Presenting Coffee Talk: a weekly roundtable led by the city's best doers curated by Presence Agency.

Every Wednesday at 1pm we'll be sipping Stumptown Coffee in the lobby while we chat with some of our favorite people in town about what they're doing.

Our next installment features Shulamis Rouzaud, Founder of Chicago Bread Club. Shulamis will be with us discussing how to affect public policy in a real way.

The mission of the Chicago Bread Club is to share the art and knowledge of bread and to promote the regional grain economy. We meet the last Monday of every month at 6:30 pm at local bars and breweries that allow outside food. We usually have a guest host, and guest hosts can be farmers, millers, bakers, extension agents, researchers, brewers, etc, anyone who is connected with our regional grain economy. About 40-50 people show up to our meetings every month (about 15-20 are the same and 25-30 are new faces), and they are so appreciative that the Chicago Bread Club exists.

In addition to running the Chicago Bread Club monthly meeting programming, the other major goal is to connect our regional grain growers and millers with small, mid-size, and large food firms. Big Food is looking to innovate, meet consumer demand, and match government nutrition standards, and our goal is to help them meet their goals by making connections that put good grain in the their supply chains (with strong contracts in place of course). I have my undergraduate degree in nutrition and dietetics and I know that not enough Americans are getting at least half of theirs grains as whole, and I’d like to be a part of changing that.