Linda Falkenstein
Andrea Macgee with a plastic container of her muffins in the kitchen at FEED Kitchens.
Andrea Magee bakes at FEED Kitchens for her Second Breakfast Bakery.
Andrea Magee already had one foot out the door of her job as a pediatric ICU dietician and nutritionist at American Family Children’s Hospital when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
“I’m 40 and the pandemic certainly made a lot of people aware of their own mortality, and that time on this planet is precious,” says Magee. “For me at least, it was like, ‘Well, if I’m going to be living on this planet, I’d like to do things I love and bring happiness to my family and people around me.’”
She enrolled in the baking program at Madison College, not as a career move but as a “sabbatical, to give me time to think about what I really want to do.”
“I wasn’t really thinking I was going to start a bakery,” says Magee.
But she did, launching an online bakery offering subscription breakfast bakery boxes once a month, with one, three, or six-month packages. Magee does her baking at FEED Kitchens, which makes commercial food production space available for small businesses, nonprofits, vocational training programs, and individuals who want to break into food service.
Her Second Breakfast Bakery is one of several new bakery businesses in the Madison area.
FEED Kitchens manager Chris Brockel saw the trend unfold a few months into the pandemic. FEED Kitchens had shut down temporarily, but when it reopened, “what we saw was that many of the new businesses coming in were bakeries.”
Brockel credits a 2017 Lafayette County court decision that deemed that state bakers could sell goods out of their homes. “That allowed people the freedom to dabble around, do very simple things, and figure out their business” while at home, Brockel says.
Like Magee, Rachel Glaza, owner of Amalgam Bakery, started questioning what is important during the pandemic and rethinking how she wanted to live. A lifelong baker, she started baking macarons, the notoriously finicky French cookie. She now sells her elaborate creations — decorated macaron gift boxes, macarons that look like cheeseburgers — out of her home kitchen in Fitchburg. And, at least for the foreseeable future, she’s content.
“It’s a luxury, to be honest, that this is not something that I’m looking to expand to a storefront,” Glaza says. “I’m here doing this now, and it serves and fulfills lots of things for me.” She calls baking “an almost meditative exercise.”
But not everyone wants to run bakeries out of their homes. Some, like Magee, want a boundary between work life and family life. Brockel says for others, the business outgrows their kitchen’s baking capacity.
Often bakers opt for FEED Kitchens “because their business is growing,” Brockel says. Sometimes those businesses grow so much that the bakers move out of the communal kitchen to their own brick and mortar shops.
FEED had room for Magee because Marie Young of Far Breton Bakery was able to move into her own storefront and invest in her own equipment. Young has been a baker for 25 years, working at Ovens of Brittany, L’Etoile, Harvest and Samba Brazilian Grill. She opened Far Breton in 2019, initially selling at farmers’ markets and then out of a cart.
“It’s a weekend thing. People get up, they want to go someplace nice, and get a baked good and a coffee,” Young says.
Also important for Young: Madison College’s baking program means Madison has a steady stream of trained bakers, which makes staffing for bakeries easier. Since opening her storefront on Fordem Avenue earlier this year, Young has seen her sales double and has had to hire more employees to keep up.
“We pride ourselves on being fancy enough and artisan enough that we attract people that have been to Europe and have a little bit more of a palate for the type of bakery that I make, but that we’re also down to earth enough that we attract folks from the neighborhood,” Young says.
“I think there’s room to have a bakery in every neighborhood, and I think we should have a bakery in every neighborhood,” Young says.
Debbie Buchanan of Reverie Baking Company was making pastries at Mint Mark when she started experimenting with sourdough loaves in her home on the side. About six months before the pandemic shut down restaurants, Buchanan started selling loaves to family, friends and neighbors. By the summer of 2020, she was making around 25 loaves a week and starting to form plans for Reverie, now open on Winnebago Street. She says the pandemic “awakened the appetite for people who maybe weren’t eating home baked goods as much.”
Now that most people are back to work, whether remotely or in the office, “some of those people who got into [baking then] aren’t able to do that themselves anymore, but they still want to eat fresh-baked things,” Buchanan says, “It’s something a lot of people don’t want to do at home.”
