For 106 years, La Segunda has baked bread in Ybor City, a neighborhood in Tampa, Florida. It’s a Cuban bakery where the loaves are scored with palmetto fronds and reach 36in in custom ovens. Between the longstanding traditions and myths that shape the place, the owners that span four generations have never seen prices rise as they have in the past year.
Across America, inflation affected the food industry acutely, and in the case of La Segunda, the cost of wheat doubling in just 12 months left a bruise. “That’s 30% to 40% of our manufacturing,” said Copeland More, a partner alongside his father in the business.
The jump in cost added nearly $40,000 to overhead each month, and it left More to navigate just how to raise prices, retain customers, and keep the 140 employees across three bakeries above water.
In Tampa, the cost of living rose at a rate in the past year that dwarfed the rest of the United States, by more than 3%. For Daniel Mitchell, who started working at La Segunda just six months ago as a technician, he felt the pressure.
His days just kept stretching. The more time he spent traversing Tampa Bay as a construction contractor, the less troubling the increasing cost of living for his family seemed. But after long days, he would make it home just in time to tuck his kids into bed and leave before they opened their eyes.
By the time the pandemic reached Tampa, construction ground to a halt, so he took a second job. Then, he took a third. Twelve hour days bled into 15 hours. Soon, Mitchell left construction completely to keep pace with the 10% increase in rent and 7% in food alongside childcare.
His wife, Ciera, who already worked at La Segunda, suggested talking to her manager. She made good on the promise, and Mitchell made good on their faith when they hired him as a maintenance technician. “Now I only have to work one place,” he said and with the regular hours, he gets home in time to see his kids before the sun sets.
Still, although the stress of multiple jobs and long days has ebbed, the cost of living continues to climb, and so the Mitchells have given up eating out and paid careful attention to just how they’re spending their money. “Now it’s more of a necessity, you know what I mean?” Mitchell said, “Holding on to money, saving, because you never know.”
A rise in the cost of living
The rising cost of everything in Tampa has become as commonplace as the storms that build up on the Gulf’s edge nearly every afternoon in the summer.
Across the country, the cost of rent, food and housing grew exponentially this past year. Nationally, the cost of inflation hovered around 8% according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But along the Gulf of Mexico, Tampa dwarfed the national average, often by three points. While tourism revenues ballooned, low wages stagnated. Insurance rates rose as jobless claims alongside evictions and property taxes edged toward insurmountable for many residents. The region saw some of the fastest-growing rents in all of America according to real estate academics – more than a 30% jump.
At La Segunda, when the cost of living began to climb in 2020, More and his managers agreed to raise wages. “We got ahead of the game,” he said, “and we’ve always had full benefits.”
Like the rest of the country, restaurants shuttered across Tampa Bay, and turnover among employees spread like wildfire. At La Segunda, “We raised prices on everything,” More said. He feared losing customers, but as the temperature broke 100F (38C) this past month, the line of people waiting outside in Ybor and the humming dining room at their Kennedy location reassured him.
For La Segunda, bread animates the business, with wholesale to customers around the country making up almost 75% of its revenue. In each shift, the bakers produce between 3,000 and 5,000 loaves by hand.
“I think what we do is kind of a dying art,” More said of producing that much bread by hand. “It’s just difficult. You’re on your feet. It’s hot. It’s manual labor. It’s repetitive labor.”
It’s part of why La Segunda built out a retirement program for its employees that ensured they could retire, take vacation or see a doctor. Many of the bakers are older, and More told them, “You guys can’t work here for ever.”
At first, everyone was skeptical, but in time they came around to the idea of their wages being set aside. And over the years, More and his family helped employees secure housing or put together the financing to buy a place, but now when he talks to his employees and managers, he said, “Housing costs are outrageous. You basically can’t live unless you’re at this wage. I’m thinking to myself, ‘It just doesn’t add up.’ You know?”
All throughout Tampa Bay, the concentration of for sale signs along the road, empty storefronts, and people panhandling at intersections told another story inextricably tied to the city.
‘Food is the door’
North of La Segunda on Nebraska Avenue in Seminole Heights is where Nancy Hernandez’s hope to build a food pantry began in 2007.
But long before there was a physical space, she carried a five-gallon bucket filled with water and sandwiches up and down the street talking to people. By 2020 during the first wave of the pandemic, she started dispensing food with a box truck before she and her husband signed the lease on a physical space in 2021.
Hernandez has never seen such an urgent need as she has over the last two years. When they moved into the single story storefront, Hernandez built out a small church, an office, and devoted the lion’s share to food storage. They named it Ministerio Mujeres Restauradas por Dios or “The Ministry of Women Restored by God”.
In the blue light before the sun even hints at rising, Hernandez and her husband stock the pantry, like playing a careful game of Tetris to make sure everything fits in the limited coolers they have. They started with food, because as Hernandez said, “Food is the door.” She ran through how everybody’s rent in this neighborhood rose in the last year, but wages stayed the same. “You can only stretch it so much,” she said.
For some of the families it begins with the inability to afford childcare, a missed day of work, or the sudden jump in rent many saw here. Soon, they’re tiding themselves over in a hotel or a family member’s living room and, as Hernandez explained, people who never imagined themselves standing in line for a food pantry are suddenly there.
In Tampa Bay, there’s a patchwork of non-profits devoted to providing aid to families like Hernandez’s, and among the largest is Metropolitan Ministries. For James Dunbar, their senior director of outreach and prevention, he echoed Hernandez’s sentiment when he explained how much broader the spectrum of families affected was.
Of course, the most vulnerable families were still at risk here, but he noted how families that have never needed nor asked for help were standing in line for food or looking for help with rent, diapers, or their mortgage. “Now it’s our neighbors that have never had to ask,” he said. “It’s moving up the chain.”
Back on Nebraska Avenue, Nancy Hernandez ferried back and forth between her office and the pantry as her husband left to pick up a food donation in the truck. On Friday, the pantry would open, but it was unclear how many more months they could afford to stay here.
In June, the landlord, who previously had been extremely flexible and understanding, let Hernandez know that the rent would double come July. The space, previously $1,500, would now cost $3,000 a month. For now, Hernandez focused on finding space for the donations on their way to the pantry, but as the day wore on, she wondered how long they might sustain themselves here, and so, she prayed.
Back at the bakery, the next shift of bakers set to work as the last customers of the day left with pastries and Cuban sandwiches. More, looking over the projected cost of wheat in the coming months saw some promise as the prices dipped slightly. “It’s been a challenge,” he said. “But it’s just figuring out solutions around the problems, being proactive, and getting ahead of it.”
The same set of questions haunt him today as when he joined his father as partner. How do you keep pace with the cost of goods while keeping customers? How do you take care of your employees while staying afloat? The past year only galvanized those questions.
