CHICAGO — One great thing about independent retail bakeries is their inherent ability to uplift their community. In the 75th Street neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, Brown Sugar Bakery is a destination that has helped put the community on the map.
That’s not just because Stephanie Hart, the bakery’s owner, competed on Food Network’s Holiday Baking Championship in 2014 and was a 2019 James Beard Award nominee. It’s also because the cakes are so good they’ve garnered attention from big names in entertainment and politics, as well as culinary stars like Marcus Samuelson and the late Nicholas Lodge.
After two decades in the neighborhood, Brown Sugar could have moved to a centralized location downtown, providing easy access to Chicago residents and tourists. But the beauty of this bakery lives in its roots.
“I love community,” Stephanie said. “There aren’t a lot of bakeries on the South Side of Chicago. And I know for a fact that when you can walk or have a short drive to work, and you can then shop in your community and have resources in your community, it changes everything. I’m just a tiny cog in it, but I love being part of that solution.”
While the flagship store isn’t going anywhere, the Brown Sugar Bakery business is expanding through popups at Macy’s and Nordstrom downtown and a satellite kiosk inside Chicago’s Soldier Field. And soon, travelers — especially the ones who make 75th Street their first stop from the airport — will delight in having access to Brown Sugar Bakery products at O’Hare International Airport.
Stephanie credits the growth to visibility gained from seven years in Brown Sugar’s first satellite location at the iconic Navy Pier.
“When I first opened on 75th Street, if I saw someone white coming into my store, I assumed it was the gas man or the electric company,” Stephanie joked. “Today, our clientele come from so many different cultures, and I credit that to the exposure we had at Navy Pier.”
That said, some of the proudest moments for this Black woman-owned bakery have come from quite notable women of color.
When Beyonce’s tour came through Chicago last summer, the Brown Sugar team was “Beyonce ready” after rumors circulated that the pop superstar might be visiting local small businesses.
“Every time we answered the phone, we treated it as if it could be Beyonce,” said Zoie Reams, Stephanie’s daughter and a nationally recognized mezzo-soprano who also helps in the bakery when she’s not onstage. “We had it together with our tone, customer service, everything. And then we got the real call. And it was intense.”
At 75th Street, even at its busiest, the Brown Sugar staff is ready for anything. When Vice President Kamala Harris visited, the bakery only had about 15 minutes notice before the roads were closed off … leaving Stephanie stuck on the other side of the barricade.
“You wouldn’t believe how fast a fleet of black SUVs and people in black suits can show up at your bakery,” Zoie recalled. “We had enough time to sweep the floors and wipe down the counters, and we were ready to go.”
That was the moment the bakery learned a lesson: Sometimes, lifting up the community doesn’t always come without a cost.
“After that, it hit,” Stephanie said. “The vice president left, and the people came at us.”
For weeks, Brown Sugar was inundated with prank calls and hate speech, along with criticism for Harris, despite her active support of small businesses in an underserved area of Chicago.
On the other hand, Brown Sugar also discovered opportunities — and seized them.
“People also called and said, ‘I want to get the cake that Kamala Harris had, but I’m in Massachusetts,’” Zoie said. “And we were like, ‘Okay. We can do that.’”
That visit was in March 2021, and the bakery has been shipping products around the country ever since. In fact, Brown Sugar has discovered a boost in business from people ordering birthday cakes year-round, filling in where there used to be gaps during slower times of year.
As Brown Sugar gains prominence, it’s taking on extra orders — while maintaining business in the 75th Street storefront — by baking at scale in a 10,000-square-foot facility a few miles down on West Street, which started up in November 2023.
“We were getting to the point of not being able to meet the needs of customers walking through the door on 75th Street,” Stephanie explained. “When a holiday would come, we would literally have to cut off orders two weeks in advance. Our customers who would try to order close to a major holiday couldn’t process the fact that we just couldn’t make any more cakes. That was happening year after year.”
And then, shortly before the new facility opened, Angelica’s, a Black woman-owned caramel cake brand with a big presence in Chicago grocery stores, went out of business. Ever the entrepreneur, Stephanie was compelled to keep Angelica’s going.
“I felt like this was a calling for me,” Stephanie said. “I did not want to see a Black woman’s brand that had been in grocery stores for 30 years just disappear.”
In the new space, Stephanie was confident she had the capacity to relieve stress from 75th Street and slowly build Angelica’s back up. But given Angelica’s brand recognition, it was, instead, a quick lesson in how to fail fast.
“I got my butt kicked the first month,” she recalled. “It was November, and Angelica’s had been closed since June. So, I said, ‘Let’s just make a few phone calls and share our story.’ I walked away for about 35 minutes, and when I came back, we had 6,000 cakes we needed to make. I said, ‘Let’s stop making phone calls.’”
After overcoming those initial obstacles, the team has ramped up production, thanks to investing in automation for the first time.
This story has been adapted from the March | Q1 2024 Craft to Crumb mini-mag. Read the full story in the digital issue here.
