Finance

This story was published in The Windy Citizen on February 27, 2008. It was written for a class while Molly was attending Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

Bill Stoltzman last visited Jarosch Bakery three days ago. He purchased the same thing he’s bought “since Jarosch opened”: sweet, crumbly slices of apricot graham cookies.

Jarosch Bakery Inc., in Elk Grove Village, is a family-owned company with very loyal customers. It will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year and Stoltzman, 73, expects to be there.

Despite the seemingly ever-increasing presence of chain bakeries, owner Ken Jarosch says his small business is stable. “Our revenues are in the vicinity of $2.5 million,” he said, “The same as last year.”

“We’re a pretty well-established business, making the stuff that we make, and people like to come in and get exactly that, because they’ve been getting it for years. That’s what they want,” Jarosch said.

Case in point: “We have five grown children, four of whom live out of town,” Stoltzman said. “The first place the four from out of town stop is Jarosch. They all have their favorites.”

Jarosch Bakery is known mostly for its custom-made, decorated cakes. “One of the more unique ones that I can remember, because I ended up making it, was a cake for a nurse,” Ken Jarosch said. “They wanted a severed arm. And so we made a severed arm and put a band-aid on it and everything.”

The business frequently gets requests for cakes for bachelor and bachelorette parties. Jarosch said he’ll fill some of those orders, but “generally what people are really wanting is what I would consider a pornographic cake.”

Jarosch’s prices range from pocket change to weekend splurge. A small Easter egg cake costs $1.55, while an eight-inch Boston cream pie costs $6.25. A decadent amaretto whipped cream torte comes in at $20.75.

Jarosch regularly employs about 50 people. “We’ve got 25 people in the back and roughly 25 people in the front. A good majority of those 25 in the front are either high-school kids or college kids going to a local school,” Jarosch said.

Though the bakery relies on part-time help, particularly during the Christmas rush, a number of employees have worked there more than a decade.

One woman “has been here not quite since we opened, but pretty darn close. She’s over 45 years at this point,” Jarosch said. “One of our managers in the back with coffee cakes is about 30 years. One other guy working on sweet rolls has been with us over 25… The ones who haven’t been here 30 years have been here eight to 12 years, which I think is a good thing.”

Marianne Domino, head decorator in the cake department, has been employed by Jarosch for more than 27 years. When asked what convinced her to stick around, she said cake decorating satisfies her creative side.

“I just really, really enjoy it,” she said.

Jarosch is large enough that the tasks for a single product are done by separate bakers, assembly-line style, particularly with the large, tiered cakes.

“There’s somebody down there who will take the layers and put it together,” Domino said, “then it goes to another person who will ice it, and then I just strictly decorate them.”

The amount of time it takes to make and decorate a wedding cake depends on the size and complexity of design, but Domino estimates it generally takes a couple of hours.

The bakery is able to match icing colors to fabric swatches, a critical issue for any bride.

“Sometimes they’ll bring in the lace of their wedding dress and they’ll want the lace done onto the wedding cake… and that can be very detailed, with all the beading and things like that.”

Decorated cakes start at $18.25, while the wedding cakes range from $84 to about $700.

Head Baker Raul Farfan has been with Jarosch for 26 years. “Originally it was just a summer job,” he laughed.

Jarosch estimates that he goes through about 3,000 pounds of flour and 2,000 pounds of sugar each week. “It definitely goes up in December,” he said, “because that is by far our highest production run throughout the year. It probably goes up by about 25 percent, possibly a little more.”

But Jarosch not only feeds its customers – it feeds the community, too.

“We live in Elk Grove Village, we work in Elk Grove Village, our kids went to Elk Grove Village schools,” Jarosch said. The bakery gives gift certificates for raffles and auctions to local theater groups, churches and scouting organizations. It hires frequently from Elk Grove High School and has what Jarosch calls “an excellent relationship” with the school and the community in general. “We try to help the local organizations or the local chapters because those are our customers,” he said.

Jarosch Bakery gets shortening products from Illinois-based companies. Its cherries come from Wisconsin. The blueberries, Michigan. The wheat used for the flour is usually milled in Minnesota. “A lot of our suppliers are local,” Jarosch said. And it’s the commitment to being a presence in the community that makes Jarosch Bakery special.

Farfan said the quality is what makes Jarosch distinctive. “We use the finest ingredients. It’s in our reputation, you can tell. When I bring stuff home people say, ‘Oh, I’ve been there, I know that.’”

Stoltzman agreed that the “quality and variety” separate Jarosch from other bakeries.

The bakery expanded in 1993, absorbing an adjacent dry-cleaning business. The move doubled the size of the retail store and also increased production area. “We stayed basically in the same spot, we just got a little bit wider,” Jarosch said. “The business, that is.”

Though he acknowledges more space is needed at Easter, Christmas and during graduations, he’s not thinking of opening a second location.

“Our business relies heavily on the artistic ability of our employees and the supervising of that talent,” he said, “And the fact that we’re here watching over things and making sure things are getting done is the way we want it.”

This story was published in The Windy Citizen on March 12, 2008. It was written for a class while Molly was attending Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

Some Midwestern schools think the answer to higher electricity bills is blowing in the wind.

K-12s, colleges and universities have been putting wind turbines on their campuses since 1993, mainly to combat rising energy prices. But they’re also a learning experience, and those in Illinois are helping meet the state’s renewable-energy goal.

