Center City Soft Pretzel encounters twists and turns as it rebounds from a fire
The Sept. 28 fire at the Washington Avenue bakery damaged the hard-to-replace dough extruder and electrical panels.
Center City Soft Pretzel Co., one of the region’s largest bakers of the signature Philadelphia-famous snacks, has been offline since Sept. 28 and is not expected to reopen till March after an electrical fire damaged its dough extruder and its electrical panel.
Commercial baking equipment, like most machinery, functions as a sum of interconnected parts. “It’s not that one piece of equipment is more important than the next,” said Erika Tonelli Bonnett, who owns the company founded by her father, Tony, in September 1981. Center City sits behind an enormous garage door at 816 Washington Ave.
“They all do a very specific thing and without one, it just doesn’t work.”
Neither do she and her seven employees. “I have been doing nothing, and it’s horrible because I am somebody who does not stop moving,” she said.
The fire damaged the bakery’s three-phase electrical panel that supplies the extruder, which is the size of a pickup truck and pipes the dough into shape. For electricians to get to the panel, two single-phase panels and associated parts had to be removed and replaced, Bonnett said, adding that this expense, about $30,000, is not covered by insurance. She started a GoFundMe campaign with a $10,000 goal.
The extruder was rebuilt and awaits the assembly and installation of the new electrical panels. “It’s not like something you can just run into Home Depot and grab,” she said. “The supply house doesn’t have it because the manufacturer needs to make it, and the manufacturer can’t make it until he has the supplies to make it. It’s ‘supply chain, supply chain, supply chain.’ If I have to hear it one more time, I’m going to put my head through a wall.”
Center City’s business is about half retail and half wholesale. The bakery also serves customers through Goldbelly, the national food broker.
Before COVID-19, the bakery opened at midnight, creating a late-night scene of hungry bar-goers and taxi drivers seeking a pretzel hot from the oven. “We miss our retail people, so much,” she said. “Those customers are not just customers — they’re family,” she said.
Bonnett, 47, started working for her father 17 years ago, doing the office work. When her father took ill about six years ago, she took over the business. He retired to Florida and died at age 71 in September 2021.
To complicate matters, Center City Soft Pretzel has not been able to get the word out because its Facebook, with 4,700 followers, was hacked last fall, locking out Bonnett. She created a new account, which on Monday had only 80 followers. When some customers see the “Oct. 3, 2022,” date on the original account’s most recent Facebook post, they may think that the bakery is permanently closed. The bakery is now on Instagram at @centercitypretzelcoinc.
“I wouldn’t have all these sleepless nights and all this anxiety if that was the case,” Bonnett said. “It would be easy to just say, ‘no, we’re done.’ But I can’t, because that building is my father, that is his legacy. It’s like a sibling to me.”