It’s 9 a.m. on Sept. 20 and all anyone can think about is baseball.
Three men commune over coffee and doughnuts in front of Torrance Bakery.
Their laughter reach a fever pitch as they recount the thrilling events from last night’s baseball game.
The night before, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers sealed his place in the record books when he became the first player to achieve a 50/50: 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in one season.
Kirk Rossberg is just about to enter the bakery when he picks up on the rabble.
Earlier that morning, he had checked in on graphic designer Gabe Soy about the progress of the Ohtani 50/50 cookies that he planned on selling at the bakery to celebrate the milestone.
He gives the men an enthusiastic greeting before joining them at the table.
“Did you see the way that Ohtani swung that?” Rossberg began before mimicking the swing of a bat. “Isn’t he the first one to pitch 50/50?”
Rossberg, 67, stands out from the T-shirt and short clad throng in chinos and a white button-down. He wears the embroidered “Torrance Bakery” logo on his shirt with pride.
With a megawatt smile as white as his hair and sky-blue eyes shining behind black-framed glasses, Rossberg bears a striking resemblance to actor Ted Danson. Only, the “Good Place” Rossberg runs isn’t in the afterlife.
It can be found in the heart of downtown Torrance.
Since Oct. 19, 1984, Rossberg has served as the owner and president of Torrance Bakery.
This past summer, Rossberg, his 117 employees and the city of Torrance celebrated the bakery’s 40th anniversary.
It is a milestone marked along the way from its humble beginnings during a difficult time in Torrance’s history to its rise as a beloved local institution with a reach that goes far beyond the city.
Rossberg is a homegrown baker whose roots are sown deep in the South Bay.
During his freshman year at Bishop Montgomery High School in Torrance, he got his first start in the baking industry by sweeping the floors of a shop owned by Herman Schmidt, a Swiss candy maker based in Redondo Beach’s Riviera Village.
Eventually, Schmidt decided to relocate to a bigger storefront in Beverly Hills. Instead of following him, Rossberg decided to run for the other hills: Rolling Hills Estates.
It was there he began working for Gerry and Dorothy Mayers of Mayer’s Bakery at the Peninsula Center while attending classes at Bishop Montgomery.
“I like to think they taught me a good work ethic,” Rossberg said.
He often found himself behind the wheel of his gold Chevy Vega as the delivery driver for Mayer’s Bakery.
At any given time, he delivered anywhere between five to eight wedding cakes from La Venta Inn in Palos Verdes Estates to the Queen Mary in Long Beach.
After putting in four years at Mayer’s, Rossberg decided to branch out and expand his education.
In the years that followed, he worked at a variety of bakeries from Beverly Hills to Torrance.
All the while, Rossberg attended classes at El Camino College.
“I would go to work at, like, 1:30 in the morning so I only took afternoon classes,” Rossberg said. “I used to love the library because they had the most comfortable seats around. Sometimes, I fell asleep after working.”
Although he never declared a major, Rossberg used the opportunity to take a diverse range of classes from physical education to astronomy. He flourished in art, excelling at the sculpture classes taught by art instructor James Russell.
“I had this feeling of wanting to have a bakery or to be better in the bakery,” Rossberg said, looking back. “The art classes really helped.”
While taking those art classes, Rossberg honed his skills in color, design, texture and placement. The freedom of the classes also allowed him to further dive into his passion for baking.
In one sculpture class, students could pick their medium for their final project. While his classmates used clay and metal, Rossberg went down a more out-of-the-box route.
“I did it with cake,” he said.
By the early ‘80s, Rossberg, then in his mid-20s, knew he was ready to branch out on his own.
He looked at many bakeries for sale from El Segundo to downtown Los Angeles. But one place kept calling him back: Torrance.
At the time, downtown Torrance was experiencing an economic downturn.
“In the ‘60s and the early ‘70s, it was the center of the business district,” said Tom Aldrich, 69, a bakery regular and retired Torrance police officer. “Then they built the [Del Amo Mall] on the west side of Torrance and sucked all the business. It really became blighted.”
El Prado Avenue and the surrounding streets in the Old Torrance district were occupied by pawn shops and thrift stores.
Just down the street, at 1653 Cravens Ave., stood the Pussycat Theater, an adult movie theater where a young Quentin Tarantino worked as an usher.
This didn’t deter Rossberg from one storefront.
