Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York, sells about 35,000 pounds of brownies a day. You’ve almost certainly eaten one: they’ve supplied Ben & Jerry’s for decades. What you probably didn’t know is that the person who made that brownie got hired without a resume, a background check, or an interview.
That’s not an oversight. It’s the policy.
What Open Hiring Actually Means
Open hiring means showing up and adding your name to a list. When a position opens, the next name gets a call. Criminal record, gaps in employment, history of substance abuse: none of it factors in. The only question Greyston asks is whether you’re ready to work.
Bernie Glassman founded the bakery in 1982 with a Zen Buddhist principle at its core: everyone is on a journey, and denying someone the chance to work because of where they’ve been on that journey makes no sense. That’s a values statement. But Greyston has also made it work commercially, which is what makes it interesting.
The bakery employs over 130 people. It sells brownies to Ben & Jerry’s, Delta Airlines, and direct to consumers online. It’s a B Corporation. And it reports low turnover and strong employee engagement, metrics that often go the wrong direction when companies take risks on non-traditional hires.
The Support System That Makes It Work
Open hiring without support infrastructure would be chaotic. Greyston pairs the hiring model with a wraparound services network through the Greyston Foundation: housing assistance, childcare, health care, job-skills training, and an on-site “pathmaker” who helps employees navigate barriers between employment and stability.
The urban community gardens managed by the Foundation produce 14 tons of fresh produce annually. Employees’ children have access to a daycare center. PathMaking (the Foundation’s flagship program) helps people build a holistic picture of themselves and their goals, not just their job skills.
This is what separates Greyston from a feel-good hiring experiment. The model works because it treats employment as one piece of a larger system, not the whole solution.
Open hiring isn’t about ignoring risk — it’s about redistributing it. Greyston absorbs the risk that other employers push back onto workers, and structures the environment so that risk actually goes down over time.
What Greyston Has Proven
Gary Nash arrived at Greyston homeless, struggling with substance abuse, and unable to find work elsewhere. He was hired, advanced through the organization, and eventually started his own business. His story isn’t typical (not everyone who gets hired at Greyston has a dramatic turnaround), but it illustrates what becomes possible when the first barrier gets removed.
In 2018, Greyston opened a Center for Open Hiring to train other businesses on implementing the model. They’ve since partnered with Unilever to promote sustainable and inclusive business practices at a larger scale. The bakery’s success has become a proof of concept that other organizations are now testing in their own contexts.
The lesson for retailers isn’t necessarily “adopt open hiring wholesale.” It’s more specific: the workforce barriers you’ve accepted as givens (background checks that screen out capable people, hiring processes that filter for credentials instead of capacity) are design choices. Greyston made different choices and found that the tradeoffs were manageable.
To find out more about Greyston Bakery, visit their:
P.S. Greyston’s brownies are genuinely good: ordering directly from their site is one of the more satisfying ways to fund a social model you believe in.