For bakery owners, growth is often described through visible milestones: opening another location, entering a new market, serving larger clients, or reaching customers beyond the local community. What receives far less attention is the operational work required to make that growth sustainable.
In a recent episode of The Perfect Rise, host Kimberly Houston spoke with Max Jacobson-Fried, Managing Partner of Freed’s Bakery, about what it takes to expand a third-generation bakery without losing the quality, service, and culture behind its reputation. Founded in Las Vegas in 1959, Freed’s has grown to include multiple retail locations, partnerships with major Las Vegas event venues, and nationwide shipping.
The company’s growth has not followed a perfect plan. It has included unsuccessful expansions, operational strain, difficult decisions, and lessons that changed how Jacobson-Fried approaches leadership. That honesty makes the Freed’s story especially useful for bakery owners considering their own next stage of growth.
Legacy Is Bigger Than a Signature Product
When Jacobson-Fried joined Freed’s Bakery in 2003, he entered a business with decades of history and an established reputation. He also had the opportunity to work alongside the two generations that preceded him, including his grandmother and aunt.
From them, he learned that preserving a bakery’s legacy does not require maintaining every product or process indefinitely. His grandmother and aunt were willing to adjust the bakery’s product mix as customer habits changed. What remained constant was the company’s commitment to producing quality products and treating customers like family.
That distinction gave Jacobson-Fried room to evolve the business without feeling that every change threatened its identity. Freed’s could introduce new products, use new technology, and pursue different opportunities because its legacy was rooted in standards and values rather than a single recipe.
For other legacy bakeries, this presents an important question: Is the business protecting what customers genuinely value, or is it holding onto familiar practices simply because they have always existed?
Expansion Reveals What the Business Has Not Built Yet
Freed’s opened a second location in 2007, shortly before the economic downturn created additional pressure throughout Las Vegas. Jacobson-Fried readily acknowledges that the company overextended itself and did not fully understand what the expansion would require operationally.
Production was divided between locations, communication was inconsistent, and too many decisions still depended on him. He worked every day, transported products between locations, addressed customer concerns, and stepped into whichever role needed help. Instead of creating a business capable of supporting two locations, he became the person holding both locations together.
The company eventually consolidated in 2011, but the experience became an operational education. Jacobson-Fried gained a clearer understanding of delegation, communication, organizational hierarchy, and decision-making. When Freed’s began expanding again several years later, the company did so with a different structure and a more realistic understanding of what growth demands.
The lesson was not that the first expansion had proven Freed’s should remain small. It was that the company had to acknowledge its role in what went wrong and build differently before trying again.
Communication Must Be Built Before Scale
One of Jacobson-Fried’s clearest lessons is that expansion depends on communication. Businesses often focus on financing, customer demand, equipment, staffing, and physical space when evaluating whether they are ready to grow. Those considerations matter, but they cannot compensate for information that does not move reliably through the organization.
Freed’s now uses dedicated communication channels that allow teams at its production facility and retail locations to communicate directly. The company also holds short, focused weekly huddles to review upcoming needs, recent challenges, and issues requiring attention.
These systems reduce the likelihood that Jacobson-Fried will become the bottleneck again. Managers and team members need enough information and authority to make appropriate decisions without waiting for one person to become available. When every question travels to the owner, the organization has not truly scaled. It has only increased the number of people and locations depending on the same decision-maker.
Strong communication does more than keep people informed. It establishes who needs to participate in a decision, where information belongs, and how the business will respond when something changes.
Systems Turn Experience Into a Repeatable Standard
For many years, quality control at Freed’s depended heavily on experienced family members walking through the bakery and deciding whether something met the company’s standards. That approach can work when the right person is always present, but it becomes increasingly fragile as a bakery grows.
Freed’s has been working to turn that knowledge into a shared source of truth. The goal is to document product standards, processes, and expectations so they can be taught and consistently applied throughout the organization. This is particularly important in baking, where the difference between acceptable and exceptional can be visual, tactile, and sometimes subjective.
Technology has also improved visibility across the production process. Orders include barcodes, departments use scanners, and the team can track where a product is within the workflow. When a customer arrives for an order, employees have a better chance of locating it, understanding its status, and addressing problems before confusion spreads across multiple departments.
Documentation, photographs, searchable information, and order-tracking tools do not replace skilled employees. They give those employees the information needed to reproduce the bakery’s standards without relying entirely on oral history.
Nationwide Shipping Requires a Different Business Model
Freed’s experience with nationwide shipping demonstrates how easily an appealing growth opportunity can expose operational weaknesses. Shipping a cake requires more than placing a bakery product inside a box. The business must manage freezing, insulation, dry ice, packaging, transit time, product movement, customer expectations, and the response when a shipment is delayed.
During an earlier attempt, Freed’s found itself refunding a significant number of orders because cakes arrived late, damaged, or unusable. The product itself was not necessarily the problem. The challenge was controlling the customer experience after the cake left the bakery.
As Freed’s prepares to bring nationwide shipping back, the company is approaching it with a more focused model. Rather than extending its highly customized local cake operation across the country, it is developing a limited selection of flavors, sizes, and products that can be produced consistently at greater volume.
This approach reflects a broader operational truth: A successful local product does not automatically become a scalable product. Expansion may require the bakery to redesign its offering around repeatability, transportation, labor capacity, and the limitations of the new sales channel.
Culture Is Also an Operating System
As Freed’s continues to grow, Jacobson-Fried remains focused on how employees treat one another and how that behavior reaches the customer. Respect and empathy are not positioned as abstract company values. They shape how managers respond to mistakes, how teams resolve conflict, and how problems are examined.
When something goes wrong, the first priority is to correct the issue. The next step is to understand what happened and determine how the system can prevent it from happening again. The goal is not to immediately assign blame, but to create accountability that improves the organization.
Jacobson-Fried also recognizes that leadership behavior travels through a company. The way he treats managers and team members influences how they lead others and ultimately how customers are treated. In that sense, culture becomes another system that must be intentionally modeled as the company expands.
Growth Requires More Than Opportunity
The Freed’s Bakery story reminds bakery owners that growth is rarely a straight line. Some opportunities will work, others will fail, and even a well-established company can discover that its current systems are not prepared for its next stage.
Sustainable growth begins when leaders are willing to examine where communication breaks down, where decisions become bottlenecked, where standards remain undocumented, and where a new opportunity requires a different operating model. The strongest businesses are not those that avoid mistakes altogether. They are the ones that honestly identify their role in those mistakes and use what they learn to build more effectively the next time.
Listen to the full episode of The Perfect Rise to hear Max Jacobson-Fried share more about leading Freed’s Bakery, learning from expansion, building operational systems, and carrying a family legacy into its next generation.
About the Author
Kimberly Houston is the Member Experience Director for the Retail Bakers of America, host of The Perfect Rise podcast, and an award-winning pastry chef, educator, and business strategist. Through conversations with bakery owners, educators, and industry leaders, she explores the systems, leadership strategies, and operational decisions shaping the future of the baking industry.