Donna and Kevin Maltz: Small Businesspersons of the Year.

• Author: Stomierowski, Peg
• Position: Special Section: SMALL BUSINESS

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Donna and Kevin Maltz, owners of the Fresh Sourdough Express Bakery and Restaurant in Homer and newly recognized as Alaska's Small Businesspeople of 2010, are honored to represent Alaska's small businesses, especially in advocating for greater sustainability in serving community needs.

While their passion for grassroots enterprise and "green" values endures, their sweat equity in the bakery and restaurant field extends back decades. From its humble beginnings on the Kenai Peninsula, Fresh Sourdough Express was known as the hippie granola bakery, Donna says and acknowledged as an eco-friendly pioneer. The Maltzs extol "eco-friendly" business as the way of the present and the future.

For 28 years, they've been offering regional cuisine, all the while laboring hard to stay true to their core values, whether in their scratch bakery, restaurant or catering. Everything is baked and prepared on premises and the dinners they serve highlight local seafood and produce.

As ever for the Maltzs, in business as in life, personal and planetary concerns merge whether, they said, it's in grinding organic grains for cultured sourdough breads, serving organic coffee, hand-crafting products from scratch ingredients, using eco-friendly packaging, or supporting local farmers, fishing and communities by buying and serving quality regional produce.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

It was 1982 when Donna, then 25, came to Homer with her then-boyfriend in a 10-year-old laundry truck with $43, their dog named Red, a vision of adventure and a trailer full of supplies for a working soup-and-bread kitchen. They began selling from their truck on the Homer Spit. She recalls talking to her family from a payphone outside the old Sterling Cafe, with smokers gathered nearby talking politics while she pressed her ear to the receiver.

An organic farmer and social ecology graduate from Evergreen College in Washington state, with scant bank credit potential at the time, Donna pleaded with her father for help and eventually received a $10,000 loan to smooth the way for expansion from the laundry truck to a 360-square-foot facility (now expanded to 3,000 square feet).

"That's a defining moment," she feels. "When I passionately believe in whatever it is I want to do, I just go for it, somehow accepting there will be success."

With the money, they bought kitchen equipment. She also paid "every last penny" back before summer ended. Her dad became a key supporter, over the...