4 Ohio Bakeries Whose Recipes Left With the Owner
Kraft General Foods paid to own the name and the recipes when Hough Bakeries locked its doors for good in Cleveland in August 1992.
By then the company was down to 32 stores pulling in $12 million a year, a fraction of the 1,000-person operation it ran at its 1973 peak.
Somebody wanted those recipes. That makes Hough the exception.
These are the Ohio bakeries whose recipes left with the owner.
1. Pincus Bakery
Pincus Bakery ran a stretch of Green Road in University Heights, just outside Cleveland, for 48 years before it closed for good.
The shop shut its doors on September 15, 2016, with no warning to regulars and no comment from owner Steve Pincus.
Nobody saw it coming.
Pincus was known around Cleveland’s Jewish community for its hamantaschen, honey cake, and kichel, the kind of order a family made every holiday for decades.
The Cleveland Jewish News reported that a local rabbi hoped, at the time, that someone would eventually manage to bake Pincus’s hamantaschen again.
Pincus was the second bakery to disappear from that stretch of Cedar-Green in eighteen months, following Lax & Mandel Bakery’s 2015 closing.
Joel Davis, president of nearby competitor Davis Bakery, told the Cleveland Jewish News he felt bad about losing a fellow Cleveland baker.
He also acknowledged his shop would likely pick up some of Pincus’s old customers. He never claimed to have picked up the recipe.
Pincus itself never published the recipe, and no bakery has ever advertised picking it up.
2. Crest Bakery
Crest Bakery baked cakes, cookies, and donuts out of Akron’s North Hill neighborhood for 80 years before owner Rafael Apaestegui announced the end in 2019.
Crest had been baking in North Hill since the 1940s.
He told News 5 Cleveland he couldn’t find enough qualified bakers to keep up, and that steady customers had thinned out too.
Apaestegui said he wished as many people had kept shopping there regularly as ended up worrying about the closing once the news broke.
The building went up for sale once Crest closed.
The display cases went dark.
No buyer ever announced plans to keep baking under the Crest name, and none of Apaestegui’s cake or cookie recipes turned up at another Akron shop.
Business listings for Crest Bakery still show it as permanently closed.
3. Warren Baking Company
Warren Baking Company, a Trumbull County bakery, mixed dough for 102 years before it closed.
Local news stations covered the closing in March 2025 as the end of a century-old fixture on Youngstown Road.
The Iacozili family had run Warren Baking Company for the entire 102 years, best known for Dominic’s Italian Bread alongside its doughnuts and cookies.
Owner Patty Abbey gave customers only short notice and thanked them without stating a reason for closing.
The dough stopped rising for good.
Four separate Mahoning Valley news outlets covered the closing that same week, a sign of how many people in Trumbull County noticed.
None of the coverage named a buyer, a family member taking over the ovens, or a cookbook collecting what Warren Baking Company made.
Local restaurant owner Mark Canzonetta said afterward that he’d like to see someone reopen the bakery under new ownership, a comment that itself confirmed nobody already had.
Its storefront on Youngstown Road still sits listed as permanently closed.
4. Em’s Sourdough Bread
Em’s Sourdough Bread started with a starter Melissa Schroeder’s mother handed down, the one she used to open her first Dayton bakery in 1993.
Schroeder later moved the bakery into Cincinnati’s Findlay Market, building a following on breakfast sandwiches and sourdough loaves for eight more years.
Then, in October 2024, she closed the stall for the last time, thanking customers and staff without saying why.
No explanation followed.
Her farewell message thanked a rotating cast of staff who’d passed through over the years, from touring performers to local college kids.
That starter had been feeding a Dayton and Cincinnati following for more than 30 years by the time the stall went dark.
No other vendor at Findlay Market has taken it up since.
The Hough Bakeries Exception
Hough Bakeries shows what the other outcome looks like.
The Cleveland chain filed for bankruptcy after its 1992 collapse.
Its assets went to auction rather than sitting with a closed storefront.
According to Case Western Reserve‘s Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, the International Exposition Center bought the catering side.
Kraft General Foods bought the Hough name along with its recipes.
Hough had employed 1,000 people at its peak, running bakery counters inside May Co. department stores across the region.
A former head baker also spent years reconstructing the cakes from memory at a shop he opened in Collinwood, without ever obtaining the company’s actual recipe cards.
Hough’s formulas didn’t disappear.
They just stopped belonging to anyone who’d baked with them.
Psst! How much do you know about Ohio’s food history? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Ohio Food History IQ
Answer these questions on Ohio’s baking and candy history. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
An Ohio dairy company invented the Klondike bar in the early 1920s. Which company was it?
Recipes That Did Survive
The Bake Shop didn't lose its recipes the way Pincus Bakery, Crest Bakery, Warren Baking Company, and Em's Sourdough Bread did.
It opened in Cincinnati's Walnut Hills and Avondale neighborhoods in 1929, run by the United Jewish Social Agencies to employ women who needed the work.
It baked for upwards of forty years, employing more than thirty women at a time during some of the hardest years of the Depression.
Its recipe cards for apricot paste, marshmallow and chocolate cake, and Easter cookies survived long after the ovens went cold.
The American Jewish Archives still holds the originals today.
The cards are stained, and someone's handwritten adaptations still sit in the margins.
Pincus Bakery, Crest Bakery, Warren Baking Company, and Em's Sourdough Bread closed without leaving that kind of paper trail behind.
No archive exists for them.
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