John Sweet '00

Posted October 31, 2007

Business owner and entrepreneur John Sweet’s romance with bread began with the village bakeries of Germany, but it didn’t end there.

“I remember really enjoying the way that food was much more central to the lives of folks over there; from the midday meal being the main meal of the day, to the abundance and regularity of farmers markets, and the more regular (often daily) purchases of fresh food,” explains John. “In many urban settings, there are literally bakeries on every corner, and every village has its own bakery. I found these places to be very stimulating in terms of the senses they engaged, as a customer or even as a passerby.”

Inspired by the care that German bakers put into their bread, John returned to the states and sought work in bakeries across the country. He fell in love with his wife, Angela, while baking bread at Zingerman’s Bakehouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the summer after his sophomore year at Covenant.

“I spent 40 hours a week standing on a concrete floor shaping hundreds of loaves of artisan bread every day in the 82 degree bakery,” says John. “That summer I fell in love with breadmaking, and my vague vision for a neighborhood bakery narrowed to a bakery specializing in the baking of traditional, handcrafted artisan breads.”

During and after his time at Covenant, John worked at and visited many bakeries, and started a small business out of the basement of a family’s home in Lookout Mountain. He also spent 16 weeks learning about the chemistry of fermentation, as well as principles of production management and controlled lab experiments, while enrolled in an intensive “Baking Science and Technology” course at the American Institute of Baking in Manhattan, Kansas.

Already during his freshman year at Covenant, John had begun working on a business plan for a bakery of his own. Using business principles he learned at Covenant, and encouraged by his professors to pursue his passion, John built up a complete business plan and turned it in as the capstone Senior Integration Project for his business degree.

That plan, originally titled “Sweet Bread,” later became the starting point for Niedlov’s Breadworks, an artisan bakery in downtown Chattanooga specializing in naturally leavened, handcrafted, whole grain breads. John owns and operates the company, along with his wife, Angela.

As John and Angela seek to raise their two children in and around the bakery, their daily work is often accompanied by the sounds of their toddler son moving piles of flour with his toy trucks on the bakery floor.

“I consider it a great blessing to be able to work as much as I do, and still see my family,” says John. He admits the difficulty of disengaging from the bakery at times, but he and Angela see making that work as a major responsibility and a great challenge.

Operating their business by six principles—Product, Service, Profits, Innovation, Community, and Education—John and Angela encourage their coworkers and employees to find fulfillment in their work.

“We love to knead. We knead to love. This has been our organization's motto from the beginning,” says John. “I am called to be a baker, and that means bread is God's chosen vehicle for loving through me. With that in mind, Niedlov's is the medium through which I engage, and love, the world: God, neighbors, family, customers, coworkers, vendors. We strive for excellence in our business. This begins and ends with bread.”

But John’s passion for breadmaking isn’t just about bread. It’s about redemption.

“One of the reasons that baking has continued to captivate me over the years is that breadmaking is very similar to our human process,” says John. “Dough being created though the mixing of ingredients; individual loaves being weighed out, hand shaped and shaped again; these loaves being let to develop and rise in the proper environment; the surface of each loaf being cut with the blade in perfect patterns just before baking, that they may properly blossom in the oven; and the transformation by fire that happens on the surface of the hearth: loaves dying as dough and being reborn as bread, fulfilling the Baker's vision for what they ought to become. It's a beautiful process: living and life-giving.”

From business and economics professors to soccer coaches and teammates, whether in student government or club-sponsored local Widows Harvest ministry, the relationships John formed at Covenant were crucial to shaping his calling to “knead to love.”

“Covenant helped me learn how to think,” says John. “It opened my eyes to many things, and gave me experiences and opportunities that changed my life at a critical stage. To look very specifically at who I was and what I was created to do, all in preparation for ultimately setting about the Lord’s work of becoming that person in the real world, was a process of eternal significance to me.”

John recalls soccer coach Brian Crossman’s “uncompromising standards, model leadership, and commitment to success, not only on the field, but also in the lives of his players,” and relates his continuing friendship with Krue Brock, who taught the freshman core class which inspired John to begin planning his business in earnest. Community development professor Brian Fikkert, whom John describes as one of his heroes, brought a passion to economics and serving the poor that continues to affect him.

“The greatest thing to me about Covenant,” says John, “was the opportunity it provided to live in community and practice leadership, with a commitment to intentional, Christ-centered thinking and living. A motivated student can thrive at Covenant, working to become prepared to be a fully engaged citizen of the world, building community and ushering in the Kingdom in his or her own way.”