It was a two-story, 1,200-square-foot brick building housing a place called Torrance Bakery on El Prado Avenue.
The owner, Al Perez, was a fellow baker who spoke only Spanish and was looking to leave the business after three years.
The rent was 35 cents per square foot, totaling $420 in 1984.
In photographs taken at the time of the purchase, Kirk Rossberg is beaming. He has the bright white uniform of a baker, a mustache that could rival “Magnum P.I.”’s Tom Selleck and a dream.
“You have to have that confidence,” Rossberg said, looking back on that time. “And a lot of help.”
The early years of Torrance Bakery were not easy.
“I was surprised by all the expenses that you have to do to start up a business,” Rossberg said.
There were the ingredients, the payroll, the rent. When Torrance Bakery first started, there were seven employees on staff, including Rossberg.
In the days before Yelp and Instagram, the best and only ways to advertise were through the Yellow Pages and by word of mouth.
But in the years following Torrance Bakery’s grand opening in 1984, the city’s fortunes began to turn.
The American Honda Motor Company, Inc. opened its headquarters on Torrance Boulevard in 1990 and brought an economic boost to the city that has continued ever since.
“I think the downtown Torrance area has changed in the fact that it’s become more relevant, more trending and the businesses there are taking a bigger role in being active in the community,” said Donna Duperron, who has served as president and CEO of the Torrance Chamber of Commerce since 2010.
Torrance Bakery began seeing the changes starting in the ‘90s, when the row of shops across El Prado Avenue gave way to a condominium complex and a widening sidewalk that allowed for outdoor dining.
Like the city it is named after, Torrance Bakery grew and expanded.
This included a second location, which first opened in the Rolling Hills Plaza Shopping Center in 1995 before relocating to Gardena in 2007.
New businesses moved onto El Prado Avenue to better support the bakery’s operations, including a wedding cake gallery and a sandwich shop and cafe.
On any given day, Torrance Bakery is a thriving hive of activity.
Customers jostle to place their orders at the end counter before one of the dozen sales associates behind the counter takes them down the row of five glassed-in display cases.
Behind the counters, the black apron-clad sales associates, wielding trays laden with anything from a slice of cake to dozens of jelly doughnuts, move seamlessly past each other despite the narrow space.
Behind a short, patterned curtain, the bakery itself is a hive of activity.
Lively Spanish music plays in the background as bakers move between the network of smaller rooms that make up the back of house.
The main room houses the heart of the bakery, a massive Hobart 364 reel oven that dates back to the Al Perez days. It can turn out 18 sheet pans of baked goods at a time.
One may find Jose “Jefe” Pedroza, a 53-year-old baker with 27 years of experience under his belt, quickly transferring piping hot trays of challah bread to cool off on the portable bakery racks on the side.
Behind him, Daniel Reyes slices sheets of raw dough into squares that will soon transform into fragrant loaves of rosemary focaccia bread destined for the sandwich shop three doors down.
Reyes, along with three other bakers, came to work for Torrance Bakery when Alpine Village closed its doors in 2023.
The wooden table bolted to the terra cotta-colored tiled floor is also original, going far back to when the bakery first opened in the ‘80s.
Forty years ago, Rossberg would stand at the corner where Reyes is today, decorating cakes while another baker rolled out dough.
“When I walk by here, it reminds me of our beginning,” Rossberg said, looking at the work table. “And the hard work it takes to get to where you go.”
Today, Rossberg’s duties see him working 10 to 12-hour days, six days a week, and have him more focused on the managerial and business aspects of running a bakery rather than shaping bread loaves and decorating cakes.
That role goes to decorators Blanca Venegas and Lin Alvarado, who have 27 and 13 years of experience each.
At their stations in an adjacent room, they pipe pastel flowers and scalloped borders, transforming plain white blocks of cake into stunning showpieces.
Their finished masterpieces sit in refrigerated displays and in the vault-like, walk-in refrigerator. They range from elegant three-tier affairs with delicate golden columns to a simple round cake swathed in pink frosting with a green “HAPPEE BIRTHDAE NATALIE” scrawled on top, a “Harry Potter” reference.
Cakes are a top seller at the bakery, where they produce 400 to 500 cakes a week, 286 of which are decorated and customized creations.
“It’s close to about 40% of our business,” Rossberg said.
On July 7, 2007, Torrance Bakery broke a record of 114 wedding cakes produced in one day.
