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Nationwide

Bakery distributors in the US

Bakery is the one category in this directory where federal regulation does not merely govern the trade, it defines the product. There is a rule saying what may be called bread and what must be called a roll, and there is no rule at all about a croissant. This page sets the suppliers we have verified against the parts of the aisle that are defined and the parts that are not.

  • Every supplier here was verified against the company's own website when its metro page was built, and each row links to that full listing.
  • The standards quoted below are from the Code of Federal Regulations, the US Code, the FDA Food Code, and the chaptered text of two state statutes, each cited by section.
  • Eight metros in seven states. No paid placements, no rankings, and no claim about any supplier's ingredients that the company did not publish itself.
Browse all 176 suppliers

At a glance

Suppliers verified
176
Across 8 researched metros
Ship beyond their metro
28
Say so on their own site
Independent houses
156
Local specialists and regional distributors
Deliver to you
154
Within the areas they publish
Walk-in options
59
Collect without a delivery minimum
Publish a delivery area
84
The rest say nothing about how far they go

Every bakery supplier we have verified, in one list

Filter by metro, by how the business is set up, and by how you can buy. Each row says which of the two businesses inside this word it is in, because a company that bakes and a company that sells flour to bakers are both correctly described as bakery distributors and are not substitutes for each other.

City

Supplier type

How you buy

Showing 176 of 176 suppliers.

A federal regulation says the difference between bread and a roll is eight ounces

Almost nothing a distributor sells you has a legal definition. Bread does, and the definition is more specific than anybody expects.

21 CFR 136.3 sets it out: the standardized bakery products in that part weigh half a pound or more per unit after cooling when they are called bread, and less than half a pound when they are called rolls or buns. That is the whole distinction. A unit of the identical dough, identical formula and identical bake is bread at eight ounces and a roll at seven and a half.

The rest of Part 136 is equally literal. Section 136.110 requires bread, rolls and buns to contain not less than 62 percent total solids, determined by a method the regulation names. Section 136.180 defines whole wheat bread and prohibits the use of white flour in it, which is worth knowing because a great many things sold as whole wheat are not covered by that section at all.

For a buyer the consequence is narrow and useful. The name on your supplier's case and on its invoice is a regulated term when the product is one of the standardized ones, and the name on your own menu is not. If a spec says bread and the unit weight says otherwise, that is a question worth asking, and it has a defined answer rather than a matter of opinion.

It also explains a persistent confusion about pricing. Buying by unit rather than by weight across a line that straddles eight ounces means buying across a regulatory boundary, and two suppliers can both be accurate and not be comparable. Our Baltimore wholesale bakeries page lists houses selling several products either side of that line.

Federal law defines bread in six sections and says nothing about a croissant

The striking thing about the standards of identity is not what they cover. It is how little they cover, and how visible the edge is.

Part 136, bakery products, has six sections. Part 137, cereal flours and related products, has thirty. Between them they define bread, rolls, buns, enriched bread, milk bread, raisin bread, whole wheat bread, flour, bromated flour, enriched flour, whole wheat flour, semolina, corn meal and farina. They do not define the croissant, the bagel, the tortilla, the cake, the muffin or the doughnut. Those are not loosely defined. They have no federal definition at all.

Read that against what this trade actually sells and the split runs down the middle of the aisle. Of the 176 suppliers on this page, a majority carry bread in their own product categories and nearly as many carry pastry. Roughly half of the category has a federal definition behind the words on the case and roughly half has nothing but the supplier's own description.

This is the cleanest illustration in the directory of something that is true more widely: a specification is only as good as whatever is underneath the word. Where a standard of identity exists, the word does work on its own. Where none exists, the word does no work at all, and what protects you is the spec sheet.

It is also why a tortilla house and a bread house are not variations on one business. Our Dallas tortilla trade page covers a supply base built almost entirely on products with no federal definition, and our Philadelphia bread houses page covers one built largely on products that have one.

MetroVerifiedDeliverShip outWalk inPublish a year
DallasTX30284515
HoustonTX26233617
New YorkNY242381615
Los AngelesCA2317097
MiamiFL2222889
AtlantaGA19153107
BaltimoreMD1717128
PhiladelphiaPA159136

Counts of the bakery suppliers we have verified in each metro, from what each company publishes about itself. They are not a count of the companies trading there, and a metro with more rows has been researched longer rather than being better supplied.

Whether a bakery is a distributor is a federal question with a dollar answer

The small bakery you are about to call and the wholesale house down the road may be different kinds of regulated entity, and the thing that separates them is not size. It is the sales mix, and the federal government defines it.

