Moms Bakery Corporation

How New York’s Bagel Union Took on the Mob

"In 1966, a man named Ben Willner started the W&S Baking Corporation in the Bronx. Not only was he determined to run a nonunion bagel shop, but he was among the first to embrace what would, over time, become 338’s most pressing issue: automation. Mechanical bagel rollers had come onto the scene in the 1950s, but early iterations were bulky and slow, and the bagels they produced were frequently ill-formed. The dough was too thick to extrude properly, and constantly clogged the gears. Daniel Thompson, a Canadian son and grandson of bagel bakers, fixed these flaws. With one of Thompson’s machines in his shop, Willner began pumping out more bagels in a shorter time with one unskilled worker than a traditional shop using a union-approved team of four, which allowed Willner to substantially undercut his competitors’ prices. With his bakery location sufficiently north of Local 338’s area of operations, he mostly flew under the union’s radar. Willner’s product happened to be distributed by the same trucking company that serviced John Dioguardi’s Consumer Kosher Provisions. Knowing a good thing when he saw it, Dio soon showed up at the bakery to bandy about his wholesaling leverage — namely, the ability to get supermarket buyers to bend to his whim under threat of labor unrest. Before long, W&S bagels were being stocked on shelves around the city, and the nascent bakery prospered." - Jason Turbow