How a longtime underground Philly bakery went legit

Hidden inside a sawmill on a Roxborough hillside, there’s a bread bakery that’s had a cult following for years but only recently rose to the attention of a wider audience. Dead King Bread turns out crusty sourdough, pillowy milk bread, sunflower-studded rye loaves, and more.

It delivers weekly to subscribers and wholesale clients, and only opens to the public on Saturdays for a few hours — less if it sells out. Depending on the weather, a wait in line is more pleasant than usual: You queue up in Manayunk Timber’s “forest,” a former patch of parking lot that’s been torn up and transformed into a budding haven for native trees.

Philadelphians familiar with Dead King Bread have been missing it lately. It was shut down by the city’s health department at the end of May, a week and a half after the Department of Licenses and Inspections showed up at the bakery to tell owners Michael Holland and Molly Flannery they had been reported for operating without a food license.

Dead King reopens this Saturday, having passed its health inspection late last month (on its second-ever visit from the health department). It’s in the process of applying for its food license with L&I — the last step in making this nine-year-old underground operation fully legitimate.

» READ MORE: Dead King Bread, an offbeat sourdough bakery, finds a home in a Northwest Philly sawmill

Some might be surprised to learn Dead King, which had customers lining up out the door for months, didn’t have a food license. But its owners say they weren’t trying to pull a fast one. They had every intention of obtaining a food license eventually, but were building their business and getting their ducks in a row before wending their way through the bureaucratic maze that separates by-the-book businesses from bootstrapped ones.

“We stayed under the radar as long as we possibly could because we needed to pay our bills,” said Flannery, who had stopped working a second job at a hair salon just two weeks before the shutdown.

“Doing it the right way basically means that you are not in operation for months, sometimes over a year,” Holland said. They’ve barely scraped by during this six-week shutdown, he said. “We’re spending our last dollar this week.”

Dead King is one example of a number of unauthorized food businesses in Philly that contribute to the city’s vibrant food scene. Its story sheds light on the challenges of establishing a new enterprise on a shoestring, a task that’s more feasible outside city limits.

Dead King had a grand debut last November, but it has been around since 2015. Holland started baking sourdough at home, selling loaves at neighboring Germantown Kitchen Garden and eventually delivering them to weekly subscribers in Northwest Philly. In 2018, he built an outdoor brick oven on Kitchen Garden’s land to scale up production.

Flannery came aboard as a business partner in 2020. As their customer base grew, they had to find new kitchens to prep ever-larger batches of dough, up to 150 pounds at a time. They’d cart them to the farm before dawn, firing up the temperamental wood-fired oven as the sun came up.

“We had this very scrappy, experimental start at the farm,” he said. “I’m a self-taught baker. I’ve never had a business.” The bread got better and better — bubbly, beautifully crusty, consistent — and they branched out to a few wholesale customers in 2021.

As the bakery grew in size and seriousness, Holland felt a “low-level anxiety” about the process of getting the business on the city’s radar. Soon after he quit his day job as an art handler around 2018, he started taking steps to get above-board: getting his commercial activity license and ServSafe certification, paying taxes on the bakery’s income (despite fearing it would alert the health department to Dead King’s existence). He also started looking for a brick-and-mortar space.

When Holland and Flannery discovered the opportunity inside Manayunk Timber, a sustainable sawmill with a giant warehouse, they swooned, signed a lease, and started planning. They perceived the move as the final step toward legitimacy — and inspection and licensing would be a part of that, just toward completion. “It was a process we’ve been planning to go through since we moved in,” Holland said. The health department’s Food Business Plan Review for Stationary Food Establishments became his bible.

“I’d been scrutinizing the code for months while we were doing the build-out,” he said.

As they constructed the bakery, they were careful to factor in criteria for eventual inspections by the city. They put in all-new copper water lines, floor drains, and stainless National Sanitation Foundation-certified sinks with proper spacing. They refinished the concrete floors with epoxy. They bought an NSF-certified deck oven and replaced their residential refrigerator with commercial ones.

When the doors opened to the public — on Saturdays starting last November — the bakery was still very much a work in progress, so they kept chugging along without flagging their work to the city.

