Long before Dave Dahl helped turn a family bakery into one of the most recognizable bread brands in the country, before his face appeared on bread packages across America and before the company he helped create sold for $275 million, his definition of success looked very different. It was a small piece of prison communication dropped into a box.
Dahl was 38 years old, incarcerated at Snake River Correctional Institution in Oregon and, by his own account, exhausted from years of addiction, crime, incarceration and despair. He had spent much of his adult life running — from consequences, from himself and from the unhappiness that had followed him from place to place. Then he did something he once might have considered a sign of weakness: He asked for help.
“My success was way before Dave’s Killer Bread when I put that kite in the box and asked for help and I went to school and that drafting was the beginning of my success,” Dahl said. “I loved it just as much as making the bread.”
More than two decades later, Dahl returned behind prison walls — this time by choice, and with a much different purpose. The co-founder of Dave’s Killer Bread recently visited Folsom State Prison, where he met with incarcerated participants in California Correctional Training and Rehabilitation Authority job training programs, including men learning AutoCAD and drafting skills remarkably similar to those Dahl credits with helping change the course of his own life.
Folsom Times had the opportunity to sit in on the conversation as Dahl joined CALCTRA’s Michele Kane for an extended episode of the agency’s “Prison to Purpose: Building Futures Behind Bars” podcast before his visit inside Folsom State Prison. During the conversation, Dahl offered a candid account of the journey that brought him from addiction and repeated incarceration to entrepreneurship, second-chance employment and a life now centered in part on giving others reason to believe their own stories can change.
At Folsom, that message wasn’t coming from someone speaking about rehabilitation from a distance. Dahl had lived it.
“When I got arrested at 22 years old, I was very immature, reckless,” Dahl said.
His problems had begun well before there was a bread company attached to his name. Dahl grew up around baking but wanted little to do with the family profession. His father was a baker, but Dahl said the relationship was difficult and he had no interest in following the same path.
“My dad was a very unusual baker, very unusual human being,” Dahl told Kane. “And I didn’t like him growing up. I didn’t want to be anything but him. So baking was definitely not what I wanted to do. But I didn’t know what else I wanted to do either.”
What he did find in his early 20s was methamphetamine. Dahl described the first time he injected the drug as a transformation — but one that ultimately led him deeper into addiction and crime.
“When I stuck a needle in my arm, it was like a brand new world,” he said. “It was, I call it my first transformation in life.”
He described going from feeling profoundly unhappy to suddenly feeling happy, while acknowledging there was nothing healthy about the escape he had found. Addiction soon began determining how he lived.
“I just, it was all drug-related stuff,” Dahl said. “I was always trying to get high. And I couldn’t afford it. I couldn’t keep a job. So I did whatever criminal activity I needed to do to make a dollar to get high. Because my morals went out the window with the drugs.”
Dahl said his criminal history included burglary, armed robbery, unarmed robbery and later drug and assault offenses. His incarcerations stretched across years and state lines, including four and a half years in Massachusetts for armed robbery. Altogether, he spent about 15 years incarcerated.
“I was running all the time,” Dahl said. “I was always running away and, you know, everywhere I got, you know how they say you’re still there when you get there.”
Eventually, there was nowhere left to run. The pivotal moment came in 2001 at Snake River Correctional Institution, when Dahl was 38.
He described going onto the prison yard and appearing normal around others, then returning at night to a far different reality — sweating, unable to sleep, plagued by disturbing dreams and thoughts and tired of the life he was living.
“I just got to the place where I was tired of being suicidal,” Dahl said. “And I mean, being miserable and being a loser. And I told myself that I’ll do whatever I got to do to either change or die.”
For Dahl, asking for psychiatric help required overcoming a prison culture — and his own pride — that had taught him to see vulnerability differently. He recalled reaching a point where other people’s opinions no longer mattered compared with his need to survive and change.
“I came to a point where I said, ‘You know what? I have nothing to lose. I don’t care what anybody thinks. I don’t care if they trip on me standing in the medline because I’m going to get help if I can,’” he recalled.
So he submitted a “kite,” the term for an incarcerated person’s written communication within the institution, requesting psychiatric services. “And it was the best thing I ever did,” Dahl said.
The importance of that moment, he said, extended beyond receiving treatment. It taught him something he had resisted for much of his life: humility.
“I learned some humility and understand the power of humility,” Dahl said. “I am who I am. I don’t care what you think.”
He also accepted that he could use help. “I accepted that I could use help,” Dahl said.
