He told the cartoonist to make the muscles in his arms a little bigger, his face less rough. Glenn and Dave launched four varieties of Dave’s Killer Bread at the Portland Farmer’s Market in August 2005. It didn’t work. The morning of his junior-year finals he woke up in a jail cell bloody, covered in cuts. They knew they had something killer and unique, but little did they know how much these products would shake up the bread aisle. When he finishes his cigarette, he puts it out, then takes the butt and slides it into his pocket. He kept driving. He’s had to live up to his own fictionalized image ever since 2005 and even though the company isn’t his anymore, his face hasn’t gone anywhere. This glutenous ice-breaker was successful; a sea of hands would raise after the first gift was tossed, each person hoping they’d be the next to receive nourishment from the stage. For the rest of his life, the story of Dave’s Killer Bread would have been erased from his timeline. “They just call me Dave,” he says. In 1987, he was addicted to drugs and incarcerated for home burglary. The robberies began to blur together. “The love of my life out there just laying in blackberry bushes for so long,” she wrote. A lack of information or understanding about employing people with criminal backgrounds can make businesses hesitant to explore this option, and we're here to change that. Retelling the story, Dave chuckles at the absurdity of his reaction. He was a pretty lousy one, too. Angelo Fraggos, a veteran food industry executive from New York, will be board chairman. Afterward he’ll probably come right back to work, maybe watch the Blazers. It was founded in 2005 by Dave Dahl, who learned the baking trade growing up in his family bakery. Nevertheless, the antidepressant worked. Dave worked hard and brought a line of products to a local farmers market in Portland,” Watson explains. When Dave’s Killer Bread was sold to Flowers Foods for $275 million in 2015, the reach of this once-local bakery expanded considerably. Seeing his bread in stores is like looking into a fun-house mirror. Even now, when the company lists promotional events online, people still comment wondering whether Dave will be there. Then it all came together. He’d fill the trunk of his Escalade with bread and take the loaves inside. Michelle knew none of this. “The monster came in a different form this time, but it was worse in a sense. When the board found out, the members forced him to take a sabbatical. He and his siblings — a sister and two brothers — worked at the bakery as soon as they were old enough. Dave let him drive his Escalade, “which was, you know, insane,” he says. All rights reserved (About Us). When the new company launched in 2005, Dave’s Killer Bread offered four varieties: Blues Bread, Nuts & Grains, Good Seed, and Rockin’ Rye. In most prisons, written requests are commonly known as kites, though no one seems to know where the term came from. When I did bread, I had to sell bread,” he laughs. He worked more hours a week than he could count and shook hands and smiled when people approached him on his days off. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. He was sliding into his car when an officer approached him and said he wanted to talk. Still, he kept drinking. He says he remembers saying things like, “go, don’t go, stop, go, don’t go,” which didn’t mean anything but in his head seemed perfectly logical. “But still, there was an unreal sort of ego.” Dave is telling me this story in a dim office, reclined three-quarters of the way in a massage chair. Dave received $33 million in the sale, but he lost a little of himself in the process. “I’ve been avoiding people because I wanted to live my life,” he explains. During Q&A sessions he’d turn to his assistant and say, “I think that question deserves a loaf of bread,” and they’d toss a loaf to the inquirer. “Screw everybody,” Dave remembers thinking. He says that if he aims for the trash and misses, he’ll walk over and pick it up. The company will first look to expand sales in California grocery outlets. This is not about me,” he says. Terms of the deal were not made public. Today, Dave's Killer Bread sells over a dozen types of bread in grocery stores nationwide. The connection is slightly staticky — the sound equivalent of a shaky handheld camera. Previously, he’d spent the early months out of prison at his mom’s garage, then later rented a house in Northeast Portland from an old friend. They reached a point where they operated three bakeries, had manufacturing partnerships with two others and sold 400,000 loaves a week in 11 western states. Dave Dahl (born January 12, 1963) is an American entrepreneur, known for co-founding Dave's Killer Bread. If you held the image on the bread’s packaging — an illustration of a muscular man with long, black hair and a mustache shredding on a guitar — up to Dave’s face, you could tell it was him. "The company has just scratched the surface in California," said Daniel Bonoff, a partner at Goode Partners, the equity firm. “You are not going to change, and I am not going to change. Watch The Dave’s Killer Bread Story. Dave’s Killer Bread® is powerfully different with killer taste and killer texture. For someone who still holds onto remnants of a self-destructive streak, Dave goes to painstaking lengths to keep it self-contained. He’s sitting in his car, but he’s been in and out. After a third deputy arrived on the scene, they pulled Dave from his vehicle, used a Taser on him twice, and threw him to the ground. Dave always felt like the proverbial bad seed before he turned his life around — in the loaf, of all things, he saw his own transformation. Mundane trips to the grocery store or Best Buy became impromptu fan sessions. Dave stopped getting paid hourly and became president of the Dave’s Killer Bread brand, which came with a much larger paycheck. When Dave was born, the Dahls lived in a small, shabby house that he called a shanty. If Dave had been a different type of guy, he might have been giving TED talks about the redemptive power of baking.