Baking the world a better place: Local gay-owned baking company to give out free breadsticks at Hampshire Pride

One of this year’s biggest Hampshire Pride sponsors is a local company that’s giving the festival plenty of dough – in more ways than one.

East Baking Company, a gay-owned baking company headquartered in Holyoke, is one of this year’s Platinum Level Sponsors for Hampshire Pride, which will be in Northampton on Saturday, May 3. (The other is Cooley Dickinson Hospital.) The company can’t disclose its full list of clients publicly, but nearly all American consumers have purchased or eaten its products in major grocery stores, chain restaurants, and schools around the country.

One of the highlights of the company’s participation in Hampshire Pride this year is their parade freebie. At a Pride parade, it’s normal for marchers to hand out or throw things like rainbow-colored candy, bracelets, or pens. But East Baking Co. will be giving away something different:

Bags of breadsticks.

“We wanted to hand out something fun and weird or different, and the only thing I can think of is breadsticks,” owner Dan Serra said. “We’re gonna have pallets and pallets of breadsticks.”

Serra first had the idea last year when he was handing out candy with the Rainbow Dodgeball of the Pioneer Valley parade float. Promoting his business would require doing something different and memorable.

“I can’t go handing out an English muffin, I can’t go handing out a hamburger bun, so I thought, [expletive] it, I’ll throw breadsticks at people!” he said.

(That’s not to say, though, that parade-goers actually need to fear a breadstick meteorite hurtling toward their heads: Serra assured the Gazette that the East Baking Co. marchers will only be “lightly tossing [the bags] to people so we don’t get sued.”)

When Serra approached Clay Pearson, the founder and director of Hampshire Pride, about the idea, Pearson found it hilarious, but viable.

“A whole bag of bread is just funny to me,” Pearson said. “I want more whimsy and joy in the world, and I think a parade is a perfect time to put that in there.” Besides that, he said, “Seeing somebody that’s got a gay-owned business that’s thriving and putting back into the community is really the magic that I asked for.”

Serra, a Massachusetts native, said he wanted to support Hampshire Pride this year because he and his husband want to establish their presence more firmly in the Pioneer Valley. The couple, who live in Williamsburg, got married last year and plan to have children later this year.

“I decided that, because we’re going to be more entrenched in the community, it’s really our responsibility, as a company in the area, to help however we can when events like this are being put on,” he said. “It’s important to us, who we are — we are a people-first organization.”

Besides, Serra pointed out, it’s helpful to put a company into the public eye with both significant financial support and a memorable stunt when it doesn’t have a location for customer foot traffic. East Baking Co. is headquartered in Holyoke, but it has facilities around the country. Though it doesn’t have “a presence like a car dealership or a Subway or a Dunkin’,” it still has a foothold in the market: as Serra put it, “Everybody eats my stuff.”

Of course, there’s also an extra significance to a Pride celebration in a political moment like this one, when homophobic and transphobic ideology has made its way to the highest levels of government. This year, Northampton Resists will be collaborating with Hampshire Pride to hold a rally at 1 p.m. at the festival’s vendor market to inspire “positive political action,” Pearson said, in the LGBTQ community.

To Pearson, the meaning of Pride is twofold: “It’s about spreading the joy that is in the queer community, and it’s about being politically active and politically proactive to make sure that the queer community is safe.” Parades and festivals are fun, but “we just have to stay vigilant and remember there is a seriousness to Pride, too.”

Serra’s take is less political, though straightforward: “If we’re not all working for the same common goal, which is to better everyone’s life, what does that mean?” He wants to help foster a community in which “everybody can show up to an event to be themselves, have fun, celebrate who they are, and not be afraid to celebrate who they are.”

Serra takes pride in having the only gay-owned baking company in the United States certified through the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, even though his company’s international presence (which includes government contracts) means that he can’t always take political stances.

“It’s been a very delicate balancing act,” he said, “but I’m not changing who I am because somebody doesn’t like it.”

Hampshire Pride’s parade will be on Saturday, May 3, starting at 11 a.m. in Sheldon Field and heading down Route 9 and Main Street in Northampton. The vendor market will be in the Armory Street parking lot. For more information about Hampshire Pride, visit hampshirepridema.com.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at [email protected].