That willingness to stop pretending he had all the answers became a foundation for what followed. During the podcast, Dahl described much of his earlier life as a struggle between insecurity and an outward need to appear smarter, tougher or more capable than he felt.
“Most of my life I pretended to be better, smarter than I was,” he said. “But I was always over here in this quivering jelly-like mess underneath and going, ‘Oh my god, this is who I really am.’”
Finding a middle ground — simply accepting himself while remaining willing to learn — became a powerful realization. Dahl said that one of the biggest lessons was understanding that not having every answer could actually create room for growth.
“I don’t have to know everything,” Dahl said. “Because if I don’t know it all, then I can find out and I can learn. And I’ve realized that teachability, humility is teachability.”
That change in mindset coincided with another development that would prove especially relevant years later when he walked into Folsom State Prison. Dahl went to school while incarcerated and took an AutoCAD drafting program.
“The job training skills that I received participating in an AutoCAD program while incarcerated helped me realize I was capable of more than I thought,” Dahl said. “These skills gave me the ability to create the branding of Dave’s Killer Bread.”
For participants in Folsom State Prison’s own AutoCAD program, Dahl’s visit provided something beyond a motivational speech. They were meeting someone who had once learned many of the same skills while serving time and later applied them in the outside world. Dahl spent time looking over their projects, talking about their work and answering questions.
“To see someone who went through an AutoCAD program in prison and was successful once returning to his community, shows that there is a future for us. It proves that anything is possible,” said Michael Stockham, a CALCTRA AutoCAD participant at Folsom State Prison.
The connection between drafting and bread may seem unlikely. Dahl says it was anything but.
After his release, he returned to the family bakery and initially worked on cookies while holding down a regular work schedule and spending additional hours on research and development. Eventually his brother pushed him toward the family’s central product: bread.
Dahl was intimidated by the challenge. Bread was far more complex than cookies, and the marketplace was already filled with large competitors.
“I’m like, well, how do I compete with these guys and kind of do something that they can’t do?” Dahl recalled.
The answer drew directly from the kind of thinking he had developed through drafting.
“I designed a product around by reverse engineering other products like you would do in drafting,” Dahl said. “You reverse engineer, you take it apart and put it back together a different way and you keep testing and trying different things.”
The AutoCAD training he received while incarcerated had become more than a line on a résumé. The process of examining something, understanding how it worked and reconstructing it differently had influenced the way he approached product development.
Just eight months after leaving prison, Dahl said he was bringing the first four bread varieties to Portland Farmers Market. It proved to be an ideal test market.
Customers tried the bread, liked it and soon began asking where they could buy it once the farmers market ended. Dahl had an answer ready.
“I said, well, here’s a card. Give this card to whoever you shop,” he recalled.
Growth came incrementally — one store, then another, then another. That pace meant Dahl personally sampled bread in new stores and met the people buying it. By March of the first year, he recalled the company producing about 6,000 loaves a week.
“It just started mushrooming from there,” he said.
The bread itself was deliberately different. Dahl wanted a dense product packed with seeds, cracked wheat and other ingredients rather than relying primarily on flour. He likened his concept to combining a bowl of cereal with a loaf of bread.
The family also made a consequential decision to go organic at a time when organic products were far less commonplace than they are today. Dahl recalled wondering whether customers would pay the additional cost or whether another company might imitate the bread without using organic ingredients and undercut them on price.
The gamble worked, and so did the story behind the product.
“Everything was just a little bit, but eventually you get to a certain point and it’s bigger than you can even imagine,” Dahl said.
He insists becoming wealthy was never the original objective.
“I didn’t get out to become a millionaire,” he said. “I got out and had this opportunity. I wanted to — I just wanted to make a good product and contribute to my family business.”
One variety in particular came to symbolize much more than food. Good Seed reflected how Dahl had begun viewing his own transformation.
“Creating Dave’s Killer Bread was a turning point in my life,” Dahl said. “When I made ‘Good Seed,’ I realized I had turned over a new leaf. I had been a bad seed, but through hard work, I became a good seed. That bread became a symbol of my own transformation and a reminder that people can change their story.”
Dave’s Killer Bread was co-founded by Dahl, his brother and nephew in August 2005. Over the next decade, the family business became a nationally recognized organic bread brand. In 2015, the company was sold for $275 million.
“The company’s a billion dollar company now,” Dahl said during the podcast. “But did I ever think that? No.”
Wealth, he said, wasn’t the measure he had been chasing.
