Voyageurs Bakehouse celebrates five years at Green Bay location

Voyageurs Bakehouse recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of its first brick-and-mortar location on Broadway in Green Bay.

Since opening in 2020, the space has served both as a storefront as well as where all the baking for Voyageurs’ other locations and wholesale products is done.

But Voyageurs existed for some time before moving into its own space.

“We started in 2018 baking bread out of our home and selling it,” said Voyageurs’ founder Ben Cadman. “We did some pop-up markets at Ledgestone Winery and then we were looking for somewhere to bake and we ended up using the Providence Academy school kitchen at Central Church in west Green Bay… That’s when we launched our website and delivered bread to people’s homes… During that 18 months, we started to get wholesale accounts and we did farmers’ markets on the weekends and on Wednesdays and we came to the realization that we needed to open a physical location.”

Voyageurs’ officially opened the doors to the public at its Broadway location on March 10, 2020, not even a week before the world began to shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic — but that didn’t prevent business from growing, leading to the opening of two additional locations.

“That’s how we landed at opening here in Green Bay in 2020, about six days before COVID and the stay-at-home orders started in Wisconsin,” Cadman said.

“It was an interesting time, obviously, but luckily we had just opened the business so it wasn’t as challenging as it would have been if we had been open for several years and then had a dramatic loss of business… We opened here in 2020 and then in the beginning of 2022 we opened our Appleton store and in summer of 2024 we opened our De Pere store.”

While this is the fifth anniversary Voyageurs’ has celebrated at its Broadway location, it is also the last anniversary the business will celebrate there as Cadman said they have simply outgrown the original space.

“Everything is baked here centrally for our other stores,” he said. “Each morning, our van will take baked goods to De Pere and then to Appleton. And as those businesses have grown and our wholesale business is growing, our actual baking space and oven and equipment is too small. But we can’t cram anymore in and can’t do anything more out of this space, so in order to grow in the next ten years, we needed a larger baking space. We needed to look for where we could move to expand our production abilities.”

It’s not only the production abilities that will be expanded, though.

“When we move, we’re going to be a full restaurant…” Cadman said. “I would say, within five years, that place is going to be open as a full restaurant and we’ll be open for evenings and we’re going to have a wine and beer program at the bakery. It’s different from what we have been up until now and in the current venue, which is more of a sandwich shop or a coffee shop where you can get pastries and sandwiches… The next five to ten years are going to be exciting. And then the real growth for our business will hopefully come from our wholesale business and being able to expand that and have our product go out to a lot more places than it currently does.”

Stay tuned in to Voyageurs Bakehouse’s social media for an upcoming announcement on where Green Bay operations will be moving to.