Remembering Entenmann's and other Long Island bakery thrift stores

They were a cornucopia of cakes, a bounty of breads and even, if you came on the right day, a panoply of pies. The bakery thrift stores that sold irregular, slightly old or supermarket surplus goods at steep discounts are now long gone from Long Island, but like Marcel Proust's madeleines, their names still can conjure a remembrance of things past.

There was Entenmann’s, with its factory and flagship shop in Bay Shore. And Wonder Bread/Hostess stores, sporting colorful signs and the promise of cut-rate cupcakes. Bond Bread stores featured not just that brand but also discounted Grossinger’s rye and Hollywood diet bread. And there was Pepperidge Farm and Tip-Top and Arnold and ...

We came because everyone loves a bargain. A 25-cent loaf of bread in 1970 could be had for just 12 cents — or three for 29 cents. By 1980, when bread was 83 cents at the supermarket, a thrift store gave you two for $1.17. A 10-pack of Twinkies in 1991? Three for $3.39 — and a fourth box free!

In an era of generally larger families, it was a way to stretch a buck. "There were five kids in our family,” said Linda Herman, 67, a retired attorney raised in Massapequa who lives in Manhattan. "Five of us to feed. You’re always looking for bargains when you have a big family,” and so weekend shopping trips often included a stop at an Entenmann’s outlet, though she doesn’t recall which — locations included East Meadow and Mineola.

Similarly, "We had four children in the family,” remembered Kathy Delakas, 64, a Babylon retiree raised in Plainview. Her family frequented an Entenmann’s store when she was young — and later she, as a typically cash-strapped teen, would visit a Wonder Bread/Hostess store for her cupcake fix. "They were much better priced than supermarkets,” she said.

"You could get slightly dated but still tasty Twinkies, fruit pies and, my favorite, those pink marshmallow Snoballs for a ridiculously discounted price," agreed her sister, 62-year-old Janice Costa, of Bethpage, who runs the Canine Camp Getaway vacation company.

Nor was the quality appreciably different. Three kinds of goods made it into bakery thrift stores. One was simply overstock, when a bakery, as an inevitable result of estimating upcoming orders, produced more than needed.

EXPIRATION MARKS

Otherwise, in one variation or other in different bakeries’ thrift stores, "there were two marks on the boxes,” explained George Campbell, 76, who spent two college summers in the 1960s working at the Entenmann’s factory in Bay Shore. "A black mark meant it had expired, because they could only sell it for five days — but a six-day-old crumb cake tastes just as good as a five-day. And then there was a red mark, and none of us working the line ever wanted to get a red mark on a box, because that meant it was damaged.”

But only superficially, really. "The things that were red-marked had gotten jostled in the box and somehow, let's say it was a pie, the crust on top was cracked,” said Campbell, a retired marketing executive formerly of Farmingdale and now a professional Santa Claus in Texas. Savvy shoppers, he said, knew to "always look for the warm apple strudel that had gotten broken.”

Thrift stores also offered a bigger variety of goods than generally found in supermarkets. "It's not like today where you could walk into Target and they have 300 kinds of Entenmann's cakes,” Delakas joked. Andrew Arnell, 56, who grew up in Merrick and lives outside Philadelphia, remembered how the Pepperidge Farm thrift store at 2212 Sunrise Hwy. — now a GameStop — was "floor to ceiling every single version and variety” of its baked goods, including kinds "you didn't always find in the supermarket.”

One might also find sizes and packaging not normally in supermarkets. When Arnell was a kid, his grandparents would send him and his younger brother Mathew to that Pepperidge Farm store down the street to buy goodies for guests dropping by — and a little something for themselves.

"They had the giant ‘milk carton’ size of Goldfish [crackers],” he said, referring to the waxed-cardboard container resembling a gallon of milk, with a foldout spout. "So we came home with that big whopper one. That’s super exciting when you’re 7 or 8 years old.”

Given the nature of how goods would get there, it was catch-as-catch-can. "You might get a particular cake and then the next time there would be other cakes and not that one,” Delakas said.

ENTENMANN’S, THE HOMETOWN BAKERY

Entenmann’s was always Long Island’s hometown hero. Though founded by German immigrant William Entenmann in Brooklyn in 1898, the bakery came to Bay Shore just two years later — delivering home-to-home in horse-drawn carts and, later, trucks, like milkmen, before expanding to local supermarkets around 1959.

The bakery relocated from 34 East Main St. to 1724 Fifth Ave. in 1961, on a 5-acre lot said to then have been the largest baking facility of its kind in the U.S.; it eventually grew to 14 acres. It was also in 1961 that the company, now led by Martha and Charles Entenmann, the founder’s daughter and grandson, introduced its now-familiar clear plastic window on its boxes, all the better to entice the browsing buyer.

It's unclear when the habit of leaving a slicing knife in the box became prevalent, but it remains widespread. "You'd use the knife in the box to kind of even [a cake] out and keep evening it out till it was gone,” Herman recalled with a smile. Delakas, like others, said that to this day, when buying "all different” Entenmann’s goods, she will "keep the knife in the box.”

Entenmann’s went public in 1976 and two years later was bought by pharmaceutical giant Warner-Lambert. From there the company went to General Foods, Kraft Foods and others before being purchased by current owner Bimbo Bakeries USA, part of the multinational bakery conglomerate Grupo Bimbo, which closed the Bay Shore flagship thrift store in August 2014.

BEYOND THE THRIFT STORES

Most, if not all, of the other thrift shops also were gone by then. Wonder Bread/Hostess stores, for instance, existed through at least the late 1990s in Bohemia, Elmont, Farmingdale, Hauppauge, Hempstead, Hicksville, Medford and North Bellmore. But parent company Interstate Bakeries filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2004, shuttering shops in many states. Wonder is now owned by Flower Foods and Hostess by The J.M. Smucker Co. In the 1980s there were Pepperidge Farm stores in locations including East Farmingdale, Huntington, Lynbrook, Merrick, Roslyn and Smithtown; an East Northport shop existed through at least the mid-2000s.

Even beyond the impact of the stores themselves, that world of Long Island baked goods resonated in other ways. Campbell, who worked in the Entenmann’s factory during college summers, remembered "this dour gentleman who was the union representative ... Lou Laughton. He kind of took me under his wing.” One day a lightning hit took out the power, Campbell recalls, and though the machinery stopped, the yeast-filled dough in long stainless steel vats kept rising — and overflowing.

"We were catching yeast and trying to curl it back up, because this thing was about 8 feet off the ground,” he recalled, laughing. "We didn't lose too much of it” before the power came back on. "So we were both very tired and he says, 'Come on over to my house and have dinner tonight.' And he introduced me to his daughter,” Denise — whom Campbell would marry. "Fifty-five years later, here we are.”

And though these bakery thrift stores, these cost-cutting oases of bready goodness, no longer cover the Island like seeds on a loaf of rye, it doesn't take much to bring us back there.

"They say smell is the strongest scent tied to memory,” Costa said, "and I believe that's true — one whiff of some of those little cakes still takes me back to happy, carefree days of childhood, back when you didn't worry about processed foods, saturated fats or any of that. You just smelled the yummy baking smells and sugary goodness and felt happy!”