Under 21 CFR 1.227, a retail food establishment is one whose annual food sales direct to consumers exceed its annual food sales to all other buyers. The same definition is explicit that consumers does not include businesses. A retail food establishment does not register with FDA as a food facility under 21 CFR 1.226, so the bakery that sells mostly over its own counter is outside the registration scheme and the one that sells mostly to restaurants is inside it.

There is a second threshold underneath that one. Under 21 CFR 117.3 a qualified facility is, broadly, one with under $500,000 in total annual food sales where the majority goes to qualified end-users such as restaurants within 275 miles, or one with under $1,000,000 in total food sales, and for such a facility the preventive-controls subparts fall away in favor of modified requirements.

None of that is a quality judgment and it should not be read as one. A bakery below the line is not less careful and a bakery above it is not more so. What it changes is what documentation exists to be asked for, which matters when you need a spec sheet or an allergen statement rather than a conversation.

The practical use is in knowing which question to ask. Asking a counter bakery for its facility registration number is asking for something it is not required to have. Asking a wholesale house the same question is reasonable, and so is asking which side of these definitions it sits on, because it will know.

The ingredient federal law names in your bread is banned in one state from 2027

This is the most actionable thing on the page and it comes down to one question you can ask a bread supplier this week.

Federal law permits potassium bromate in bread by name. 21 CFR 136.110(c) lists the optional ingredients, and among them are potassium bromate, calcium bromate, potassium iodate, calcium iodate and azodicarbonamide, at stated limits. 21 CFR 137.155 goes further and gives bromated flour its own standard of identity. None of those is banned federally, and describing them that way is simply wrong.

Two states have decided otherwise, and both dates are in the future as this is written. California's AB 418 bans potassium bromate from manufacture, sale, delivery, distribution and holding from 1 January 2027, and the inclusion of distribution and holding in that list is what brings a distributor inside it rather than only a baker. Texas section 431.0815 puts bleached flour, bromated flour, potassium bromate, calcium bromate, azodicarbonamide, DATEM, partially hydrogenated oil, potassium iodate and sodium stearyl fumarate on a warning-label list from 1 January 2027, with a penalty of up to $50,000 a day, and it exempts restaurants and retail establishments by name.

Read those two together and the shape is the same in both: the duty lands on the manufacturer and the distributor, not on the kitchen. Two of the states this directory lists bakery suppliers in have now decided the question matters, and a supplier trading in either will have had to answer it.

So the question is: is the flour bromated, and is it bleached. One of our own New York bakery listings already volunteers the answer, its copy stating that the flour is unbleached and unbromated, and that was captured from the company long before anybody looked at a statute. A supplier that has thought about this will tell you without being pressed. One thing to keep separate: partially hydrogenated oil is a different case, because FDA revoked its GRAS status and the last compliance date passed on 1 January 2021, and it still appears on the Texas list.

The spec sheet is the only thing between your menu and a recall

FDA names bakery first among the food categories where undeclared allergens cause recalls, and the allergen most often involved is wheat. That is unsurprising in a category built on flour, and it is the reason the paperwork matters more here than a buyer might assume.

The sesame story is the one worth knowing, because the outcome was the opposite of the intention. When the FASTER Act added sesame as the ninth major food allergen, the response from part of the industry was not to keep sesame out of bakery products. It was to add it, so that a blanket label would be accurate, and both an FDA Commissioner's own statement and the agency's Food Code factsheet record that happening. A rule written to protect people with a sesame allergy made some bakery products less available to them.

The obligations then chain in a way that ends at your supplier. Section 343(w) of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act puts the allergen labeling duty on the packaged product. Food Code 3-602.12 puts a written-notification duty on a food establishment for unpackaged food offered to consumers. A restaurant serving bread out of a basket has that second duty and cannot discharge it from anything except what its supplier told it.

What our own data supports here is modest and worth stating as such. Thirteen of the suppliers on this page advertise gluten-free products in their own categories and eight advertise kosher, which means most do not, and nothing in this directory records whether any of them holds a particular certification. Those are things to ask, not things to assume from a listing.

The reasonable ask of a wholesale bakery is a spec sheet naming the allergens, and it is an ordinary request rather than an imposition. A house selling into restaurants will have one. A counter bakery selling you a few dozen rolls as a favor may not, and that is a real difference between the two kinds of supplier rather than a failing of either.

