Tammy Worthy-Jones
It’s the morning of the first-ever Harrisburg Bakery Crawl, and pastry fiends are buzzing up and down N. 3rd Street.
“Honestly, I had no clue what I signed up for, but I am excited to see what different baked goods there are,” said Brooke Wimberly, whose Midtown-based sister, Camryn, invited her into the city from Mechanicsburg for the March event.
The sisters were among at least 100 customers who paid $25 to spend their Saturday hopping between six of the city’s locally owned bakeries, collecting a treat at every stop.
As they made the three-mile round trip, desserts stacked up in their plastic bags.
On the menu were miniature poundcakes, Ube croissants (bright purple inside), mini crème brûlée cheesecakes, chocolate black-tie mousse cake, iced lemon-blueberry rolls and cannolis.
In addition to baked goods, many of the crawlers had ventured out looking to try more sweets from across the city—like Lisa and Randy Berrier, retirees from Penbrook, regular customers at Alvaro Bread & Pastry Shoppe.
Rita, a regular at Salted Butter Bakery, said that, until this event, she “didn’t know there were so many bakeries in Harrisburg in such close proximity.”
There were even a cluster of bakery lovers who had missed the crawl’s ticket cutoff but came out anyway—intent to see what the hype was about and buy off the shelf.
According to Riley and Zach Madar, owners of Anna Rose Bakery & Coffee Shop, at least as many people showed up to their store without tickets as those who’d bought them.
Friends Maddie Lamarca and Allie Prim had seen the event on social media and were going to walk half of it after driving in from the Mechanicsburg area.
William, a Midtown resident, was enjoying the walk from one spot to the next.
“I’m doing my own,” he shrugged.
Anna Rose baked goods
A Little Different
While bakeries have always been an urban stronghold, the Bakery Crawl highlighted the success of the business model in a city otherwise struggling with commercial vacancies.
Salted Butter owner Alec Johnson, organizer of the crawl, started floating the idea last fall.
One of the biggest motivators was that he and his fellow Harrisburg bakers have seemed to naturally share a portion of their customers—although they all have slightly different focuses.
Vincenzo Alvaro, manager at the longest-serving bakery of the group, Alvaro Bread & Pastry Shoppe, indicated there are more bakeries in Harrisburg now than there have been in the two decades they’ve been open. His family-run business specializes in traditional Italian pastries, fresh breads, breakfast and lunch. Its Midtown location opened in 2005.
Also in Midtown, Salted Butter sells custom cakes and fun treats like sandwich cookies, cinnamon rolls and M&M brownies. Raising the Bar offers homemade croissants and fresh breads, while Just Baked Cakes and Pies, inside Midtown Scholar Bookstore, leans into sweet potato pie and pound cake.
Downtown, Wake and Bake Café’s big sellers include muffins and banana pudding. Anna Rose has become known for its pecan bars and intricately iced cupcakes.
On top of it all, most offer cookies and cakes; some offer breakfast food or sandwiches; others double as coffee shops or cafés.
“We’re all a little different,” Riley said. “We’re all the same.”
Holding the event in the spring seemed like a good way to put bakeries back at the top of customers’ minds after the busy holiday season and New Year’s lull. The crawl would give people a reason to come out and sample from each.
Loyal customers of one bakery might find others they like—ultimately driving up business for all as well as boosting Harrisburg’s reputation as a place for fancy treats.
“It’s good for the customer,” Johnson said. “It’s good for us.”
Raising the Bar cafe
Sweet & Dense
Just Baked Cakes and Pies owner Tammy Worthy-Jones has been inside the Scholar since February 2020. When asked why so many bakeries seem to be popping up in Harrisburg lately, she laughed, “I don’t have a clue.”
“It just seems like everybody just said, ‘You know what? Let’s open a bakery on 3rd Street,’” the pastry chef, originally from New York, joked.
Four of the crawl’s six bakeries—including Worthy-Jones’—were along that corridor.
Raising the Bar found a home on the first floor of the “Carpets and Draperies” building in 2022, choosing to stay close to their established customer base after years inside the Broad Street Market.
Salted Butter snagged a storefront across the street from the market last year.
Coming off pop-ups and event vending, Wake and Bake, located across from the state Capitol Complex, joined the lineup in July 2025.
You might wonder: How does such a small area support them all?
Elle Daniels
With just 12 blocks in between Wake and Bake and Raising the Bar, it might seem at first like an over-saturated bakery market—but the city’s residential density within this grid means that a certain number of people who live nearby will stop in.
Except for Anna Rose, all the bakery owners estimated that most of their customers are Harrisburg residents living within a few blocks of their storefronts.
“Just talking to my customers, if I had to put a number on it, like 85% of them live really close by,” Johnson, of Salted Butter, said. “We’re not necessarily the bakery that’s getting a lot of people from outside the city.”
Parking can be a challenge, all the bakery owners agreed—and sometimes a hurdle for potential suburban customers, who don’t want to pay $8 total for a cookie once a $3-to-$4 per hour parking fee is factored in.
“For that reason, I would say the majority, nine out of 10 of our customers, are just walking past and popping in versus making it a special trip,” Johnson added.
He simplified Salted Butter’s customer base into two camps: the regular who spends $3 or $4 every couple of days for a mood boost and the once-a-month customer who buys $100 worth of treats for their office or family gathering.
There are hyper-local differences between bakeries too.
Wake and Bake sees more business from the Capitol Complex and workers downtown. Salted Butter has increased foot traffic on market days. And Raising the Bar gets regulars from PA STEAM Academy drop offs and pickups across the street.
