When Burlington’s Koffee Kup Bakery shut down abruptly in late April 2021, the closure stranded more than 150 employees without jobs — and dozens of restaurants and delis without rolls. Among those was Papa Frank‘s in Winooski.
Restaurant owner Moe Paquette, now 65, scrambled to find a new source for the 400 sub rolls Papa Frank’s churns through weekly for its popular garlic bread. A sign in the eatery’s West Center Street window apologized for the short supply in the meantime.
A couple of days after the Koffee Kup news, Jake Warshaw and his dad, Stuart, walked into Papa Frank’s and introduced themselves. The pair had just bought the then-34-year-old Stewart’s Bakery in Williston. Within the week, the Warshaws delivered what Papa Frank’s needed — and they have continued to do so.
Last week, Paquette realized that a large catering order was going to deplete his stock of sub rolls. He texted Jake to see if he could get an extra four dozen — stat, please. “He brought them right over,” Paquette said.
Over the four years since the Warshaws purchased the bakery from founding baker-owner Stewart Ruth for an undisclosed sum of cash, the co-owners said, they have focused on expanding sales through a bedrock of excellent customer service and consistent quality.
“We know every store manager. We know all the chefs,” Jake said. “We stock the shelves ourselves and talk to customers in the supermarkets.”
The Warshaws brought a deep business background (dad) and data analysis chops (son) to their joint venture. Though the pair knew nothing about baking bread at the start, they made it their mission to learn. They recently doubled the footprint of the baking facility to meet demand for Stewart’s line, which includes baguettes, artisan sourdough loaves and brioche burger buns.
Most importantly to them, father and son still like to hang out together on their rare shared days off.
“Jake and I are absolutely 50-50.” Stuart Warshaw
After a career spent largely in the apparel industry, Stuart, 64, said he is now having the most fun he’s ever had at work. “My wife told me, ‘You should always have been in the food industry,'” he said.
Jake, 33, who previously worked remotely for a California venture capital firm that specializes in tech, said he enjoys “nerding out” over the bakery’s sales data and balance sheets, but he appreciates that he’s no longer staring at a computer screen all day. “I like doing things,” he said.
The pair are native New Yorkers who both attended the University of Vermont and were especially tickled to bring on their alma mater as a new account. Stuart and his wife, Karina, 59, settled in Vermont full time in 2013. Their son stayed in the state after he graduated a year later.
A few years afterward, as Jake and his dad searched for a business to buy together, they found themselves repeatedly enticed by food enterprises. “It became clear that this is a food economy,” Stuart said of Vermont.
“It’s what we would get excited about,” his son added.
Neither had previous experience in the industry, but “we ate a lot,” Stuart quipped.
“That hasn’t changed,” Jake said, laughing. “We start talking about dinner as we’re finishing lunch.”
The family loves to cook together, and Jake has been helping in the kitchen since the days when he needed a step stool to reach the counter, his dad said. One of their favorite pastimes is making pizza in the outdoor wood-fired oven at Stuart and Karina’s home in Charlotte. “There are always dough balls hanging around,” Stuart said.
When it came to buying the bakery, the Warshaws did not let their love of dough cloud their business judgment. Stuart said they initially looked into Stewart’s “because of the name” — spelling disparity aside. The family was also familiar with the brand as customers, having especially enjoyed the challah and the sweet-potato buns.
Due diligence revealed that Stewart’s had long-standing customer relationships and a solid reputation for its time-tested, European-style recipes. Its committed core of employees included head baker Ganesh Adhikari, 52. And, crucially, the Warshaws saw room to grow.
When they scrutinized store shelves, they noticed that Stewart’s had not yet joined many local bakeries in offering sliced loaves. They also observed that most of the buns and rolls the bakery sold to restaurants and delis were not stocked at its grocery accounts.
Once they bought the business, the new owners chose not to mess with the recipes, which contain only simple, whole ingredients any home baker would recognize, down to the bakery-roasted sweet potatoes in their favorite Stewart’s buns. The Warshaws did make a few tough product pruning decisions — for example, discontinuing croissants, cinnamon rolls and the Three Korn multigrain loaf.
“There just wasn’t enough volume for certain products,” Jake explained. “That makes it harder to scale everything else.”
