It’s been a great few years

I’ve been wanting to write parts of this letter for the past four years.

It is with profound regret that I am closing Bread Service PA. I am so incredibly proud of this little bakery and what we’ve created. We started out as a two-person team, with a couple of diBerent types of breads. At our first Thanksgiving we made probably 100 items. We’ve grown to a three-person team, and at our last Thanksgiving we made close to 5,000, including cakes, cookies, rolls, and of course, bread. Our little team has grown and adapted, and managed to put out, on average, several hundred high quality goods every week, all made from fresh flour, hard work, and love.

We are proud of what we have accomplished, and of who we are as a small business
— delivering the highest quality products we can, through sourcing heritage wheat, single origin spices, and organic seeds, oils, and butters. We’ve successfully introduced babka to NEPA (honestly it wasn’t a hard sell, it’s chocolate bread after all), and made unique cakes unlike anyone else, such as our earl grey tea cake to our olive oil and orange cake that starts by puréeing a whole orange — skin and all (January is a great month at the bakery, when we get all our peak-season citrus in and spend the day processing them — your skin glows and the whole place smells like fruit).

At our core, still, is our sourdough bread. We’ve never cut corners — from our 18–36-hour cold proof, our bread is as good (or better! But I’m an unfair judge!) as any bakery I’ve tasted in New York or Philadelphia, and it’s an honor to fill that role.

We know from our sales at Hillside Farms, Everything Natural, and our subscribers that the bread we make is hearty and filling, and appreciated at home.

Running any business is hard work. Those of you who have done it know that less often are the glamourous trips and parties, and more often it’s the covering for sick employees, balancing cash on hand, and trying to get 1,000 tasks accomplished at once. Running a bakery is even harder. We also mastered handling changes in humidity and ungodly waking hours (those of you who have gotten texts and emails from us at 3am know it’s because our day has already started). Our product is live, and minor changes in humidity and temperature can change your entire day. Every Friday morning around 2:30am, we start baking our bread (because it’s not ready to bake until then), and we have to let it cool down (which takes 4+ hours), slice it (by hand), bag it, label it, and get it out the door, all while doing dishes, sanitizing the workspace, and answering calls, texts, and emails. But it was well worth it.

Realities change. About two months ago, my father unexpectedly passed away. Since then, I’ve filled his role at our family business, which has consumed a great deal of my time. While I’m still doing all the baking, Christis has stepped up to oversee all daily operations, including processing orders, invoicing, and inventory management. While we’ve been running with no change in quality, it’s been crushing us all. We were hoping we’d be able to get to a new stage of stability, but unfortunately, we haven’t, due to losing 1/3 of our

workforce overnight. As a bakery, we also deal with uneven orders — one day might be double what we had to make day prior, or half, with no notice or explanation — that’s just how this industry works, which makes it very hard to fill gaps and manage staB expectations.

Because of all of this, due to all these challenging variables, we have decided that our best path to preserve the quality of our brand is to close our doors.

We’re heartbroken by this decision, but we’re ok with it, and hope you are too. Four years ago we started out with the intention of bringing heritage grain freshly milled sourdough bread to NEPA as an *actually* healthy bread, and we’ve achieved that goal. We’re happy to bow out knowing others are adopting some of our practices, and are excited about the bakery, bread, and food scene in NEPA.

It’s truly been an honor serving this region, and if you see Christis or Jordan delivering your bread in the next few weeks, make sure to tell them thank you for their hard work and give them an extra big tip or at least a hug.

Best wishes to all our amazing, wonderful customers, shops, and cafes,

Adam Thalenfeld, owner

Christis Stair, bakery manager Jordan Delzell, bakery assistant