When individual bakery owners succeed and grow, the entire Great Harvest franchise family succeeds and grows. To support the success of our owners, we teach and actively model the mission statement of being loose and having fun, giving generously to others, creating strong and exciting bakeries, baking phenomenal bread, and running fast to serve customers. We believe our success comes from a strong commitment to uphold the legacy and integrity of the Great Harvest brand with its focus on the customer experience, the consistent look and feel of core marketing elements, and the promise of the phenomenal-tasting, freshly milled, whole-grain, made-from-scratch products. In short, we create, share, and teach the tools that bakery owners use to personalize their bakeries and achieve their unique goals within the context of the Great Harvest franchise agreements. Through the collective knowledge we share, and the learning communities we facilitate, Great Harvest Franchising, Inc., will remain the envy of the franchise industry.

Our goal is to recruit the nicest, most generous, most honest and authentic people we can find-who love learning for the plain fun of it, who see business as an excuse to play, and love all of life for the sheer thrill of a bumpy ride—and bring them together in a caring community which supports these entrepreneurial types to TRULY run their own thing, make their own mistakes, have their own successes, and be 100% themselves.

We love whole-wheat bread. We'll always be a whole-wheat products company. That's because we think whole-wheat bread tastes better than almost anything else, especially when it's made with fresh ground flour and combined with other simple ingredients. It's our first reason for loving this business. There's just something about the way that nutty, rich taste of wheat combines with honey, yeast and salt that keeps us coming back every time.

If you look at most franchises, they began when some smart person figured out a way to make some money in a business and then wrote that recipe down and began to invite others to copy what she or he had done. The great thing about these sorts of franchises is that they aren't very risky for the person joining the franchise. The business is, after all, proven.

Most franchises of this variety require their owners to do things the headquarters way. That's because HQ knows it works and also because the franchisor is trying to build a national brand, the foundation of which is consistency. The problem with this sort of franchise, if you're an entrepreneur-type, is that they aren't very much fun. All the good stuff about opening your own business—figuring out what you want to offer and what color the walls will be—aren't your decisions to make. They've already been made.

At the other end of things is starting up and running your own Mom and Pop shop. There you have all the freedom in the world to create this thing just the way you want, but you're flying solo, with no one else to lean on. That's why so many start-ups fail.

We try to find that middle ground between the advantages of a traditional franchise and the fun of a let's-do-it-all-ourselves start-up. Our philosophy is simple. Let's create Mom and Pop whole grain bakeries where Mom and Pop know what the heck they're doing! We call it a freedom-based franchise.

We live an age when fast growth is king. Everyone wants to become the world's next gazillionaire. That's not our goal. Don't get us wrong, we love to grow. When bakeries grow, it means more people are eating great bread. But we don't love growth so much that we let it blind us to what we want from life or endanger the thing we've already built. To us, there is a balance lying somewhere between stagnation and chaos called sustainable growth and that's what we're after.

Owning and running a bakery is about our owners making good lives for themselves and their families. It is not the other way around. Their lives are not somehow in service of this business. That means we expect our owners to keep doing this thing so long as it's fun and makes their lives fuller. Not a minute longer.

When you open a Great Harvest, there aren't many rules on how to run your store. Owners do it their way, but within the context of a community of like-minded and like-talented and like-spirited owners. By connecting both owners and franchise staff together into a learning community, we all profit from 200-odd minds and thirty years of experience. For example, a great recipe for trail bread invented in Minnesota flies across the system because it is so tasty. A promo tip pioneered by Washington, D.C.-area bakeries is quickly picked up in the Ohio River valley and the Northwest because it produces results. These free-flowing ideas keep us fresh. Bakery owners support the entire system with ideas and feedback. It’s collaboration at its best. And it provides an amazing competitive advantage.