“You need efficiency to keep prices down,” his dad added. “That’s where the business side, not the love of bread, comes in.”
Under the Warshaws, Stewart’s has expanded distribution to Shaw’s and Price Chopper’s Market 32 and added new locations of Hannaford, on top of a couple dozen other Vermont retailers, restaurants and delis. Sales have multiplied many times over, Stuart said, though he declined to share the exact factor beyond “a bunch of Xs.”
He stressed that the duo’s strategy emphasizes growing by moving more product through existing accounts, rather than adding many more customers. Success, Stuart said, looks like the current seven shelves filled with Stewart’s bread and rolls at Hannaford in Williston, up from two in the past.
The Warshaws’ blend of business savvy and culinary enthusiasm stands out, said City Market South End store manager Michael Clauss, 50. His commute takes him by the bakery, where sometimes he stops just to chat, he said, “about food, olive oil or making pizza, something we all thoroughly enjoy.”
Clauss has worked with the Warshaws since they bought the business, back when he was the co-op’s executive chef. “They’re very hands-on. They always want feedback. They are very data-driven,” he said.
The trio collaborated on developing a kaiser roll, of which Stewart’s now makes more than 2,000 weekly for City Market’s breakfast sandwiches. “They’re always willing to try something,” Clauss said.
Stuart and Jake bake together almost every Sunday, sometimes testing new ideas between production bakes. “It’s an opportunity to keep our skills honed and also see how to make it better,” Stuart said.
Those baking sessions have helped them refine the complex dance of mixing and shaping dough and juggling the movement of proofed and baked loaves, rolls and buns in and out of three massive ovens. “We’ve modeled it all out into what we call a symphony,” Stuart said.
The co-owners employ a team of nine, including Jake’s wife, Alissa, 33, who is taking a break from working as a nurse practitioner to learn the family business. Karina pitches in periodically.
On a recent Sunday morning around 10:30, wafts of buttery, fresh brioche mingled with toasty sourdough aromas in the bakery as a crew of four started a fifth hour at work.
Stuart loaded Italian loaves onto a canvas belt in front of a four-deck steam oven and deftly slashed the tops with a razor tool called a lame. Nearby, Alissa finished shaping round brioche buns, two cupped palms at a time. Michael Bluto, 35, sprayed a rich egg wash on racks of proofed buns waiting for the oven and mixed dough for artisan sourdough loaves.
Jake slipped batches of buns in and out of a rotating rack oven. Between timers, he hefted tubs holding 40-pound batches of whole-wheat sourdough, dumped them onto a floured counter and used a scale to weigh out loaf-size hunks.
Father and son wore Stewart’s logo baseball caps turned backward. They also share an affable, relaxed vibe and have a good working relationship, they said; on occasions when they don’t agree, they talk things through.
“We resolve it like grown-ups,” Stuart said. “We don’t arm wrestle or slug it out.”
“Off the record,” Jake teased his dad, “I call Mom.”
It helps that Stuart spent close to a decade working with his own father, Arthur. While the two got along well, Stuart recalled that many clients deferred to his father in meetings. Even though they ran the business together, he said, “We were not like equals from a perception standpoint.”
That experience taught him a lot, Stuart said: “Jake and I are absolutely 50-50.”
One of two new recipes the Warshaws added to the Stewart’s line did provoke a rare father-son disagreement: on whether to include butter in their version of almond biscotti, the crunchy, twice-baked Italian cookie.
Stuart falls in the butter-free camp. “I’m a dunker. I like to dunk it twice,” he said. Jake, however, likes to “munch a biscotti straight. A butterless biscotti is not a grab-and-go snack,” he said firmly.
They made the decision, as they often do, by “actually listening to the market,” Jake said. Sometimes the Warshaws run test batches and trial them in stores. In this case, they asked a local grocery buyer, who was decisively Team Butter.
No, Jake did not crow at all.
This upcoming Father’s Day, dad and son will work their usual baking shift, which is just fine by them. “We’ll probably finish by two or three,” Jake said. “Then we’ll go home and make pizza.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Their Bread and Butter | A father-son pair have doubled down for growth since buying Stewart’s Bakery”
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2025.
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