There are between 400 and 500 wind-energy turbines operating in Illinois. They produce between 350 and 699 megawatts of electric power annually, depending, of course, on how the wind blows. More turbines are built each year, but they have yet to provide more than 1 percent of Illinois’ energy needs.

Gabriela Martin, program officer for renewable energy at Chicago-based Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation (ICECF), said, “If you have 699 megawatts, that’s pretty good. That’s like a coal plant.”

There are no official figures for how many Illinois schools have turbines. However, the success of three schools in Illinois, two in Iowa and one in Michigan, demonstrate that wind energy is both educational and an economic benefit. At one high school, over half its electricity needs are produced by its own turbine. At least two other schools are in the process of exploring turbines.

“The wind market is really crazy right now. It’s like the housing market two-three years ago,” Martin said.

The ICECF has awarded 25 wind feasibility study grants, generally used to determine if sites are windy enough. The majority of these grants – 20 of the 25 – have gone to schools, for a total of $507,000.

Three colleges in the state were awarded turbine installation grants, totaling $1.9 million; three schools were awarded grants that came to $2.5 million.

Turbines have turned heads in the Illinois legislature. Roger Brown, program manager of the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs at Western Illinois University, noted a new law: “The Renewable Portfolio Standard requires that a percentage of Illinois’ power or electricity must be generated from renewable energy, that is, 25 percent by 2025. I believe 75 percent of that renewable [energy] must be from wind. There’s an incentive there. It starts out at 2 percent this year. that’s a fairly aggressive situation.”

Though federal and state governments, recognizing that wind power isn’t yet a profitable business, have been working sporadically to make windfarms economically viable – mainly through tax credits – school administrators said the uncertain government policies and lack of commercial viability don’t concern them, since they aren’t commercial operations.

Terry Gutshall is the superintendent of Bureau Valley Community Unit School District, based in Manlius, Ill., 130 miles southwest of Chicago. It’s the first Illinois K-12 school to get a turbine.

“We can see the volatility in the world market,” he said. “We can see what the impact of energy consumption is, and we’re trying to do our part to help our taxpayers out and help renewable energy.”

Bureau Valley’s turbine has been turning since 2005. It can produce 660 kilowatts per year, making it one of the larger residential-scale models. It is 220 feet from the base to the top, with blades 76 feet in length. (When Admiral Richard Byrd made the world’s first flight over the South Pole in 1929, his airplane had a wingspan equal to just one of Bureau Valley’s blades.)

The $1 million turbine provides “well over half, if not two-thirds” of the electricity consumed at Bureau Valley High School, Gutshall said.

“Our net savings are around $20,000. You know, that’s almost a teacher,” he said. “The gross savings were $100,000 and we’re looking at. for sure between $70,000 and $100,000 as far as net savings.”

Spirit Lake Community School District, in Spirit Lake, Iowa, installed its first turbine in 1993. A second followed shortly thereafter. The school board authorized looking at a third last year.

The first turbine cost $239,500. The 250-kw, 140-foot high structure paid for itself in five years. Turbines produced 100 percent of the school’s energy in 2001, but due to construction projects, they supply only about 60 percent of the current need.

The combination of schools and wind turbines is teaching young children about renewable energy, and big kids don’t want to be left behind.

“The students are starting to push the university’s administrators,” said Phil Gatton, the director of plant and service operations at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale.

SIUC is in the feasibility-study stage, deciding if having a turbine makes financial sense.

“We’re in a marginal wind zone here at Southern Illinois, and our hope is that if we can prove that it works here, it’ll pretty well be able to work anywhere in the state,” Gatton said.

The university’s 2,000 acres of farmland on the western part of its campus will be the turbine site, if it’s built. The model being evaluated has a 2.5 megawatt capacity – similar to the large machines used on commercial windfarms – and would rest on a tower 300 feet high.

“We’d be looking at [spending] six and a quarter million dollars,” said SIUC electrical engineer Justin Harell.

SIUC students will vote in April on whether to establish a per-credit-hour fee of up to $10 a semester to be used exclusively for sustainability projects like the wind turbine.

“I think everybody could agree that our reliance on fossil fuels and foreign oil is not a good thing for the country,” Gatton said. “I think investment in renewables, especially when you can prove that they’re cost effective [is] something the university should take a leadership role in.”

Several Illinois K-12 schools are also in the process of getting turbines. At Erie Community Unit School District, a neighbor of Bureau Valley, Superintendent Michael Ryan began examining wind power in 2005.

“I was very concerned about deregulation in January of 2007, and I wanted to be energy independent by that date. So that was really my big motivator and the deregulated market really scared me and I wanted to see if I had an alternative to that and wind energy could be that.”

The school hopes to complete the turbine by June.

“When the pieces of the turbine started arriving last year, I’d bring the students out to the turbine so they could really see the pieces on the ground, because when they get in the air you don’t get that perspective of how big they are. So I went over and had them touch the pieces. Each one of our blades weighs 4,000 pounds and laid out there, it really is something for them to see. I wanted them to get a sense of what the turbine really is and not just something up in the air making electricity,” Ryan said.

The turbines have been successful. “They pretty much run themselves,” Spirit Lake’s facility director, Jim Tirevold, said. However, schools might balk once they get wind of increasing prices and wait times.

“They just can’t make blades fast enough, they can’t build gearboxes fast enough; it’s just amazing,” Martin said. “That has driven the prices up significantly. the economics have been affected adversely for wind just because there’s such a huge demand worldwide, from India to China to the U.S. to Europe. You just can’t get enough wind turbines.”