“It was quite a feat to do,” Rossberg recalled.
A team of ten people worked together to pull off the endeavor.
“It was just nuts trying to deliver, let alone bake and decorate,” Rossberg said.
The complex operations of the bakery don’t just rest on Rossberg’s shoulders.
There are two managers. One is Blanca Aguilera, 38, who has doe-like brown eyes. She oversees the 40 bakers and decorators in the back of house.
“My team in the back, we have so much connection,” Aguilera said. “Everyone works so hard, I couldn’t do it without them.”
Mallori Wood, the general manager, stands out with her fuchsia hair and Halloween-themed pins on her apron. Her tattoos are spooky-themed, with a vampire Mickey Mouse on one arm and a witchy Marge Simpson from the “Treehouse of Horrors” short “Easy Bake Coven” on the other.
When she first started at the bakery over 10 years ago, those tattoos had to be covered up by long sleeves.
“When I got hired here, there were no tattoos, no colored hair,” Wood recalled. “So I kind of like to think that I had a hand in warming Kirk up to that idea of branching out and allowing everyone to embrace their creativity.”
Most of the sales staff she oversees got their start while attending high school, just like Rossberg did so many years ago.
“It’s a healthy work environment,” sales associate Kat Faber, 36, said. “Everyone here is really friendly and respects each other.”
The customers who visit Torrance Bakery represent a slice of the city’s population.
There are young, aspiring ballet dancers from the dance schools found along Satori Avenue to Torrance High School students looking for a quick bite before first period.
There are regulars for whom Torrance Bakery made their wedding cakes, then their children’s and grandchildren’s birthday cakes years later.
On any Thursday morning, one might come across a raucous group of retired Torrance police officers and one Hermosa Beach firefighter, representing a combined 300 years of experience, swapping stories over coffee and doughnuts.
Or the next day, one might catch 76-year-old twin sisters Sue and Judy Golden treating themselves to their weekly maple bars after spending the morning packing bags of non-perishables for the charity Food4Kids.
“We’ve been coming here for years,” Judy Golden said. “It’s our go-to bakery.”
Her twin chimed in, finishing her sentence.
“It’s an institution,” Sue Golden added. “They’re very community-minded.”
Torrance Bakery’s reach isn’t limited to the South Bay.
“Everybody loves Torrance Bakery,” Dupperon said. “That goes far beyond the city of Torrance. Cities as far as San Gabriel Valley knows Torrance Bakery and speaks highly of it.”
As an L.A. County preferred vendor, Torrance Bakery has supplied cookies, brownies and other baked goods for city events, including the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day.
The Dodgers and the Lakers have sampled their fare, as have their out-of-town rivals.
Torrance Bakery has even stocked the green room at SoFi Stadium for the Rolling Stones, the Foo Fighters and Taylor Swift.
Even after baking for the stars, Rossberg still finds a way to give back to El Camino College and the South Bay community.
In the early 2010s, a unique opportunity came up for Rossberg, courtesy of his alma mater.
El Camino College was looking to add a cake decorating class for their Community and Continuing Education Program.
Rossberg took them up on the offer to join as an instructor.
The cake decorating classes took place at the Gardena location and were well received but only lasted a few years.
This past summer, Torrance Bakery delivered trays of cookies for packaged meals given to Palos Verdes residents who were displaced by the landslides in Portuguese Bend.
Although the bakery first started in October 1984, July 2024 marked its 40th anniversary with a celebration and a “week of giving.”
“It’s like a landmark,” Torrance Mayor George Chen said. During the July celebration, he presented Rossberg with a certificate of recognition. “They’re part of the fabric of the City of Torrance. It’s one of the marquee places.”
Rossberg has no plans on slowing down. He still lives in Torrance, across the street from his childhood home, with his wife Margie. She works with another kind of bun in the oven.
She’s a charge nurse in the labor and delivery ward at the Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center in Torrance. They share a blended family of five kids and six grandchildren, whose ages range between two to 11 years old.
“I love Torrance,” Rossberg said. “I can’t think of a better place to live. The weather, the people are great. We have the beach. We have so many great things here.”
There are no plans to expand to a third location. Instead, Rossberg sees himself continuing the work he has done for the last 40 years.
“I see us basically continuing to do what we do,” Rossberg said. “Just things like that, where we can give back to the community as much as possible because the community has been so great to us.”
