ANDREW AMBRIZ

Class of 2017

It feels like time travel when you walk up to this famous old donut shop storefront in McCook. Peek inside and you’ll see the James Beard award-winning Sehnert’s Bakery and Bieroc Cafe is the place to be. Brownies, peanut butter bars and cream horns, a case filled with freshly fried and iced donuts. Wooden tables and floors, exposed brick walls and Edison lights set the scene for your coffee date. Sit for hours with bottomless coffee in a Sehnert’s mug or a locally-supplied espresso. The bread is their own, made from flour milled just down the road. Andrew Ambriz (’17) owns the establishment with his wife Alix (Machino, ’16) and says it’s a dream come true.

“As you sit down it feels like you’re sitting at the table you’re supposed to be at, across from the person you should be talking to,” Ambriz said. “It’s wonderfully private but also beautifully connected. I always called the bakery the inflection point of the community, where you could not talk to anybody the entire day, and by the time you show up for lunch, you can see everybody in McCook by the time you left. It is as much a gathering place for everyone and where chance encounters happen, where life happens. But it’s also a place to go when you need really connected time with one particular person — you sit across and you download.”

The story unfolds like a fable: The Sehnert bakery business got its start in Germany in 1521. Then eight brothers emigratee from Erfurt, Germany, to open bakeries across Nebraska. Walt Sehnert (’49) was the last one to do so, and with wife Jean (’50), they open a McCook location in 1957. Walt passed it to his son Matt in the 1990s, where Matt (’86) and his wife Shelly (Moravec, ’88) made it what it is today — why not do lunch? Add espresso to the menu. They even introduced folk music to southwest Nebraska with dinner and a show called Live at the Bieroc. Fast-forward to a fateful Tuesday night in February 2021 when Andrew Ambriz got a text. Matt pitched that this straight-out-of-a-movie bakery and cafe could be theirs.

So, the Ambriz family took a leap of faith: “We’re building our life here,” Ambriz said. “Rural communities matter, and we’re doing everything on our end as a business to make sure that continues to be so.”

A focus on rural started young. Back when Ambriz was 10, his family packed up in the middle of a school year and moved from Los Angeles to his mom’s hometown of Pender, Nebraska, because of the threat of gun violence in their California schools. Initially he and his siblings didn’t dig it. But his sister got involved in Future Farmers of America (FFA) and they adapted.

“FFA became more of a gateway for understanding the state, rural communities, rural economy and agriculture by attrition,” Ambriz said. “That introduction let us into our niche appreciation for everything that was going on around us. Instead of looking at it as ‘nothing happens here,’ it was ‘I understand what happens here now.’ ”

He was elected to FFA state office in 2012, the same year he started as an animal science major with a meat science industry emphasis at CASNR. And he can thank FFA for introducing him to Alix, an ag education major and scholar in the Engler Agribusiness Entrepreneurship Program. That first year was really intense, jumping from chapter to chapter to advocate for the program, representing Nebraska nationally.

His official introduction to life as a first-generation college student was through his fraternity, Alpha Gamma Sigma, but he also hung around the Nebraska Human Resources Institute, the Interfraternity Council, and of course, friends of FFA.

“That’s how I recall a lot of my time at the university — the relationships that I still leverage,” Ambriz said. “Things I learned outside of the classroom, either from other people, from advisers, from various connections and things I’ve learned from other people that I wouldn’t have learned elsewhere.”

During the summer of 2015, he interned with Cargill at a beef processing facility and found that the industry was fascinating but not quite the right fit for him. So, Dr. Lindsay (Schroeder) Hastings (’04, ’07, ’12) convinced him to try a rural serviceship through the Rural Futures Institute (now called Rural Prosperity Nebraska) that moved him and Alix to McCook for the first time. A fire was kindled when he learned people actually get paid for community development. After some freelance gig work, he stepped in as McCook’s interim director of economic development, then took the long-term position. To be closer to Alix’s and his families, he took a similar job in Broken Bow. In those roles Ambriz was a mover and connector of people, a “weaver of ideas” as he calls it; he wanted these rural communities that were already doing well to be everything they wanted to be and more, to sustain themselves.

“As I started to notice patterns, the people that were really getting things done were these driven and energetic business owners that just wouldn’t stop,” Ambriz said.

He brought that philosophy back to McCook with him as a Sehnert’s successor. Under Ambriz, the place has instituted a breakfast menu and increased the wholesale pizza crust business. Packages ship across the country — Hawaii to Alaska and everywhere in between. Ambriz does the behind-thescenes tasks just to keep the lights on. Weekly tasks are varied: troubleshooting a leaky dough proofing box, replacing tile in the kitchen, ordering supplies or researching new supply chain opportunities and venues. There are also donuts that need to be made every day, shifts that need to be filled, keeping track of inventory for catering, training and process that is constantly innovating. Every day there’s a new problem to solve.

“If you have a typical day, I don’t think you’re doing entrepreneurship correctly,” Ambriz said.

Before the fact, the fantasy of owning the bakery seemed too good to be true — it only happened because the Ambriz family had a connection to McCook: “We stayed connected to the people because we love the people, and we knew that they matter because of how they take care of each other and how they took care of us,” Ambriz said.

Now they have a whole network of those same people to support them as entrepreneurs, but also as they raise their three young sons Zander, Isaiah and Joshua. A family. A community. A business. It all began with CASNR.

“The ability to connect people with place — that’s been a tremendous help because I can break down anywhere in the state of Nebraska,” Ambriz said. “Because of connections that were made a lot of the time in college, I can call just about anybody and say, ‘I need help.’ I don’t think you have to go much further than two degrees of separation before you find that spark that’s going to create some sort of magic. Whether that’s help, whether that’s a business deal, whether that’s an improvement in a community. The network at CASNR is second to none.”