For Just Baked Cakes and Pies, many customers come from inside the Scholar—other regulars travel in from Lower Paxton Township and Uptown Harrisburg. Alvaro gets some traffic from nearby fire and police stations.
Meanwhile, along the N. 2nd Street corridor, Anna Rose owners said that state workers make up most of their clientele, followed by other office workers, convention goers, travelers and tourists.
“It’s a very commuter-focused downtown area,” Zach said.
One unifier for customers that Johnson has picked up on—a lot of his regular customers like the local aspect of the business.
“They want someone to know their name,” he said. “They want someone to know their order, and you don’t get those types of things with chains, necessarily.”
Vincenzo Alvaro agreed.
“He comes three or four times a week and gets a breakfast sandwich,” he said, pointing to a man walking into his shop. “I know him by name. I know what he gets. When you do that with people, it makes them feel good about themselves.”
Alec Johnson
$5 Goes Far
While bakeries offer food, they don’t quite operate like a restaurant.
That may be a good thing now, since full-service restaurants have struggled lately (a national trend) due to high operating costs, labor shortages and consumers’ tightening pocketbooks.
By contrast, the bakery scene in Harrisburg is booming. This may be because—compared to restaurants—a few dollars can go a long way.
Johnson worked at a Dairy Queen decorating ice cream cakes four years ago. He said the franchise’s 25-year owner often repeated a specific philosophy.
“She always said that, when there was almost a recession, Dairy Queen sales went up. Because if people are struggling to pay their bills or to make ends meet, they can at least spare $5 to get themselves something to make themselves feel better,” he said.
Even when money’s tight, all the owners said, people still want to treat themselves on a rough day.
“I know a lot of people are struggling right now, and so I feel like that’s maybe why there’s so many bakeries that are doing so well,” Johnson said.
Raising the Bar owners Casey Callahan and Timishia Goodson described baked goods as an affordable luxury.
Raising the Bar
“It’s more affordable for people. It’s not a $30 entree,” Callahan said. “People on the everyday can afford [baked goods] a little bit more than they can going out to a full-scale dinner.”
Goodson pointed out that a bakery’s costs are different than a restaurant because of a different mix of perishables. While they can keep flour a little longer than other ingredients, bakers must be mindful of the shelf life and fluctuating prices of dairy products and eggs.
“Sometimes for a while, that will completely change our menu,” Goodson said.
At one point, for example, cream cheese jumped from $3 a pound to $9 a pound, forcing them to take cream cheese items off the menu.
Overall, Zach Madar pointed out that bakeries often work more like a retail store than a restaurant. They also keep the staffing light, with only four workers, including the two owners, at Anna Rose.
“We have the people that get the product ready and the person that checks people out for the product,” he said. “We don’t need waiters and waitresses.”
Callahan noted that restaurants have a lot higher labor cost due to waitstaff.
“Notoriously, I think even successful restaurants struggle,” she said. “Not that we don’t struggle and bakeries don’t struggle, but when you have a smaller staff, if you keep it tight, you can get through the leaner times a little easier—whereas, I think for a restaurant, especially the larger you get, it’s a lot more difficult.”
Wake and Bake co-owner Elle Daniels added social media is a major pro for bakery owners in business.
“One thing I’ve noticed recently is people love to watch other people eat,” she said.
She often capitalizes on the Capitol view from her bakery storefront’s window. Videos are big for the bakery, too. Especially process videos, coffee-making videos, often filmed by one of their baristas.
Daniels does most of her baking in the afternoons, after the store closes. She’ll mix cookie dough, setting it aside for the café’s chef to bake in the morning—so customers smell the aroma the next morning when they walk in.
Daniels said that she’s been known to pull the prettiest baked goods from a batch just for social shots for Wake and Bake’s more than 1,600 Instagram followers.
“It’s like, ‘OK, I’m saving this one for a picture.’ Like, ‘Nobody touch this one,’” she joked.
Anna Rose Bakery
Sense of Belonging
While the Bakery Crawl lasted only a day, many participants emphasized that Harrisburg’s bakeries are fixtures in their daily lives—and the reverse is true for bakery owners, too.
At Alvaro, for instance, Vincenzo said that he treats his regulars like family.
“I’m telling you, just a little conversation, a human to another human, is what this world needs a little bit more of,” he said.
Beyond the daily routine, owning a bakery also means being a part of major milestones in people’s lives.
“Our cakes are meant for everyone’s most important day,” said Zach at Anna Rose, from birthdays to baby showers to weddings. Riley added that they also see a lot of first dates—and sometimes it works out. A couple who ended up getting married, she said, even came back for a visit.
“It made me cry a lot,” she said with a smile.
Ultimately, whether customers are coming in for a quick bite or a big event, the draw remains the same: a sense of belonging.
Bakery crawler William put it best: “The welcoming atmosphere makes you want to come back to every one.”
Something Sweet
If you have a craving, the bakeries mentioned in this story can be found at the following:
Alvaro Bread & Pastry Shoppe
236 Peffer St., Harrisburg
4715 N. Front St., Harrisburg
www.alvarobread.com
Anna Rose Bakery & Coffee Shop
100 N. 2nd St., Harrisburg
www.annarosebakery.com
Just Baked Cakes and Pies
270 Verbeke St., Harrisburg
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Raising the Bar
1507 N. 3rd St., Harrisburg
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Salted Butter Bakery
1224 N. 3rd St., Harrisburg
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Wake and Bake Café
240 N. 3rd St., Harrisburg
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