THE WEST

The Air Force Vet Who Quit Corporate America to Bake Bread—and Phoenix Can’t Get Enough

Written by Eric Barton | July 28, 2025


AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Eric Barton The Adventurist

Andres Cano can still picture Saturday mornings in New Jersey, his mother frying Colombian cheese and teaching him how to make bollo de mazorca and bollo de queso. “She always told us, ‘In life we would need to be self‑sufficient but also never lose our Colombian roots, and our traditional cooking,’” he says. Those lessons, equal parts practicality and heritage, became the backbone of a life that somehow runs straight through a loaf of bread.

He didn’t grow up imagining himself a baker. Cano spent 18 years climbing the corporate ladder in tech sales and strategy, most recently at Amazon Web Services. It was stable, good money, and the kind of job where you can disappear in a reorg without anyone blinking. “I worked for a large corporation that I could see the shift happening & in a heartbeat would get rid of someone without care,” he says. Around the same time, a friend gave him a sourdough starter. He began baking, and something clicked. “I have always helped large corporations build their dream… and I thought to myself, ‘Why can’t I have something of my own?’”

Last October, Cano quit his job and launched Andres Candough DoughVine Bread out of his home in the Phoenix neighborhood of Laveen. Nine months later, the bakery has more than 400 customers, regular collaborations with restaurants, and a partnership with State Forty Eight selling branded merch. His loaves aren’t the usual crust‑and‑crumb studies that fuel Instagram sourdough accounts. They’re stuffed with memory: a Colombian chorizo loaf with queso Colombiano, a guava‑and‑cheese loaf he grew up eating as a snack, a pizza loaf with marinara, mozzarella, garlic, and red‑pepper flakes. “I love to develop new flavors… that I can see connecting our community together through culture,” he says.

Andres Cano

Andres Cano

The moment for Cano happened at a Chilte pop‑up, where his breads were paired with small bites and drinks inspired by Spain and Portugal. He walked in that morning hoping for the best and found the place packed—family, friends, regulars, even an Air Force buddy he hadn’t seen in a decade. “It will be a day I will always remember,” he says.

Andres Cano Candough bakery

Cano talks about staying grounded the way some people talk about brushing their teeth. He started working at 13, cleaning buildings at night with his parents. He joined the Air Force, learned discipline, and then spent nearly two decades in corporate America honing strategy, project management, and people skills. “My beginnings and where I come from keep me grounded always,” he says. “Anything in life could be taken away at the snap of a finger.”

Candough bakery

Now he’s using those skills to grow the bakery—thinking strategically about expansion while still baking in the same hands‑on way that first sparked his passion. On the rare day off, he and his partner head to their small cabin in Heber with their dogs. They might see friends or just stay in the woods, or sprawl on the couch with a movie.

Andres Cano Phoenix

Growing up in New Jersey, Cano didn’t imagine himself a baker

It’s a life that looks nothing like corporate tech. And yet it feels inevitable, like Cano was always going to end up here—making bread that carries his history, feeding a community that now knows exactly who he is.


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