Rotella’s Italian Bakery, Omaha, Neb., has grown to the point that to join the family business does not mean that you have to be a baker. The company has needs beyond knowing how to bake a good loaf of bread, from engineering and maintenance to marketing and sales. Family members who join the business are encouraged to find their niche, a way that their personal passions and strengths will serve the company best. Both Lou Rotella III, chief operating officer, and John Rotella, general manager, have found success and been named Baking & Snack’s Operation Executives of the Year for 2024 by playing to their own strengths. 

For John Rotella that passion is building things and working with machines. When working at the bakery in those early days, he quickly latched onto the maintenance department, taking equipment apart, fixing it and putting things back together. After graduating from high school, he attended business school for a year before making the switch to construction engineering technology. Before joining the family business full time in 2008, he spent a few years working in construction. 

He started at Rotella’s working with the bakery’s head engineer as a project planner. While John Rotella said his father was the best baker, he is not a builder. When it comes to bakery maintenance and engineering, John Rotella learned a lot from the bakery employees. 

“We’ve had a lot of fantastic employees who have taught us a lot, whether by what we should be doing or what we shouldn’t be doing,” he said. “Being a hands-on type of person working on equipment, I loved to learn more about engineering and working with the engineers on the floor, having them teach me how to do all these tasks and take equipment apart and put it back together.” 

In 2010, John Rotella attended AIB International’s engineering program to fill in some bakery knowledge gaps and meet more professionals in the baking industry. Today, he is in charge of the company’s capital improvement projects, and his brother and father put a lot of trust in his expertise. 

“John’s ability to build and buy equipment, get us the latest and putting it together to create something that’s the most efficient — he’s really taken us to the next level,” Lou Rotella Jr. said. “He’s building another bakery right now, and with all the state-of-the-art stuff he’s bringing in and what he’s done with the freezer, we’re going to the next level.”

Lou Rotella III, chief operating officer, on the other hand, took an interest in business law. After getting an undergraduate degree in business from Creighton University, Lou Rotella III went on to get his JD and MBA from Creighton University in May 2000. After graduating, Lou Rotella III joined Rotella’s Italian Bakery full time. 

“Sometimes with family businesses, they say it’s good to work somewhere else for a period of time before you re-enter the family business,” he said. “And there’s some validity to that. I understand those points. But I had the benefit of getting to work with my grandfather from the time I graduated from law school until he passed away in 2009. That wouldn’t have happened if I had gone somewhere else first.”

Lou Rotella III first got to work in the company’s human resources department. The company had grown to a new level with nationwide distribution, and it was critical that more formal policies and procedures be put in place as the company was hiring more staff. He saw his role as supporting his father’s dream of growing the business through regional and national foodservice accounts. 

“When I first started working full-time, the company was in a significant growth phase, and it took a lot to create infrastructure and operations and standard operating procedures,” Lou Rotella III said. “There was a lot new happening in both food safety and quality, and we had to take all of that to the next level. Supporting his dream and seeing that come to fruition has been one of my greatest accomplishments.”

Every Rotella contributing their own strengths to the business allows the brothers, their father, cousins and uncles to collaborate on ideas and decisions and then trust each other to get the job done. 

“We work really well together because we each have our own niche and trust each other,” Lou Rotella III said. “And then we know that each one of us has the best interests of the bakery in mind.”

Lou Rotella III, John Rotella and their father talk multiple times a day: during breaks, over lunch, at family dinners. John Rotella attributes that level of access to the fact that they are family, one of the biggest benefits of being in a family-owned and -operated company is the access they have to one another. And then, thanks to their niches, they’re able to trust each other once a decision is made. 

“We all work side-by-side, and then we divide and conquer,” John Rotella said. “We collaborate and update everyone on what’s going on day-to-day.” 

This collaborative nature and trust the Rotellas have in one another has launched the company into new efficiencies and even categories. That trust, honestly, came easily for Lou Rotella Jr. when his sons joined the business. He knew very early on that they not only had the work ethic and passion to take over the family business, but they also were quite capable. 

“Almost immediately when they started working for the bakery full time, I could hear it in the way we talked, and we talk all the time,” he said. “And you could just hear in those conversations that there was an immediate connection. They prepared during those years working at the bakery as teenagers and during college. When it came time for them to take the baton I was holding out for them, they just grabbed it.”

John Rotella said he’s pushed his father on incorporating more automation into the business to reach new levels of efficiency. In 2012, the company got into the gluten-free side of baking, a passion project of John’s, whose wife has celiac disease. 

“That was a big leap of faith from my father, letting us do that,” John said. “We’re still operating that today.”

He’s installed new high-speed lines, built a new bakery and now a new cold storage facility that came online this year. In an attempt to find new ways to reduce the bakery’s waste streams, John Rotella started a new business, Ag Alchemy Animal Nutrition, which uses 10% to 15% of the company’s bakery by-products to create dog treats for their own brand as well as private label and co-packing. 

With the cold storage facility and new bakery coming online in the next 16 to 18 months, John Rotella recognized the hard work his brother Lou Rotella III has put in to ensure those operations will be staffed well. Not only did Lou Rotella III formalize HR policies and procedures, but he also ensured that employees were equipped with robust training that aligns with the company’s core values. 

“He’s done a fantastic job of developing our culture, how we do things so that when we bring in these new employees, they acclimate very quickly to who we are and what we’re about,” John Rotella said.

Today the company has a training center at the main campus, a dedicated space to educating employees on proper policies and procedures around Good Manufacturing Practices, food safety and quality. Lou Rotella III has been tasked with succession planning and strategic planning for the next 10 years of growth, which involves setting up new leadership in the company who can take over when the current leaders retire. With a staff that has tenure — 40-year veterans passing the baton to 25-year veterans — disseminating the knowledge and promoting from within has been a highlight of Lou Rotella III’s job.

“The best part about my job is promoting people from within,” he said. “I really enjoy communicating to someone that they’ve earned that spot, that they’re going to grow in the company. Those are awesome meetings because I’m so happy for the person who has worked so hard to get where they are.” 

The Rotellas are a proud family who have built a thriving bakery business over the past 103 years, each generation building on the foundation laid by the generation before. For the fourth generation — John Rotella and Lou Rotella III — the thrill comes in looking back to see how far they’ve come and looking forward to how far they will someday go. 

“Thinking about how much flour my great-grandfather and grandfather used to go through versus the numbers we’re using today, you just kind of have to laugh at how different things are,” John said. “We’re dealing with a lot of volume now, and the facility we’re building will be our fastest. It brings tears to your eyes because you wish your grandfather could see everything that’s happened since he built the bakery on 180th Street in 1989.”

When reflecting on what it means to carry the weight of their last name and all that has been accomplished before, the gravity is not lost on the brothers. 

“Lou and I have big shoes to fill,” John said. “The bigger you grow, the bigger the decisions. …” 

“There’s a lot more zeroes,” Lou III laughed. 

“But we’re helping each other out on a daily basis,” John said.

This article is an excerpt from the December 2024 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Operations Executives of the Year, click here.