Mar 9 • General discussion
The world is hungry for the real thing. Let’s be the ones who provide it.
Within the Skool ecosystem, we are incredibly fortunate to have direct access to experts across every niche. For our community, the focus remains on the crafts we love within the wider hospitality industry.
I reached out to a few community owners in Skool, all with diverse backgrounds, to ask one pivotal question: Could you tell me the specific moment you realized you couldn't go back to "grocery store" standards? Here are the responses from two of the experts.
Bruce Nollert - Chef, Coach & Entrepreneur.
Bruce is the creator of the Cultivated Cooks community. His evolution from the professional kitchen to holistic advocacy is a masterclass in culinary purpose:
"My journey has led me from starting out learning how to properly prep, clean and cook through really great systems. Then I got really interested in fine dining and all the fancy molecular techniques. Then I realized those were more for me and vanity metrics. I then shifted into fermentation and foraging and started to feel reconnection to nature, that led back to the farms. Then I got into feeding the community during Covid wand working with foodbanks and teaching underserved folks how to cook. That’s when I started to reconnect to the power of food for connection and keeping us connected to Mother Nature. I became interested in holistic nutrition and began to study that. I also became aware of the corruption behind food with the big corporations and how them so well engineer food to hijack our biology and psychology to keep us hooked and also saw from my time as an R&D chef how much shit goes into food to save money and increase shelf life. Now I focus on how food can literally shape your reality and how it impacts your gut and brain and more importantly brings and keeps people together in world that is designed to keep us isolated while tricking us to think we are connected."
- Author & Founder of Crust & Crumb Academy.
The legendary Henry Hunter manages a community of over 50,000 bakers and authored the compelling book, The Loaf and the Lie. His "threshold moment" began with a humble apprenticeship in Germany:
"Matt, the moment I crossed that line started with a man named Mr. Sherman.
When I was 22 and still in the military, I rented a small place from him in Germany. He owned a bakery downstairs. To “keep the rent low,” he put me to work in the shop. Looking back, he probably just saw a strong young soldier who could haul 50-pound bags of flour. So that’s what I did. I carried sacks, cleaned up, moved trays. Mostly I just watched. At the time I didn’t realize I was being educated.
Every Thursday he made challah, and people would line up outside for it. Only once a week. I asked him why it was so special. He stopped what he was doing, looked at me, and said, “Come here, Henry. Wash your hands.”
That night he showed me what that bread meant. The braids represent unity and community. The round shape symbolizes the unending cycle of life. Before the bread went into the oven, he’d take a small piece, wrap it in foil, and place it in the back of the oven as an offering. Then he’d say a quiet prayer. I still do that today. Every single time.
Before that night, like most Americans, I thought bread came in a plastic bag and lasted two weeks on the counter. Mr. Sherman’s bakery was the first place I saw what real bread actually was. Mixed that morning. Fermented properly. Shaped by hand. Made by someone who understood that what he was doing mattered beyond the transaction.
Once you’ve experienced bread like that, you can’t go back. You can’t un-taste it. You can’t unknow what it means.
That realization eventually pushed me to write “The Loaf and the Lie,” which is the story of how we lost real bread in America when industrial baking took over in the mid-20th century, and why so many people are finding their way back to it now. For me, it all traces back to a baker who told a young soldier to wash his hands."
To Bruce and Henry: Thank you. Thank you for pulling back the curtain on your journeys and reminding us that mastery isn't just about technical skill - it’s about a refusal to settle for the "plastic bag" version of life. Your stories remind us that whether we are scaling a profitable business, decoding the biology of nutrition, or honoring the sacred traditions of a loaf of bread, we are all custodians of a higher standard.
To our community:
We often walk through the world accepting "grocery store" standards because they are convenient, quiet, and everywhere. But as our experts have shown, there is a "threshold" you cross where you can no longer un-see the truth. Once you taste the difference between a product made for profit and a craft made for people, your mission changes.
Don't just aim to be better than the competition. Aim to be the person who, like Mr. Sherman, tells the next generation to "wash their hands" and invites them into the craft. Let’s stop settling for what is easy and start building what actually matters.
The world is hungry for the real thing. Let’s be the ones who provide it.
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The world is hungry for the real thing. Let’s be the ones who provide it.
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