“I just want to be happy,” he said. “I just want to be happy that I’m doing the right thing, making a good product, taking care of family, you know, that kind of thing.”
His experience also influenced whom the company was willing to employ. Dave’s Killer Bread became known for giving employment opportunities to people with criminal histories, but Dahl said the practice did not begin as a branding strategy.
“Yeah. And that wasn’t like, hey, let’s go hire a bunch of ex-felons,” Dahl told Kane. “It was like, I got out with a really good new purpose in life and I believed that other people could do that too. So why not give people that are ready a chance?”
Dahl said he, his brother and nephew understood from experience that people returning from incarceration can be intensely motivated when someone gives them an opportunity.
“You help them, they help you,” he said. “It’s real, real basic.”
Some became exceptional employees, he said. That experience reinforced something Dahl now carries into prisons such as Folsom: transformation becomes more powerful when opportunity follows it.
“Once you see how it works, that it does work and people change and become amazing people, then you want that to grow,” Dahl said. “You want to build that in the world.”
For Dahl, giving back began before he had the financial means to write large checks. His story appeared on the back of the Dave’s Killer Bread package, and people increasingly asked him to speak. He addressed young people, adults, business groups and others, sharing where he had been and what had changed.
“I remember there came a point when I had something to give back and then I got it,” Dahl said. “I had something to offer people.”
He described the transformation as beginning with several interconnected experiences — getting help for the personal struggles he was facing, participating in CAD training and discovering that he could continue improving himself.
“I just was like, I’m happy,” he said. “I’m happy to be on this journey of self-improvement, growth, appreciation of life, gratitude.”
That journey has not been without setbacks. Dahl spoke candidly with Kane about difficulties that arose years after the bread company had become successful.
He described beginning to drink and party heavily while being treated, in his words, “like a rock star.”
“I let it go to my head,” Dahl said. “I’m like, I’ve arrived. I can’t screw this up. And I managed to screw it up.”
He described a later spiral and period of profound depression that disrupted the trajectory of his life. He ultimately came through that period as well, and said those experiences further shaped his willingness to acknowledge mistakes and begin again.
“I get to start over sometimes in certain areas because I’m willing to do that,” Dahl said. “I’m like, ‘Okay, I made a mistake.’”
Now 63, he sees growth as something that does not have an expiration date.
“It’s always time to get better and be okay with who I am now,” Dahl said.
That philosophy helps explain why walking back into a prison carries such emotional weight. Asked what he experiences when visiting facilities such as Folsom State Prison and San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, Dahl called it surreal.
He remembered wondering while incarcerated whether his story would ever matter — whether someday he might succeed and look back at those prison years from an entirely different place. Returning now feels, in part, like an answer.
“It’s kind of like that, a dream come true,” Dahl said.
What excites him most, however, is what he sees in the participants.
“I get really excited about seeing guys with their eyes lighting up and they’re working on things,” he said. “I get it when I see it.”
He also acknowledged that many incarcerated people struggle to see much reason for hope. For Dahl, going back inside helps him too.
“Well, it’s therapy for me, too,” he said. “I get something — this giving back is you get what you give kind of.”
He has expressed that connection even more directly in discussing the Folsom visit.
“Speaking about my story with other incarcerated individuals is a form of therapy for me,” Dahl said. “If sharing what I’ve been through can give someone else hope, then it’s worth it. I’ve learned that you get what you give in life. When you give hope, you often receive it right back.”
That philosophy extends beyond correctional facilities. Dahl discussed his support for Constructing Hope, an organization that helps people enter construction trades. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he said the organization was struggling to obtain grant funding because it could not operate normally and was in danger of going out of business.
Dahl said he contributed about $100,000 to help keep it operating. What happened afterward illustrated what he sees as the multiplying effect of investment in people. Other supporters eventually stepped forward with far larger contributions as the organization continued to grow.
“You see the snowballing of giving back,” Dahl said.
He is particularly enthusiastic about skilled trades, an area that also overlaps with vocational opportunities available through CALCTRA.
“They teach people how to do the trades and they give people an opportunity in the trades,” Dahl said of Constructing Hope. “Which, by the way, I believe 100% that we’re not doing enough getting people into the trades. So what an opportunity.”
CALCTRA’s work is centered on that same concept of creating opportunity through practical preparation. The self-funded state entity provides incarcerated individuals with career development and vocational opportunities intended to prepare them to become productive, successful contributors when they return to their communities.
