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The first time I talked to Helene Godin, owner of New York’s By the Way Bakery, she was in the car. Godin and a colleague were returning from a high-stakes sales call in upstate New York, 150 miles north of the village of Hastings-on-Hudson, the original home of her gluten- and dairy-free baking company.
She was hoping to get her prepared baked goods onto more grocery store shelves. “You never turn down the opportunity to do a sales call in person,” Godin said emphatically. “Ever, ever, ever.”
Godin opened the first location of By the Way Bakery as a small retail store with limited hours almost 15 years ago. Since then, it’s grown dramatically in both size and complexity.
Today, By the Way Bakery operates four retail stores, including two in Manhattan. Its products are sold in 750 additional retail locations across the country, including Whole Foods Market and Sprouts Farmers Markets.
The company employs 85 people; over half work in the bakery’s kitchens. Godin and team have mastered the art of creating delicious baked goods for disparate occasions, from pre-packaged wholesale cake slices sold in grocery stores — Godin expects to sell over a quarter-million slices this year — to traditional baked goods like apple cake, served for families celebrating the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. There are custom cakes, too, like a modern purple Taylor Swift-themed 9th birthday cake that caught my own third-grader’s eye as I reported this story. (Some ideas are obvious slam-dunks.)
Landing on the right niche to super-charge sales growth
Bakery ownership is a second career for Godin. She spent over two decades as a self-described “workaholic lawyer” in entertainment and media, working at Saturday Night Live, Reader’s Digest, and Bloomberg before quitting without a plan.
“I came up with this wacky idea that I was going to open a bakery,” she said. “And my teenage sons turned to me at the dinner table and said, ‘That sounds great Mom, but you don’t know how to bake.’”
Still, Godin saw an opportunity to reach more customers by catering to dietary restrictions, a significant but underserved market in 2010. First, she considered starting a gluten-free, vegan bakery, but she ditched the idea after a friend and early tester advised against it. “She said, ‘My god, what a difference an egg makes!’” in Godin’s telling.
So By the Way Bakery became a gluten-free, dairy-free, and kosher pareve business, originally operating five days per week in Hastings-on-Hudson, a town 20 miles outside of New York City.
Market opportunity mixed with passion was the bakery’s foundation, and it’s ultimately positioned it for solid growth. Godin doesn’t find the self-imposed restrictions limiting. “I love limitations and rules,” she said. “I find it very liberating.”
Playing the long game with a wholesale strategy
Godin learned quickly — and happily, I think — that the bakery business doesn’t move at the speed of corporate life. More than two months after that upstate sales call that framed our initial interview, she’s waiting for the deal to come through.
“We won’t know definitively for another month to two, but it seemed to go well,” she said.
“How long does a deal like that take?” I asked.
“Oh, forever, really,” Godin answered.
She described making the decision to sell wholesale almost as casually as deciding to open a bakery in the first place — this business owner clearly loves a challenge. What started as one small storefront later expanded to include two more retail locations in New York City. Shortly after, wholesale sales became Godin’s next challenge. “I just started showing up in Whole Foods, literally, with samples waiting to bump into a buyer,” she said, “and I did!”
Godin says the bakery still makes most of its money from retail locations, but even with thinner wholesale margins, sales to grocery stores are catching up.
Digital sales as the newest frontier
A full decade and 100 Whole Foods locations later, adding a new sales channel to a largely brick-and-mortar business requires careful consideration and maybe even a little tender loving care. Godin recently added online ordering through Square to the bakery’s website. Previously, customers had to open a third-party app like DoorDash to order online, but now they can order directly from her site. She sounds almost surprised by the early success of an online storefront, showering a particularly helpful Square account manager with praise.
“I’m not laying it on thick,” she insisted. She’s just thrilled with the immediate business lift.
“It’s been less than a week and it’s exploded — oh, it’s exploded!” she says. Godin declined to share sales numbers; she says it’s too early. But it sounds like the bakery’s fastest-growing sales channel yet.
“Anecdotally,” she said, “we can’t keep up.”
From the dream of “one tiny little store” in a village outside of New York City to a thriving retail, wholesale, and newly digital operation, Godin has landed on her next challenge: keeping up with exploding demand.
