After sunset on Wednesday evening, families across Colorado will cut into loaves of challah to welcome Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Anyone who’s eaten a slice likely hasn’t forgotten the buttery taste of the braided sweet bread.
Elishevah Sepulveda is happy to help anyone who’s missed the opportunity. The 70-year-old baker from Pueblo owns and operates Seppy’s Challah Breads, a small business currently selling challah to local food banks and online buyers. In the next few months, she’s planning to open her own commercial baking space to supply bread to grocery stores across Colorado.
Due to her concern about climate change, Sepulveda is also adamant the new operation won’t burn fossil fuels. She’s spent months renovating a 1930s-era filling station near downtown Pueblo so the climate control systems and industrial ovens rely on electricity instead of natural gas. During a recent visit, she offered a gleeful goodbye to an old gas-powered furnace torn from the building and laid on the sidewalk.
“I have 11 great-grandchildren and so I'm looking at the future. I know how important it is to leave them a world in which they can live in a healthy way,” Sepulveda said.
The project puts Sepulveda in a growing class of cooks questioning the food industry’s fierce dedication to natural gas.
A 2022 survey conducted by the National Restaurant Association found more than 75 percent of restaurants use the fuel, which offers a reliable way to power energy-hungry stoves and ovens without blowing a breaker. While many chefs remain committed to cooking over an open flame, some have switched to all-electric appliances offering precise temperature control and cooler kitchen workspaces.
Sepulveda also thinks electric cooking could help guide her hometown toward a climate-friendly future. Unlike a kitchen full of gas-powered appliances, Seppy’s future baking space can draw power from utility-scale wind farms or solar panels she’s planning to install on the roof. Those benefits are why leading climate scientists list electrifying buildings as a key local strategy to slow rising global temperatures.
Despite the commitment to electricity, Sepulveda hasn’t tried to hide the building’s past life as a gas station. A Standard Oil Company sign still hangs over a pair of garage doors with a fresh coat of blue paint.
It’s a legacy Sepulveda would rather preserve than erase altogether. As a Pueblo native, she says it’s clear fossil fuels played a central role in turning the community into a manufacturing powerhouse. Her grandfather worked for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which mined coal to power the historic steel mill on the city’s south side.
By baking challah at an industrial scale, Sepulveda hopes to continue Pueblo’s manufacturing tradition without further heating the atmosphere.
She plans to open her bakery by Hanukkah with an initial goal of baking more than 5,400 loaves of challah per month for distribution to local grocery stores. Sepulveda estimates the upgraded operation could double production in the new space if necessary.
“I’ll be 71 in December. To think I’ll be doing what I’m doing at my age? It’s humbling,” Sepulveda said.
While the expansion might sound like a tall order, this isn’t Sepulveda’s first attempt at large-scale baking. She started making challah after her son asked for a pair of loaves for a school project. After the bread won fans in the school cafeteria, she opened a commercial kitchen to supply King Soopers grocery stores with challah in 2002.
The operation shuttered three years later when her landlord suddenly went into foreclosure, Sepulveda said. It’s taken decades to get the business back on track by selling traditional and cinnamon raisin challah through an online store.
Another special variety targets the local community. On a recent afternoon, Sepulveda and her staff braided green chile into three dozen challah loaves, which she planned to sell at a festival to celebrate the Pueblo or Mosco chile, an increasingly popular roasting pepper variety designed to thrive in southern Colorado.
“It's beautiful. It's tasty. Puebloans go nuts over it,” Sepulveda said.
Sepulveda says everyone in Southern Colorado shares and blends their food traditions. The region’s Hispanic and Italian communities have enjoyed each other’s cooking for years, and she thinks spicy challah is a perfect ingredient for what’s already a vibrant culinary melting pot.
Once Sepulveda’s new baking space officially opens, she hopes her bread also offers her hometown an economic boost — plus a hint at more climate-minded forms of food production.