Business was steady through the winter and spring, and Flannery and Holland chipped away at improvements around the bakery (installing a Douglas fir ceiling, adding arched French doors and salvaged windows.). They were bracing for the standard summer slowdown in mid-May when an L&I inspector came to the bakery and told them someone had reported Dead King for operating without a food license.

The L&I inspector gave them 70 days to amend the situation, directing them to the health department to get the necessary paperwork and inspections done to apply for a food license. In the following days, Holland and Flannery heard from wholesale clients that the health department had instructed them not to sell Dead King bread.

On May 29, a health inspector came into the bakery for the first time. The inspector outlined the problems they spotted — a missing indirect pipe and backflow preventer, a non-commercial-grade chest freezer, and wooden shelving that can’t be easily cleaned, among other things. The health department put them under a voluntary shutdown.

“We were in the middle of mixing dough. We had 200 pounds of dough that had to get thrown out,” Holland said, noting that the health inspector — and every city employee he and Flannery have dealt with in this process — was very sweet. They encouraged Holland and Flannery to schedule another inspection as soon as they could. (A request for an interview with the health department was not returned before this article was published.)

That visit set a fire under Flannery and Holland. They assembled an inch-thick book documenting the bakery’s equipment and layout. They installed rubber-cover baseboards, changed pipe positioning, wall-mounted soap dispensers, posted handwashing signs, along with dozens of other tweaks. They cut their expenses (“shopping at Aldi,” Holland joked) and took out a loan to pay rent. They launched a long-planned Kickstarter to cover the cost of a dough divider, building materials, fees, and more.

In the meantime, they posted about their bureaucratic odyssey on Instagram, eliciting many messages of support and a smattering of criticism. “Are you implying you were hoping to not ever be up to code? I certainly would not have been a customer if I’d known that…” one commenter wrote.

Holland and Flannery understand where critics are coming from, but they argue many people don’t fully appreciate how difficult and expensive it is to launch a legitimate food business — nor how much underground operations bring to Philly’s food landscape.

“Everybody always wants to say ‘Go through the proper channels’ until they have to go through the proper channels. But then also, they love to go to these little restaurants or these little bakeries or these weird little — ‘Oh, did you hear about this little something pop-up?’ Those pop-ups are not legal,” Holland said. (“And we love them!” Flannery chimes in.)

“They’re also the only reason that a lot of these businesses are able to get a foothold and test their concept and get an audience,” Holland said.

There is a way Holland and Flannery could have run Dead King legally from the start: if they had been baking a few miles west, outside the city limits.

In every Pennsylvania county except Philadelphia, you can register a home kitchen as a limited food establishment. That route allows for fledgling outfits like the Main Line’s Wild Yeast Bakehouse, another subscription-driven sourdough bakery, to flourish legally in an individual’s home. These establishments are inspected by the state and must adhere to a battery of rules and regulations around hygiene, labeling, product testing, and recordkeeping.

But limited food licenses aren’t permitted in Philadelphia, where all food sold to the public must be made with National Sanitation Foundation-certified equipment in a commercially zoned kitchen. The Department of Agriculture regulates limited food establishments; a department spokesperson said Philadelphia’s local zoning laws do not allow home-based businesses.

For Holland, the difference in regulations is frustrating. “We go out the back door of the timber yard and we can see houses where it would be legal to have a full commercial bakery in your house.” He reflects on how many would-be entrepreneurs might have been discouraged by the process of launching a new business in Philly.

Flannery and Holland can still hardly believe it, but with just a couple of on-site fixes, they passed their June 28 health inspection, enabling them to get back to baking. They’re eager to reopen, but their excitement is tempered by their takeaways from this process.

In the end, passing the city’s health inspection itself cost a few thousand dollars — a path smoothed by upfront investments like building to code and buying NSF-certified equipment in the first place. “But not being able to operate in that time and make income, that killed us,” Flannery said.

“If we had gone the boilerplate route, we would have had to be shut down for months and months, and there’s no way we could have afforded that. It was kind of either do it the messy way or just get real jobs and quit,” he continued. “Looking back, it’s really sad to think about how many people just simply never start because they can only afford to start tiny.”

Dead King Bread at 5100 Umbria St. is open to the public on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. For their July 13 reopening, they’ll have three kinds of bread (sourdough, sunflower rye, and milk bread), two types of focaccia, canelés, cookies, and coffee-cake muffins.