Bakery Express has been described as a company with corporate grit. Looking at the Halethorpe, Md.-based bakery and its rapid expansion over the past few years, it’s easy to see why. 

Founded in 1970, Bakery Express has grown from a small operation making fresh donuts in a rowhouse basement to a juggernaut that produces tens of thousands of fresh and frozen baked goods daily, including donuts, cookies, brownies, pastries, pretzels and muffins. In addition, the bakery designs custom cakes and wedding cakes, and operates its own Bakery Express Café, open to the public and offering fresh donuts, deli sandwiches, salads and more. 

To Steve Borsh, chief executive officer of Bakery Express, corporate grit can be defined as doing whatever a customer needs — and doing it quickly. This mindset has given the company a competitive edge, one that has proved especially powerful in recent years.

“We have a large grocery store customer who switched their muffin business to us pre-pandemic, and they were shocked that if they called and wanted to see samples of something, we’d have it to them in two to three days, whereas with their previous supplier it may be five to six months,” he said. “I think customer service is really what differentiates us from a lot of the competitors in our world.”

Bakery Express’ competitive edge has helped the bakery thrive despite the challenges of the past few years and spurred the need for numerous investments in equipment and expansions to the plant’s footprint. And the bakery shows no signs of slowing down. 

“We get asked all the time, ‘Do you want to sell?’ But all we’re thinking about is building,” said Matt Reade, chief financial officer. “We’re in a build-and-grow mode and continuing the legacy of Bakery Express.”

Opening new doors 

Most of the bakery’s business is devoted to producing fresh daily baked goods for a large convenience store customer and grocery store chains. But this business took a significant blow when the pandemic hit.

“As the pandemic really took hold, it knocked down the foot traffic in those stores and really hit that part of the business hard,” Mr. Borsh said.

The pandemic spelled doom for many fresh daily operations. Bakery Express, however, leveraged its hard-working reputation to open new doors during this time.  

“The pandemic knocked a lot of people out of business, and that drove a lot of business to us,” Mr. Borsh explained. “People knew we’d do anything that made any sort of sense for them and for us.”

One door that opened for the company was frozen bakery, which has become an increasingly significant part of its business. 

Frozen soft pretzels, for example, have taken off for the company. 

“The pretzel business has been the single largest beneficiary of the pandemic in our business,” Mr. Borsh said. “We can’t make a pretzel that won’t sell.”

With large pretzel manufacturers unable to fulfill orders on time, many customers began searching for a new supplier. Bakery Express turned out to be just what they were looking for.

“Word of mouth was out there that we could do pretzels,” he said. “And then people started sampling it. Now we’re doing a ton of pretzels.”

Frozen donuts reflect a similar story. Mr. Borsh explained that many fresh donut operators switched to frozen, allowing them to slack donuts as needed and avoid throwing away lots of product at the end of the day, especially as foot traffic fell off in their stores. 

“And if they did sell a bunch on any given day, they could take more out and slack it out very quickly and stay in business,” he said. 

The donut category as a whole is taking off, with perimeter donut unit sales jumping 5.6% at a time when many other sweet goods have seen unit sales dip, according to Circana data for the 52 weeks ending Aug. 13. Mr. Borsh said he expects fresh and frozen donuts to be a growth driver for Bakery Express going forward. 

Another growing trend Bakery Express has seen is a move toward clean label products.

“Some of the customers we deal with want to see certain ingredients removed from the products,” Mr. Borsh observed. “And they’re willing to accommodate that from a price point of view, from a marketing point of view. I think that has a lot to do with the success of the pretzel, because it’s not seen by the customers as something that’s sugar-laden or overly sweet.”

Spicy and Latin American-inspired flavors are also establishing themselves in the bakery space, and Mr. Borsh noted that much of the co-manufacturing Bakery Express does has shifted toward the Hispanic market. 

“Some of the packaged donuts we’ve done include mango spice and chocolate poblano — flavors that we just never thought about,” he said. “The flavor profiles have really started to shift toward combinations of spicy and sweet.”

This article is an excerpt from the November 2023 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Bakery Express, click here.