturing for two decades; so did the apple fritters. After interviewing for the position, “I got into my car in a parking lot and I had a fritter. I’m like, Oh my God,” he recalled. Then he had a second fritter. Then, right before merging onto I-285, a third. “I called my wife and I said, ‘I’m working for these folks.’”
Photograph by Wedig + Laxton
Photograph by Wedig + Laxton
De Jesus and I entered the factory floor. The space is taken up by industrial-size fryers, conveyor belts carrying thousands of pastries, giant metal vats of batter and apple filling—all hallmarks of a globalized food system designed for mass production. And amid all the machinery—people. Each of them responsible for specific parts of the process, and each of them with a story to tell.
Like Abwe Mwendanababo, who moved from the Democratic Republic of Congo about 10 years ago. He told me he came here to study political science at Georgia State University, but doesn’t plan to use his degree for a while—for now, he’s happy running a huge robot that places dozens of madeleines into individual boxes at a time. Then there’s Hiwot Eshetu, from Ethiopia. A production-line lead, she tracks whether each shift hits a target number of cases. She pointed to a giant white board. “If we make the target, we put a green smiley face,” she said. “If something is wrong, we make it red.”
Photograph by Wedig + Laxton
Her sister Samrawit (Sam) Ahmed, who got her degree in business administration in Ethiopia, also works at the facility—but in quality control, or what’s called the sensory room. Now she tests products alongside her friend Rahel Belay, an accountant back in Ethiopia who started to study nursing when she came to the U.S., but said the path to certification was long and complicated. At Sugar Bowl, “every time, we learn some new things in technology,” Belay told me. “And we like cookies.”
My stomach was grumbling as I got back into the car. That evening, I made my kids wait until sunset before they could dig into the apple fritters. The wait was worth it. Machine-made pastries are far from the home-baked treats I generally prefer, but in de Jesus’s words: Oh my God.
This article appears in our June 2023 issue.
