Sunday, Oct. 12, 2008

Viera's Bakery branching out

By Joe Chapman, Herald staff writer

A sign sporting two cactuses and a bit of Spanish in a familiar font has popped up amid the hustle and bustle of the Road 68 corridor in Pasco.

It's a sign for Viera's Bakery, a landmark of Latino industry in downtown Pasco. Manuel Viera has operated the store at South Fourth Avenue and East Lewis Street for four years, but as the sign at 6411 Burden Blvd. says, the bakery also will be muy pronto aqui -- here very soon.

Viera's isn't leaving downtown, but it will take a big step nonetheless in December when it joins a few other Hispanic-owned businesses joining the commerce of west Pasco. Viera, 54, feels the new store can broaden his customer base in west Pasco and Richland and draw regional traffic from outside the Tri-Cities.

"He's very nervous," said Marisa Viera, bookkeeper for Viera's Bakery and daughter of the owner. She spoke on his behalf because Manuel Viera, who started out as a baker in Mexico, speaks limited English.

It's the second time he has worried about a grand opening, she said.

"When we first opened here, I remember he couldn't sleep," she said of the downtown location. " ... Then he got the call that all the bread was sold out and he was just relieved."

Viera had worked for 25 years at Castilleja Bakery, also in downtown Pasco, before he saw his opportunity to open his own business. When he heard the Midtown Bake Shop in Kennewick was closing, he moved to buy up its equipment. To finance his venture, he sold several rental houses and got a loan.

This time around, he's following a similar formula. He again took out a loan but also generated some capital by buying, renovating and selling the Colima Bakery in downtown Pasco.

Edison Valerio, community branch manager for USBank and president of the Tri-City Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said Viera's is likely to do well in west Pasco.

"If you look around, you have Wal-Mart and Yoke's, but it's not a bakery of that kind -- a Mexican bakery," Valerio said. "And after people know where his location is going to be, he's going to do well."

As a panaderia, a Mexican bakery, Viera's makes a variety of pastries and treats that do well with Hispanic customers, such as besos, which are shaped like two halves of a clam shell, and tres leches, cups of white bread soaked in three kinds of milk and capped with whipped cream and other toppings.

Making these products was a natural business strategy for a store in the heart of Pasco's densest concentration of Hispanic residents and shops.

But Viera's also gets a fair amount of traffic from Anglo customers, albeit in smaller numbers. Most of them, Marisa Viera said, come into the shop in the mornings or during the Pasco Farmers Market, which runs a block south of the bakery for half the year.

Anglo customers don't just gravitate toward the doughnuts and cookies, she said. Some of the Latino products -- such as marinitos, pig-shaped breads made of molasses and brown sugar, and bolios, jalapeo breads with cream cheese -- also are popular with them.

Another item with crossover appeal is an El Salvadoran quesadilla, which is different from the quesadillas served in Mexican restaurants. Rather, Viera's quesadillas are a kind of bread with sesame seeds.

"Anybody that's tasted it, they love it," said Eulogio Zarate, cake decorator and manager of Viera's.

But that's not to say there aren't also plenty of products that appeal to a more traditional Anglo palate.

"We get doughnuts from these guys all the time," said Rob Fry, a worker at an automotive shop not far from Viera's downtown shop. "You can't get doughnuts this size anywhere else for the same price."

One of the doughnuts can fill a dinner plate and sells for 85 cents.

The racks also are loaded with cookies, jelly rolls, cheesecakes, sugar cookies, bread pudding, banana bread, sponge cake, pineapple upside-down cake, turnovers, fruit tarts and strudel sticks.

The west Pasco store will be quite a bit larger than the downtown bakery, though the out-front area will be about the same size. It will have 6,000 square feet of space, compared with 3,500 square feet at the downtown location.

Extra space at the new store will be mostly for the bakers, and 1,000 square feet will be rented to a tenant, probably a tortilla maker, Marisa Viera said.

The new store will cost $380,000 to build, according to the permit. Don Pratt Construction is doing the project in a commercial strip north of TRAC that's already populated with businesses such as a barber, sewing store and a surveyor.

Not far away, other Latino-owned businesses such as Fiesta Mexican Restaurant, The Big Burrito and Ala Mode Accessories & Jewelry Repair also have been drawn to west Pasco's bustling commercial district.

Like Viera's, Fiesta got its start in downtown Pasco. "It says a lot about the downtown core," said Cruz Gonzalez, assistant vice president for grants administration and operations for Columbia Basin College. He was the Community Development Block Grant coordinator for the city in 2005 and 2006.

Although downtown Pasco is mostly known for its Hispanic cultural identity, it can serve as a business incubator for the entire city, he said.

"The rents are inexpensive. It allows some of the business owners to minimize their expenses throughout their growth periods and then make plans for larger expansions," Gonzalez said.

SuperMex grocery store is another example he cited. The store has been at 420 W. Lewis St. for about five years and plans to open a second location on North 20th Avenue next month.

The crossing over of Hispanic businesses into areas more predominantly Anglo is good for those businesses because they expand their customer base, Gonzalez said. But it's also good for those communities because people gain access to a greater variety of products, he said.

Blurring the lines that divide the community also has a social benefit, said Pasco City Manager Gary Crutchfield. "When you have distinct boundaries, it's comforting to some but it creates too much unnecessary friction."

If Viera's new store does well, it also could be a place for different socioeconomic groups to meet. The Vieras hope to draw customers from an agricultural employee picking up a sandwich on the way to the fields to a white-collar worker from a nearby business grabbing a deli sandwich at lunchtime.

Then there are the customers who live as far away as Othello, Moses Lake, even Spokane, who come in once a week to stock up on $30 worth of breads at 50 cents apiece, whom the Vieras also expect to see at the new location.

The store will start out being open 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. But if business is good, hours will be extended to 4 a.m. to 11 p.m. to match the downtown store and more employees will be hired, Marisa Viera said.

If all of that happens, Manuel Viera should sleep soundly again.