How Absolute Logic Keeps Leaven & Co.'s 24/7 Bakery Running Around the Clock
Wholesale Craft Bakery | Operating 24/7 In the Bronx98 Employees
Executive Summary
After outgrowing a one-person IT provider, Leaven & Co. needed more than break-fix support: it needed a partner it could trust to run the systems its entire 24/7 operation depends on. Over the past five years with Absolute Logic, Leaven & Co. has transformed technology from an operational risk into a dependable competitive advantage.
Today, the bakery relies on Absolute Logic to manage its cloud infrastructure, maintain uptime across a nonstop production schedule, support a fully remote front office, respond to issues at any hour, and evaluate and deploy the new systems it needs to grow.
Meet Leaven & Co.
Leaven & Co. has been baking craft bread for chefs across the greater New York area since 2004. Working from its Bronx facility, the bakery uses natural leaven and other artisanal techniques, and it runs around the clock, seven days a week, delivering fresh product to somewhere between 600 and 800 locations a day. Its customers range from retail to institutional accounts, including Gate Gourmet (which uses Leaven's bread in first-class airline service), the food startup Wonder (which uses its pizza bases), and a series of hamburger chains.
The operation is larger and more distributed than its craft roots suggest. Ninety-eight employees work in the bakery itself, while the entire front office runs remotely, with order entry, customer relations, and accounting handled by staff in Las Vegas, Wisconsin, Delaware, and New Jersey. Leaven & Co.'s setup only works if the technology holding it together is genuinely dependable day in and day out.
Why Reliable IT is Non-Negotiable in a Deadline-Driven Bakery
Leaven & Co. is a deadline-driven business. Orders arrive by phone, by email, and from a few customers by text, and at three o'clock each afternoon the bakery stops taking orders for the next day. From then until the evening, everything that came in has to be processed, printed, and moved to the production floor, which makes the late-afternoon stretch the most stressful and least forgiving part of the day.
For a wholesale operation built on same-day fresh delivery, IT is not a convenience - it is part of the production line. It decides whether product reaches hundreds of accounts on time, which is why an hour of lost time is never just an hour.
“If we were to lose data entry ability for an hour, we would be behind three hours. If we lose an oven for an hour, we're going to be behind three hours, because you have new work flowing in and it's just backing up.”
- Says Dan Wilczynski
Any operator who lives by a daily cutoff will recognize that multiplier, and it is why Leaven & Co.'s technology cannot be treated as an afterthought. Every system the bakery depends on now lives in the cloud, from the RingCentral phone service to the ERP and accounting platforms. This allows Dan and the team to push through the afternoon rush, treating those systems as a fixed constant rather than a variable to worry about. They know that Absolute Logic can be relied on to keep their systems dependable.
The Challenge
Before partnering with Absolute Logic, Leaven & Co. depended on a single-person IT provider. While talented, one individual could no longer support a rapidly growing bakery operating around the clock. Overnight, Leaven's IT support changed from one talented individual to a full team with a more organized and structured way of working.
For a business that had felt the limits of relying on a single person, the depth of the full Absolute Logic team quickly transformed the relationship with the vendor that plagued Leaven & Co. before. Dan Wilczynski describes the change as a move from a one-man band to a company that could handle the whole environment properly. In the five years since, through the pandemic and a full migration to the cloud, he has never had reason to look at another provider. That kind of continuity is rare enough in a vendor relationship that it becomes its own form of proof.
Migrating the Entire Bakery to the Cloud
Absolute Logic moved Leaven & Co. off its in-building servers and rebuilt the ERP and accounting systems in the cloud. The migration eliminated on-premises infrastructure, reduced operational risk, and positioned the company to support future growth without expanding its internal IT resources. Dan describes it as an orderly, highly engineered process in which the team worked the problems out well in advance, and the result has held up: in five years the bakery has never lost a server and has had no outages. Moving everything off-site also meant Leaven & Co. no longer had capital and floor space tied up in hardware, or a single point in the building that could take the whole operation down with it.
The migration paid off most clearly when COVID hit. With the city shutting down, the bakery had to send everyone home at once, and the systems had to support that change with little notice.
“When COVID came, that's when the rubber met the road. We had to bug out very quickly. In one day, in a matter of hours, we moved our telephones and our computer systems and everything all remote, so everybody was working from home.”
Absolute Logic got staff onto their own systems immediately, then equipped everyone with new laptops, and, as a result, the remote front office never transitioned back to on-site work, because the systems underneath it were built to run from anywhere. What began as a crisis response became Leaven's permanent improvement.
