Home, sweet hometown bakery - Wyckoff Quality Bakery

Nation's Business, June, 1992 by Meg Whittemore

When you talk to former residents of Wyckoff, N.J., a semirural suburb 27 miles northwest of New York, and ask them what they miss most about the town, their answers are surprisingly similar: They miss the Wyckoff Quality Bakery.

The memories are rich--flaky, buttery strudel, the World's Finest Cheesecake (customers say it's true), almond Danish rings thick with imported marzipan, and chocolate fudge birthday cakes filled with raspberry mousse and iced with fresh whipped cream.

"We put quality first," says Hanna Kino, who, with her husband, John, started the Wyckoff Quality Bakery 33 years ago. "People are not going to pay our price for less than top quality."

The prices are indeed premium: A Danish ring (coffee cake) sells for $7.25, cheesecakes range from $8.75 to $22. A 10-inch birthday cake with one filling and whipped cream icing is $36.

But a great many people think the price is right. The Kinos now onw and operate four additional bakeries in neighboring towns and counties. The combined sales for the five locations last year were more than $4 million.

John Kino, now retired, acknowledges that it is Hanna's skill at giving customers what they want that has made the business so successful.

Hanna is involved in everything at the Wyckoff store. One recent afternoon, she worked the front counter while taking a telephone order from an out-of-state customer; she also checked on the cleanliness of the cake pans in preparation for baking, handled myriad rapid-fire questions from her sales employees, and decorated a layer cake while instructing a customer who had telephoned to ask how to make vanilla sugar.

"I am a heavy-duty person," says Hanna. "My sons and husband think I am crazy, but I think my involvement is important."

The business started in 1959, when the Kinos bought a small Dutch bakery that was for sale across the street from their current location. "We had saved up $5,000 and bought the business, recipes and all, for $13,000," says Hanna. The first thing to go was the recipes. "We couldn't deal with Dutch baking," she says. "It is very lean except for the holiday stuff."

Instead, the Kinos focused on the rich, butter-and-cheese-based baking methods favored by German-Jewish bakers. John handled all the baking while Hanna supervised retailing.

John learned his trade while working for several German-Jewish bakers in northern New Jersey in the 1950s. "They wouldn't share their recipes with him," says Hanna, "so he had to steal them. He would mix them up and then go into the bathroom and write them down."

The Kinos' trademark "baker's dozen buns" (13 sweet rolls) and fresh hard rolls soon attracted a loyal following. Over the years, the Wyckoff Quality Bakery became a fixture in the town. Police officers and postal workers routinely stopped in at 7 a.m. for their daily Danish. Scores of high-school students learned the basics of retail sales and management by working for the Kinos.

As many as a dozen people--all of them specialists--now handle production. "I don't have one baker on the premises," says Hanna, " no one who could make a product from beginning to the end." Instead, there are mixers, an oven person, another who watches the temperatures, a cake icer and decorator, a cleanup person, and so on.

But Hanna watches every step. "I can't not know what is going on in my business," she says. "I don't have a need to do everything, but I have to know about everything."

Now in her 60s, Hanna says she was a female entrepreneur when it wasn't popular. "One of my store managers told me that I was really a woman of the '90s," she says. "I feel very honored by that because over the years I have never stopped thinking young."