Some of Pennsylvania’s best bread is being made in an old gas station in North Philly

When you think of gas-station bread, you probably don’t envision a sourdough boule made from local grains, baked with a sturdy crust and airy, light crumb. But with Claire Kopp McWilliams’ bread, that’s exactly what you get. Technically, every loaf the Ursa Bakery founder and her team sell at Philly’s farmers markets comes out of a gas station — or, at least, a former one.

The bakery’s production facility in Nicetown-Hunting Park was a working gas station between the 1920s and ‘70s, before becoming a beer distribution center, McWilliams tells me. “People still come and ask if they can buy beer,” she says, pulling armfuls of dough from an industrial mixer. She folds the stretchy slabs into greased plastic tubs, then presses rosemary and chopped olives into what will become knots of fougasse, a Provençal flatbread that’s often likened to focaccia but made with baguette dough.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and McWilliams is showing me how she prepares for Ursa Bakery’s busiest event of the week: the Fairmount farmers market. The bakery draws long lines at the year-round market, selling around 350 loaves in a day. The former head baker at Vetri Cucina, McWilliams is known for her sourdough. It’s her favorite style of bread to make and most of the loaves Ursa sells are sourdough varieties; McWilliams also showed aspiring bakers how to make sourdough in her bread-making class at Vetri. She started Ursa Bakery as a solo side project in 2018, before leaving Vetri in 2019 to focus on her bakery full-time while continuing to work with her former boss on their 2020 book, Mastering Bread. Before that, she held baking positions at Fork, Talula’s Garden, Parc, and Avance, plus a brief stint selling cheese at Di Bruno Bros.

After mixing on Wednesdays, McWilliams is up at 5 a.m. on Thursdays to shape and bake the bread that gets sold at the Fairmount farmers market. The bakery’s offerings include seeded loaves, baguettes, and specialties like seaweed miche (one of McWilliams’ favorites in the summer) and a braided Hawaiian loaf made with pineapple and brown sugar. The baker says she also likes to make a couple of completely whole-grain breads, including rye loaves, even if they’re not popular with many of her customers — though she notes that those with European accents seem to like them. “They’re not money makers,” she says. “I make them on principle,” she adds, speaking to how they’re healthy and, in her opinion, delicious. Like all of Ursa Bakery’s bread, everything is made with local grains — the majority of which are grown in Pennsylvania — that are mostly milled in-house.

The baker has been selling bread at the Fairmount farmers market for years, even before she started her business. The opportunity came about when Mighty Bread founder Chris DiPiazza was offered a spot at the market but didn’t have the bandwidth. McWilliams — who DiPiazza met at her bread-making class at Vetri — said she’d step in.

McWilliams purchased the North Philly property that’s now her production facility for $120,000 in April 2021, but her bakery didn’t move in until the spring of 2023 (prior to that, she rented space at Mighty Bread, then Merzbacher’s). She refinanced and rented out her Germantown home to buy the North Broad Street structure with her dad after he sold some land in Idaho, and relied on support from family and friends. “Because of the gas station part, I was never going to be able to get a loan,” she says.

Although the property’s former life as a gas station has its benefits — McWilliams points out how the garage doors allow easy access for large machinery — it’s needed substantial work to operate as a baking facility. While renovating the interior, for example, the baker says she dealt with several setbacks, including a mishap with an order for a special walk-in fridge for fermentation that resulted in her building one herself. Following a contractor’s guidance, McWilliams mapped out the space to fit her equipment, installed drywall for insulation, and added a few finishing touches, including a CoolBot system to control the temperature. And there’s more to be done, like a remediation of the exterior. There are gas tanks from the 1970s on the grounds that need digging up, the baker says, and environmental testing is required to determine if there’s any contaminated soil that would need to be disposed of and replaced.

For now, though, McWilliams’ facility suits the needs of her business, which has grown to a team of four (including the bakery’s founder) and has a loyal following on Philly’s farmers market circuit. Aside from Fairmount on Thursdays, the bakery sells at the East Falls market on Saturdays, and has a partnership with Urban Roots’ CSA, plus a handful of wholesale contracts with farm stands. Despite earning a local following and a spot of national recognition — in 2022, Food & Wine called her bread some of the best in Pennsylvania — McWilliams isn’t interested in expanding her business much, and often declines other commitments, instead keeping her attention on the farmers markets. “I say no to a lot of opportunities,” McWilliams says, speaking of pop-ups, collaborations, and wholesale accounts. “But it’s like, we’re kind of dialed in with this thing that works,” she adds. “I don’t think it would be worth it as much because then I would have to pull back and become more of a manager, and I don’t even think it would be profitable.”

It’s a personal decision as much as a business one. It was at a farmers market in Seattle where McWilliams discovered her love of baking, selling bread for a local bakery while studying at the University of Washington. “I love the veterans and bringing an entire community together hours at a time every week,” she says. “It’s the kind of culture that we should protect.” And it’s a sustainable business model for Ursa Bakery as a lean operation. “My goal is to just make what we do work,” the baker says. “Actually pay people fairly, pay our taxes, keep us afloat.”

“Those things that Claire has chosen to not compromise on make her product what it is, make the bakery what it is,” DiPiazza says. Merzbacher’s founder Pete Merzbacher, who met McWilliams years ago at Philly baker gatherings, says she “knows who she is, she knows who she’s not,” and “the kind of bread that she wants to eat” and the “bread that she’ll let other people make.” Ultimately, he says, “she just makes things that I think she believes in, which is local, small scale, and delicious.”

McWilliams also isn’t afraid of taking a risk. After all, who else buys an old gas station that needs a ton of work? “The mainstream advice is that investors should run from sites like this, and that’s basically why I could afford to get it,” McWilliams says. “But I’m hoping to prove that there’s a way to be a small fry, but make something good happen.” Judging by the line that forms at Ursa Bakery’s stall at the Fairmount farmers market each week — mostly returning customers who know their order by heart — something good is already happening.