Responding to Outages at Critical Moments
Technology fails on its own schedule, and the closest thing to a crisis Dan can recall came on a weekend, when the print server went down on a Saturday. That timing was the problem: Saturday is when the bakery's orders are assembled and the invoices and labels are printed. As such, a printing failure at that hour threatens the entire next delivery cycle. Dan called Absolute Logic right away, and the team came in to fix it.
“I remember calling Absolute Logic on a Saturday afternoon, and they were able to come in and get all our Zebra printers back online, get everything up and running, and we were just off to the races. It was fast and relatively seamless.”
That quick response mattered because the cost of a Saturday failure is not limited to that day. If those orders had not printed, the delay would have carried into the following days and grown as new orders piled up behind them. What stands out just as much is how rare the problem was, since, in five years with Absolute Logic, it is the only serious issue Dan can think of.
Patient, Responsive Support for a Team Under Pressure
Day to day, what Dan values most about Absolute Logic is the way they handle his staff. When a stressed employee cannot print during the afternoon rush, the response they get matters as much as the fix itself. Dan calls it Absolute Logic's "bedside manner".
“The biggest part of the relationship is their patience with people who are feeling pressure at a moment and having difficulty printing or doing something. These people just want the computer to work. Absolute Logic listens, they try to piece it together, and they always stay calm, cool and collected and get the job done.”
Getting help is easy for Leaven & Co.'s staff: they just send an email and set the priority, and anything marked urgent gets a response within minutes. For Dan, the ease and effect of Absolute Logic's support has a direct payoff, because a problem handled patiently by the team is a problem that never lands on his desk or stalls the rush. In a deadline-driven business that speed is the line between staying on schedule and falling hours behind.
Trusting Absolute Logic to Own the Technology
Dan takes a position many owners would find hard, preferring that Absolute Logic, rather than his own people, make the technical calls. The team is responsible for uptime and performance, so, in his view, the team should own the decisions that affect them, from big picture strategy to minor tasks like physically connecting a new printer.
“What makes the relationship work is that I trust them enough to make those decisions, and then we just stay out of it. They're responsible for the uptime, they're responsible for the performance, so they make all the decisions. We don't even plug in a printer out there.”
That trust also shapes how the bakery grows, since Absolute Logic now runs preventive maintenance and is currently surveying all of Leaven & Co.'s equipment and software to map where things stand and where they can improve. When the bakery wants to deploy a new project on its Bakers13 platform, it does not call the software vendor directly: it has Absolute Logic scope the work and manage the vendor, then handles the training once the system is ready.
The Results
No Longer Tied to On-Premises Infrastructure
Migrated ERP, accounting, and phone systems from in-building servers to the cloud, removing the hardware and single points of failure once inside the bakery.
High-Volume Orders Without Manual Data Entry
Set up automatic CSV import into its Bakers13 platform for high-volume orders, cutting manual data entry during the most demanding peak-hour rush.
Five Years Without a System or Production Outage
Maintained the core systems behind Leaven & Co.'s 24/7 operation without a technology failure that shut down production, even as isolated issues such as the Saturday printing incident were resolved quickly.
Urgent Issues Answered in Minutes
Geared fast, patient support for staff working under constant deadline pressure, with anything marked urgent acknowledged and addressed within minutes of the request.
Enabled Entire Company to Work Remotely Within Hours
Moved the whole company to remote work within hours at the start of COVID, then made the distributed front office a permanent, stable operating model.
Technology Decisions Off Leadership's Plate
Entrusted the Absolute Logic team with every technical decision, down to connecting a new printer, freeing leadership to focus entirely on the bakery.
Problems Identified Before They Become Disruptions
Proactively reviews Leaven & Co.'s technology environment to identify aging equipment, capacity concerns, and other risks before they interrupt production, allowing issues to be addressed on a planned schedule instead of during an emergency.
Why Leaven & Co. Recommends Absolute Logic
Asked what he would say to another business weighing Absolute Logic, Dan points to the qualities that have kept him with the same team for five years:
“Their professionalism, their technical skills, their desire to invest in your business as much as we do.”
For Dan, that investment is what matters most, because it is what lets the technology recede into the background. It is why Leaven & Co. has handed over its entire technical backbone to the Absolute Logic team and has never once looked back.
Today, technology is no longer something Leaven & Co. worries about. It simply works, allowing the team to focus on baking, serving customers, and growing the business while Absolute Logic quietly keeps everything running behind the scenes.
How Absolute Logic Can Help
Whether you're preparing for regulatory audits, supporting a 24/7 operation, migrating critical systems to the cloud, or looking for a trusted technology partner, Absolute Logic helps organizations reduce risk, improve resilience, and focus on what they do best.
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