How Merzbacher’s built a community — one loaf at a time

When Peter Merzbacher first started delivering loaves of bread around the city on his bicycle, he had no five-year plan to grow his small baking project into a wholesale business. But today, Merzbacher’s processes 12,000 pounds of dough into bread every week out of its Germantown warehouse.

And still, the mission remains the same: nourish and delight the community through a love of bread.

“Bread, to me, is the perfect symbol of community,” says Merzbacher.

Merzbacher launched the bakery under the name Philly Bread in 2013. At the time, it worked similarly to a community-supported agriculture model: for $25 a month, subscribers could buy loaves in advance, and Merzbacher would haul a bike trailer full of bread to meetup spots around the city for pick up. It was at those meetup spots, where his subscribers would also sometimes hang out for a beer after picking up their bread, that Merzbacher — then a recent transplant to Philadelphia from Massachusetts — began discovering a newfound sense of home.

“By making bread, I was very quickly building community.”

And that community soon helped grow his subscription model into a more formal business, one where customers could buy their bread on demand instead of waiting for his delivery. Once demand outgrew his home kitchen, he began knocking on the door of “every pizzeria in West Philly” looking for an oven to bake in, and managed to find a pizzeria owner who would rent out his kitchen for $100 a week. But in a few short months, Merzbacher’s business again outgrew the space.

“I came in for one day a week, then two days a week, then most days of the week,” says Merzbacher. He soon found himself kicked out of the pizzeria, with nowhere to go, and a growing roster of wholesale customers. “It felt really unfair to pull the rug out on them.”

After another expeditious search for a new space, he “lucked out” with an empty Tunisian bakery in Olney. It was fully-fitted for artisan baking: with imported French ovens and imported German mixers, it was perfect for Merzbacher’s intuitive approach, in which he tinkers with each step in the baking process to form creative loaves. He believes that “the dough is the boss” — he prefers to feel the dough and rely on tactile intelligence for improving it, rather than following strict measurements or a technique from a cookbook.

Merzbacher lived above the bakery while scaling up the business, and, by Philly Bread’s sixth birthday, the operation grew from just Merzbacher to having two dozen employees.

Now, another six years have passed since they moved in March of 2019 to what Merzbacher calls his “dream bakery,” a Germantown warehouse they renovated into a bakery that tripled their production space and now has a retail window for walk-up and pick-up orders.

The move also came with a name change from Philly Bread to Merzbacher’s. After hiring different firms to come up with a more memorable and creative name, it soon became obvious how well Merzbacher’s own last name would fit: having a German name for the business in their new home of Germantown, plus the similarity in sound between “-bacher” and “baker” proved “too good to be true,” as he puts it. At first, he thought naming the bakery after himself would seem like an egotistical move, but seeing the logo, which reminded him of a trustworthy, old-school bread brand, changed his mind. Five years later, he says it was the right call.

“People mispronounce it, but they do remember it,” Merzbacher says.

Bread, to me, is the perfect symbol of community.”

— Peter Merzbacher

Since settling in Germantown, they’ve more than doubled their production and have introduced several new products from their ovens. Each week, Merzbacher says he can count on the high demand for their tender Sweet Potato Buns and their famous Philly Muffins, their signature healthier square-ish version of an English muffin. Their newer releases are also popular, like the Citywide Sourdough and their newest product, Healthy Vibes: a bread made with roasted sweet potatoes and cooked red lentils that boasts 10 grams of protein and 9 grams of fiber in two slices.

Merzbacher’s idea behind developing Healthy Vibes was to make a hearty, high-protein bread without using a processed nutrient such as pea protein isolate. It was also a great way to use the sweet potatoes that they already had in their inventory for their Sweet Potato Buns.

“I want it to be a daily bread,” Merzbacher says of the Citywide Sourdough, which contains toasted cornmeal that imparts moisture to the bread and extends its shelf life. The cornmeal is sourced from a mill in Manheim, Lancaster County, that provides to the scrapple industry. That local pride is central to much of their sourcing: all of their white, wheat and rye flours come from Snavely’s Mill in Lititz, also in Lancaster.

Merzbacher’s ultimate goal is to keep the greater Philadelphia community at the center of what they do, which means growing thoughtfully and sustainably.

Merzbacher’s breads and baked goods can be found at all locations of Kimberton Whole Foods. “They’ve figured out how to achieve the scale you need to offer food at a fair price without losing a sense of humanity and community and regional pride that one could easily lose in that process of scaling up.”