When Fitzroy Alexander looks at the redbrick industrial building on Pleasant Street, formerly headquarters of the U.S. Plastics, he doesn’t see urban decay, environmental hazards, or a potentially risky financial investment.

“I see bread, and people making bread, and the smell of bread in the air all around here instead of chemicals,” said Alexander, owner of Traditional Breads, which will soon move from its home for the past five years in the Lydia Pinkham building on Western Avenue to the sprawling new site where massive renovations are under way.

With a $5.5-million loan from Sovereign Bank and a $400,000 low-interest financial kick-start from the Lynn Economic Development and Industrial Corporation (EDIC), Alexander is betting his baker’s apron that the Traditional Breads factory will become a city landmark and key employer.

Last week, Alexander sprawled the architectural drawings on a wide conference table and outlined his plans, which include preserving the buildings distinctive red brick chimney.

“It was once used to heat this big building. It doesn’t work anymore, but I’m going to keep it, and at the top will be my sign,” he said, proudly, referring to the company logo showing a baker carrying a bread loaf on a tray with another tucked under his arm.

For Alexander, a 42-year-old native of Grenada whose success is truly a rags-to-riches story, the Traditional Breads sign could be to Lynn what the Citgo sign is to Boston’s Kenmore Square. To hear him tell it, the dream may sound big, but it’s just another chance to embrace life’s many opportunities.

Traditional Breads currently makes 160 varieties, from dinner rolls to large loaves, from whole-wheat multi-grain to fancy focacia, breadstick, boules and ciabattas.

The operation in the Lydia Pinkham building at 271 Western Avenue cranks out 480 million pieces a week. That translates to 50,000 pounds of flour every 2.5 days. Customers include the Stop & Shop and the Market Basket supermarket chains, the Lawrence public schools, commercial food services, and a slew of Boston-area restaurants. Once ensconced in the new factory, production is expected to increase dramatically, and with it the list of buyers.

The entrepreneur attributes much of his success to Norman Bodek, an accountant who was visiting Alexander’s’ Caribbean homeland when they met by coincidence. Alexander, then an 8 year-old schoolboy, was playing soccer on the beach with his friends. Bodek, who lives in Stamford, Conn., was on the island to oversee his data-processing business. The international businessman remarked that the boy had a strong kick. Alexander responded by booting the ball and striking Bodek in the head.

During subsequent visits to Grenada, the friendship between Bodek and Alexander blossomed. As Alexander put it, “When he visited, he lived in a hotel where my mom worked. He really became my father. I still call him dad. He told me, when I was older, that he would bring me to the United States.”

True to his word, Bodek waited until the boy finished high school, then brought him to the U.S. for another year of secondary education. Upon graduation, Bodek put Alexander to work for his Boston-based business, which translated Japanese management textbooks into English and published them domestically.

Alexander learned bookkeeping and other office skills and briefly attended the University of Massachusetts. He met a group of people from Cambridge interested in transcendental meditation and lived with them for eight years. It was there he learned to bake bread.

The Cambridge roommates had opened Rudi’s Bakery in Woburn, named after their spiritual leader who had died in a plane crash. Alexander joined them a year later, in 1980.

In 1983, Rudi’s Bakery was moved from Woburn to Chelsea and continued to grow. A French company bought the business in 1989. By then, Alexander was living in his own apartment and practicing TM free from the chaos of communal living.

In 1990, he started Signature Bread in Somerville, holding onto the profitable company until 1999 when it was sold to Hazelwood Farms. Not long afterward, Signature Bread was resold to the Pillsbury Co.

“Now Pillsbury owns two of my old companies, and Pillsbury is owned by General mills,” said Alexander, a cheerful, charismatic man who currently lives in Medford with his wife, Delicia, their newborn, and two sons from a previous relationship.

How he met his wife is part of the whole good-things-can-happen story. Shortly before the sale of Signature Bread, a close friend of Alexander’s mother arrived in the U.S. from Grenada with their 17-year-old daughter in tow, intending to tour New York and Boston. Alexander, out of politeness, invited them to Cambridge. The woman had an unusual request: Could her daughter remain in the U.S. to attend college, sharing the longtime bachelor’s apartment in return for housekeeping duties and walking the dog?

“I couldn’t believe this woman was going to leave her young daughter with me,” he said of the seemingly incredulous proposition. “But she trusted me.”

Alexander agreed. He also went about his life, dating and working hard to start yet another company.

In 2000, he opened Traditional Breads in the Lydia Pinkham building, a business incubator with an electric mix of occupants. By then, the young woman sharing his apartment had completed two years of college.

The bread business boomed, but the Western Avenue location proved difficult. The building needed expensive upgrading, and residential abutters weren’t happy about the refrigerated bread trucks coming and going at all hours, making noise and blocking traffic.

Big changes were on the horizon in 2002. Upon returning to his apartment one evening, he found the table set with a sumptuous meal, the candles giving off a romantic glow. The pretty 20-year old woman across the table asked him matter-of-factly why he never looked at her as more than a friend and confessed she felt differently. Marriage followed closely on the heels of that memorable dinner.

Meanwhile, Alexander was scouting for a new bakery location but ran into legal tangles with the city when he tried to buy a dilapidated furniture warehouse on Bennett Street where the tax-delinquent tenant had been squatting for years.

“I don’t know how they put up with me here,” said Alexander, gesturing toward the homes only yards away from his present factory. “I want to be a good neighbor, but I still have to bring in trucks, sometimes early in the morning.”

Fitting in with the neighbors shouldn’t be difficult on Pleasant Street, given the mix of warehouses, car lots, automotive repair centers and other industrial enterprises.

Alexander credited city Development Director Hal McGaughey, EDIC Executive Director Peter Deveau, and Ward 6 Councilor David Ellis for helping him find the property and making the deal work.

“These three gentlemen made this possible,” he said. “Until I met them, I had never met city officials so eager to help me.”

According to McGaughey, Traditional Breads possesses all the qualities that municipal development offices seek. “It could become the next Willow Labs,” he said, referring to the fast-growing drug-testing company on Union Street.

Hanover-based CMC has been hired as the general contractor, responsible for demolishing several thousand square feet of the structure that abuts Pleasant Street and for completely renovating the remaining structure. Project manager Martin Dowd said the massive tanks used by the U.S. Plastics have been removed and an environmental remediation company is nearly done with the asbestos cleanup. New baking equipment has been ordered from Switzerland and other parts of Europe where Alexander frequently travels.

The Traditional Breads factory will have four truck bays where bread is loaded from a refrigerated warehouse dock, and an employee parking lot will accommodate about 40 vehicles so as not to clog nearby streets. The company owns no delivery fleet. Customers pick up the bread in their own refrigerated trucks.