President & CEO, Fancy Pokket Corporation
2010 Top 50 CEO Hall of Fame Inductee

Thirty-seven years after starting Fancy Pokket, Mike Timani is still growing, still pushing and having far too much fun to stop

Mike Timani had a problem.

It was June 2024, Fancy Pokket was about to turn 35, and the founder and president of the Moncton bakery had decided, only days before the anniversary, that something had to be done to mark the occasion. Something big. So, naturally, he decided to make a 220-foot-long piece of lavash bread.

Not 220 feet of lavash flatbread cut into manageable pieces and conveniently arranged end to end. That would have been easy. Timani wanted one continuous sheet of bread, roughly 10 inches wide, travelling through the bakery’s production line, around a spiral cooling conveyor without breaking, then rolled up, frozen, thawed and unfurled outside the plant.

His manager, he recalls, thought it was a crazy idea. “I challenged myself because I wanted to make it unique,” he says.

They pulled it off. On the day of the event, fierce winds sent table coverings flying until staff stapled them down. The enormous roll of bread was laid out, filled with turkey, lettuce, tomatoes and mayonnaise, then divided into roughly 325 to 350 sandwiches that were donated to people in need.

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