After 42 Years on Market Street, Brenner Bakery Is Closing. The Last 800 Bread Bags Are Going Straight to Customers.
Hollis and Cathy Brenner say they never planned to run out of things to make. They also never planned to see the bakery turn 42. Now, with no successor in the family, they are closing the doors and letting the last of their signature cotton bread bags go directly to the people who used them.
RHINEBECK, N.Y. — For 42 years, Hollis Brenner has done the same thing at a quarter past four in the morning. He walks the eight blocks from his house on Livingston Street to the bakery on Market Street, unlocks the back door, and lights a fire in the same brick oven he built with his uncle the year the bakery opened.
His wife Cathy joins him at six. She has run the front counter, the ledger, and the customer letters for as long as the ovens have been lit.
In three weeks, that will stop.
"We have been talking about it for two years," Cathy said, sitting at the small oak table in the back kitchen where she still writes replies to customers by hand. "You do not walk away from something like this on a whim. You walk away from it because the walking away is finally the right thing."
A different kind of bread bag
The bread bags were Cathy's idea, back in 1987. Customers kept coming in on Fridays complaining that the loaf they bought on Monday had turned to a rock by Wednesday. Plastic made it worse. Paper did nothing.
"I read somewhere that bakers in Vermont used to wax cloth," Cathy said. "I asked Hollis if we could try it. He said it would take too long. Then he tried it anyway."
The construction has not changed since. Unbleached cotton canvas, double-stitched at the seams, lined with a heavy band of beeswax folded outward at the top. Each bag takes about eight minutes to finish by hand. The wax is warmed, folded, and pressed by hand. No two are identical. All of them work the same way.
"You get a loaf home, you put it in the bag, and you leave it on the counter," Hollis said. "It stays fresh for a week. It has always stayed fresh for a week. That is not our invention. That is just cotton and beeswax doing what they have done since our great-grandmothers made them."
The bags never became a headline product. They were what Cathy called the "quiet corner" of the bakery. Customers who bought bread eventually bought a bag. Then they told their sisters. Then their sisters told their book clubs.
Big cookware brands looked into producing something similar in 2009, Hollis said, and again in 2016. They walked away both times. The math did not work. Beeswax at scale is expensive. Cotton canvas at the right weight is expensive. Hand-finishing is slow. To sell at the price a home customer would pay, the margins were too thin.
For a small bakery in Rhinebeck, the margins were fine.
The beekeeper down the road
The beeswax has always come from Tom Reilly, whose apiary sits 16 miles north in Red Hook.
"Tom's father supplied our first batch in 1987," Cathy said. "When his father passed, Tom took over. It has been the same family the whole time."
Tom, now 59, keeps around 200 hives in a pasture behind his farmhouse. He filters and blocks the wax himself. Every three months, Hollis drives up in his pickup and comes back with enough to line another run of bags.
"When Hollis called me in April to say they were closing, I sat down for a minute," Tom said. "That is a long time to sell someone the same thing."
Why they are closing now
Hollis is 70. Cathy is 68. Their granddaughter Hattie, who has spent most summers behind the counter since she was nine, is 22 now and finishing veterinary school in Ithaca.
"We asked her once," Cathy said. "She loves the bakery. She does not love the four in the morning part. And she should not have to."
Neither of them wanted to sell the business to a stranger. Neither of them wanted to let a chain buy the name and put the ovens in a warehouse somewhere. So they decided to close on their own terms.
"The sourdough starter goes to my sister," Hollis said. "Her name is Margaret. She has been alive for 41 years." He paused, then corrected himself. "The starter has, I mean. My sister is 74."
The ovens are being donated to the culinary program at Dutchess Community College. Cathy's recipe binder, all 84 pages of pencil handwriting, is going to Hattie.
The last thing left to place is the bread bags.
The last 800 bags
Cathy counted the remaining inventory in early June. There are 800 cotton bread bags in the storeroom behind the bakery. Some are wrapped in tissue paper. Some are stacked in linen crates. All of them were finished by hand in the last twelve months.
The Brenners considered selling the bags wholesale. They decided against it.
"These went to our customers for 42 years," Hollis said. "They should go to our customers now, too."
Starting this week, the last 800 bags are being sold directly, two for $34.95, from the bakery's website. Cathy still answers every customer email personally. Every order comes with a 90-day guarantee. There is no restock. There is no next batch. When they are gone, they are gone.
Cathy stood up from the oak table and looked out the window toward Market Street. The afternoon sun was coming through the front window of the bakery, catching the corner of the sign that has hung above the door since the day they opened.
"Forty-two years," she said. "That is a long time to be lucky."