Ever since I have been buying my own food there have been neighborhood surplus bakery stores where you could buy bread that was either not delivered that day or was returned from retail stores. AKA day old bread stores.
Anyway about 10 years ago the outlet in my neighborhood closed. No biggie I thought consolidation.
Anyway the other day I got to thinking about this so I set out to find a day old bakery.
I found about 6 empty boarded up buildings, but no open stores. None of them have any signs suggesting I visit an open location.
Where did they all go?
What happens to the bread they used to sell there?
The only ones I’d seen were affiliated with Hostess, and they were closed last year. Hostess now sells their overstock at Big Lots stores.
The bakeries have gotten better with inventory management and reduced the amount excess items they produce…they sale all of their bread at wholesale prices to retailers and have no need for the day old bread market.
Old Home used to have some around here but they closed quite some time ago.
Some of the surplus bread goes to dollar stores now. We have the 99cents only store and another dollar store that both sell day old bakery goods.
Yeah. In addition to the dollar stores I’ve seen day old bakery goods at Big Lots.
Wally World’s bread prices are comparable to those of the day old bread stores making traveling across town to them not cost efficient for most people. And Wally World is EVERYWHERE.
I used to live near (and my parents still do) an Entenmann’s Outlet store. Of course they no longer make my favorite item (apple strudel), but I’ll still stop in and get a cherry cheese danish or something.
We still have them in SC - I can think of three offhand, and I know that two of the three are still open as of last weekend.
Otherwise, around here, day-old baked stuff goes to shelters and soup kitchens, or to big-box overstock places like Big Lots - we have two of those as well as a local? overstock place called Ollies. A couple of the dollar stores around here (depending on location, I’m guessing) also have day-old bakery stuff for sale.
Once it gets past a certain age, it isn’t even allowed to get donated, so it goes in the dumpsters for the crackheads and the freegans to fight over.
There’s an Entenmann’s outlet store where my parents live in southern Connecticut. We used to get pastries, Thomas English Muffins, bread, etc.
(When I was a kid, they’d make a stack of the boxed goods you bought and then put the stack in a machine that would wrap twine around it and tie it up in about ten seconds.)
There used to be a few Hostess outlets around, and I always bought my bread there. They all closed down when the parent company went out of business. One thing I noticed is that they did not sell “day-old” bread. When I compared the expiration dates at the outlet and the grocery store, the outlet bread was usually at least as fresh, often fresher, that the grocery. The quality wasn’t always equal though. Sometimes the outlet product was overcooked, and rarely undercooked. At about half the price of the grocery-store or WalMart product, it was worth taking a chance.
Bimbo, a Mexican owned company that owns the Arnold bread brand as well as Entemann’s pastries, Thomas’ English muffins, etc, still has bakery outlet stores. They have a map of their locations. Unfortunately the nearest one to me is an hour away so it isn’t worth visiting.
They donate them to food banks, who in turn deliver them to churches and other charitable organizations who distribute them.
We have a Flowers Bakery thrift store here in the shopping center behind the actual bakery. All types of bread, hot dog and hamburger buns, etc. are 79 cents. Most everything is still in date (comparable to what you see in the grocery store.)
These. On Weight Watchers, I use the 40 calorie for two slices Nature’s Own. You can pay $3+ for it at Walmart or $1.40 if Big Lots has it, or better yet, only a buck at Dollar Tree. The last one I remember, a Hostess outlet, closed down probably half a dozen years ago. And for the record, I’m in east Texas.
There is a Pepperidge farm outlet store here, but a lot of the stuff there is held in reserve for local food banks and churches. People come in and sign for it. I suppose you could start your own church and get a tax break, and cheap donuts…
On the topic of outlet bakery stores, my dad once asked my mom if they needed to stop at the “used bread store” while they were out shopping.
Yep, there are Flowers outlets in Georgia.
I’m not a big bread person, but one of my college roommates loved those places. one thing I did recall (at least from the one we used to go to) is that, despite being a “surplus” place, they seemed to have a wider selection and better prices on a more diverse range of products. I don’t know if they still do.
Walmart type places may be cheaper on some things (they are now the most expensive meat and dairy in my city for some reason), but I have a harder time finding stuff that isn’t just “white bread.”
There is (was?) one of these places just down the road, between a church and a car wash. I have never been there. However, this thread is making me wonder if it’s even still open because I don’t pay attention to it.
ETA:
Apparently the place I’m thinking of is a “Schwebels” and they are open 7 days a week.
I live relatively close to a Mrs. Baird’s plant with its affiliated outlet store. I also shop at a place I refer to as a “salvage grocery store” and it sells Mrs. B’s cast-offs. It also occasionally carries “Mrs. Freshley’s” snack cakes and their version of the Hostess Twinkie is criminally delicious. This => 
is me, drooling while thinking of Mrs. F’s Faux Twink-eez.