Its stated mission places rehabilitation and second chances at the center of its work, combining vocational training with real-world experience producing quality products and services. CALCTRA’s vision is to lead in career training and rehabilitation through innovative life and vocational programs designed to support successful reentry.
Among the organization’s primary goals is enhancing incarcerated individuals’ lives in ways that can help reduce recidivism, along with fostering continuous improvement and professional development. Its stated values include leadership, rehabilitation, professionalism, accountability, integrity, teamwork, innovation and safety.
For Dahl, the AutoCAD classroom at Folsom State Prison was a particularly direct example of that mission in action. The participants were able to show him their projects and ask questions of someone who understood not merely the software they were using, but the uncertainty of wondering whether skills learned inside prison could truly mean something outside it.
Dahl could answer that question with his own history. The drafting program he took while incarcerated helped teach him the way of thinking he would later use in developing and branding a bread product. From there came a farmers market table, then individual stores, thousands of loaves a week, a nationally recognized company and eventually a $275 million sale.
But Dahl repeatedly returns to the point that the financial outcome is not where he locates the beginning of his success. It began when he became teachable, it began when he accepted help, and it began before Dave’s Killer Bread existed.
That perspective is also reflected in one of the more vivid symbols of his life today. Years after first selling bread at Portland Farmers Market, Dahl purchased a penthouse on the 27th floor of a downtown Portland building. The outdoor decks were a major reason he chose it.
From those decks, he can look down at the place where Dave’s Killer Bread first met its customers.
“I can look right down on the farmers market where I started selling my bread,” Dahl said. “And it’s just goosebumpy, you know.”
For Kane, the image represented a story coming full circle. For Dahl, it provides something else as well.
“It’s also good to remember your roots,” he said.
The view serves as a daily reminder that the penthouse, the company and the money came later. The first victory happened behind prison walls.
“My success was way before Dave’s Killer Bread when I put that kite in the box and asked for help and I went to school and that drafting was the beginning of my success,” Dahl said.
Dahl’s Folsom visit was part of his recent time with CALCTRA programs within the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He also visited San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, connecting with participants in programs involving Autodesk and The Last Mile and seeing the work being done to prepare incarcerated individuals for opportunities after release.
His conversation with Kane for “Prison to Purpose: Building Futures Behind Bars” was recorded Aug. 17. The episode featuring Dahl is now available.
The podcast shares stories intended to demonstrate the value of job training programs and pathways to opportunity. Episodes are released every other Tuesday and are available through major podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and iHeartRadio, with video episodes also available through CALCTRA’s YouTube channel.
Near the conclusion of their conversation, Kane asked Dahl what he would tell someone listening from inside a correctional facility, someone who had previously been incarcerated, or a family watching a loved one serve time. His answer returned to hope.
“I think there’s a lot of hope to be had,” Dahl said. “There’s a lot of hope to be created.”
He pointed to programs such as CALCTRA as places where that hope can become something practical.
“This kind of thing is going to make a difference,” Dahl said. “It does make a difference.”
And, he added, the impact doesn’t necessarily stop with one person securing a job or successfully returning home.
“Each person whose life is changed, they go out and change other lives,” Dahl said. “They change their family’s lives. They help their companies succeed. They start their own businesses. I mean, it’s exponential what happens, the growth.”
Dahl understands setbacks well enough not to portray transformation as a straight line. His own path included repeated incarceration, addiction, recovery, tremendous business success and later personal struggles. What has remained constant, he said, is the possibility of getting back up.
“There’s no reason to give up hope,” Dahl said. “Never is. And I’ve had falls from grace and I always come back. So, I believe in others, too.”
That may be the most important part of the story he carried through the gates at Folsom State Prison. The familiar face associated with Dave’s Killer Bread wasn’t there primarily to tell participants how to build a $275 million company. He was there to tell them about the years before anyone knew his name — about addiction, prison cells, sleepless nights, swallowing his pride, asking for help and sitting down to learn a drafting program.
For the men in Folsom’s AutoCAD program, the connection was difficult to miss. Dahl had once been an incarcerated student trying to determine whether what he was learning could lead anywhere. Years later, he returned as proof that it could.
And in a story filled with bread, business and an extraordinary financial outcome, Dahl continues to measure his greatest success by a far smaller moment — the day a desperate man in an Oregon prison wrote a message asking someone to help him change his life. At Folsom State Prison, that journey brought CALCTRA’s mission of career training, rehabilitation and second chances full circle: from someone who once needed an opportunity himself to someone returning behind the walls to help others recognize one in front of them.
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