Following her heart and her passion for baking, Joanne Canady-Brown left a corporate project management position in 2008, joined Panera Bread later that year, and within two years ventured out on her own as a food entrepreneur. In 2011, she founded The Gingered Peach, now a nationally recognized bakery in Lawrence Township, N.J. In 2018, she was awarded a fellowship from the James Beard Foundation Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership program. Since then, her business and her impact on her community have grown exponentially. Today, Canady-Brown also owns Melba Ice Creamery, next door to the bakery, and Rojo’s Roastery, an artisan coffeehouse in Princeton, N.J.

As a Black woman entrepreneur, she’s often faced being discounted simply because of who she is. That’s a challenge, Canady-Brown says, that many minority group members routinely face, whether in applying for jobs, trying to secure loans or leases, or simply being credited for excellence. “We’re often just not seen. We don’t look like what the person doing this type of work traditionally looks like, so we can be overlooked,” she notes. “Especially starting out, we’re swimming upstream and swimming twice as hard.”

She adds that while diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are making an impact, there’s much work yet to do to shift mindsets, hearts and assumptions. “If you look at who still holds the majority of executive chef jobs and top management positions, it’s not a very diverse picture,” she says. “And there’s often pushback when you talk about DEI, which makes no sense in an industry like ours that desperately needs labor. As leaders, we need to take more time, look harder and challenge what we think makes a great employee. And we should revisit that constantly because our industry, employees and customers are changing fast. There are people out there who may not fit the stereotype of employees traditionally filling certain roles, but who have the skills and the drive to fill them if given a chance. It’s on us to open our eyes and make the correlations.”

Committed to not just “talking the talk,” one big step she’s taking in her own business targets diversity and inclusion while also meeting growing demand at The Gingered Peach. Given that her bakers start work at 3 a.m., many applicants from some communities simply can’t get there. “I worked hard, reaching out to the Department of Labor and nonprofits in Trenton to build a more diverse workforce. I started getting all these applicants, which was great, but then during the interviews I kept hearing ‘I can’t get there. The busses don’t run that early.’ I couldn’t change the bus schedules, so I’m adding a commissary baking facility to a Rojo’s Roastery building in Trenton, putting jobs right in the community so people can get to work. More and more, that is what equity and inclusion look like to me. Not everybody can do that, but I can, so I am. I know that the more diversity we have, the faster and stronger we’ll grow.”

Joanne Canady-Brown

Founder, Head Baker, The Gingered Peach, Owner, Melba Ice Creamery, Rojo’s Roastery

@thegingeredpeach.com