Two different businesses answer to this name, and the split is regional

Search for bakery distributors and most of what comes back is companies that sell flour, mixes, fillings and equipment to bakers rather than companies that sell baked goods to kitchens. Both are correctly described by the phrase. Neither is a substitute for the other, and it is the one ambiguity in this word that costs a buyer time.

Reading the 176 rows on this page in September 2026, about one in six is an ingredient and supplies house rather than a baker, with a handful selling both. The column on the list above says which each one is, read from its own product categories.

The distribution of those houses across metros is the part no city page can see, and it is lopsided rather than even. In our Texas and Georgia rows the ingredient side is roughly a third of the supply base; in our Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia rows it is essentially absent, and those metros' bakery trades are made of bakers. That is a fact about which companies we verified in each city rather than a census of those cities, but the gap is too wide to be an artifact.

Neither half tells you much about the other. An ingredient house with a deep chocolate and fillings book is no use if you want bread delivered at five in the morning, and a bread route is no use if you are the one baking. Our Los Angeles wholesale bakeries page and our Atlanta bakery suppliers page each carry both kinds, listed side by side, and the difference is not always obvious from a company name.

The rule of thumb that survives contact with this list: decide first whether you are buying a finished product or an input, and only then compare suppliers. They are two markets sharing one phrase.

1

Ask whether the flour is bromated or bleached

Federal law permits bromate in bread by name. California bans it from 2027 and Texas requires a warning label from 2027, and in both the duty sits on the manufacturer and distributor rather than the kitchen.

2

Ask for the allergen spec sheet, not a verbal answer

Bakery is the category FDA names first for undeclared allergen recalls. A restaurant's own notification duty for unpackaged food can only be met from what the supplier documented.

3

Check the unit weight against the word on the invoice

Bread and roll are defined terms separated by eight ounces after cooling. Two quotes described differently may be the same product, or the same word may cover two different ones.

4

Work out whether you want a baker or an ingredient house first

About one in six of the suppliers here sells to bakers rather than to kitchens, and the proportion varies sharply between metros. Comparing across the two is comparing two markets.

Unfiltered

What operators say about buying bakery wholesale

24 comments quoted verbatim from public threads, gathered for this page from national trade forums rather than reused from a city page.

r/KitchenConfidential8 points
Week old frozen bread is the same as day old frozen bread if you freeze it fresh. Frozen bread can be good if done right, just not as good. There’s also things you can do to make the bread keep great for a day or two if that’s the goal. Different breads have different properties. A good rugbrod is good for a week. A baguette will stale by end of day. A well made sourdough with a tangzhong will make great sandwiches for a few days. A slightly more acidic starter helps here (but isn’t always ideal for the bread otherwise…). That being said, yes, fresh bread is the way to go if you can make it work. I’ve made a lot of bread for a lot of bakeries. Some have done wholesale and had to take these things into consideration.
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r/barista7 points
even if you don't have much connection with the owner, maybe try to do the math on how much buying for your current supplier is costing you vs to the cost of paying someone extra/hiring someone to bake themselves and sell things that way. present it to them logically or maybe bring it up to someone whos a little more "in" with the owner and see if they think they'll be open to it. we bake in house but consist quality control and hygiene issues would be grounds for firing our baker, no need to keep with this supplier if they're delivering subpar products and high prices.
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r/KitchenConfidential3 points
Even adding in labor and cleaning, it’s still much cheaper to make it in house. Wholesale price for plain 1/2 sheets of focaccia is between $4-6 dollars.
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r/restaurantowners3 points
In that case, I would just call your suppliers and ask for a product list of "par-baked" products. You'll find plenty that you'll like.
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r/restaurantowners2 points
I use a par baked sourdough roll for my deli and honestly they taste better than what I can get delivered fresh. Very happy with the quality.
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r/cafe1 points
Pretty difficult, requires very early morning hours to have things fresh and ready for open. I’m very lucky because I have found reliable staff now, but if you are planning on doing it on your own you will burn out quickly. We are a bakery/cafe so the baked goods are pretty important and good sellers since there’s a lot of variety. I do have a few nice items (croissants, danishes) that I buy frozen from a distributor and we bake each morning, but 90% is made in house. I check the reviews of our competition (coffee shops) who just use the frozen, bake in house items from the distributors and people seem to like those pastries too. There are a lot of options these days. I will say the breakfast sandwiches we make are more profitable, we don’t make the bagels in house to save on labor, we go through a lot, so it’s fairly easy profit. On busy days we might sell 200 breakfast sandwiches. When I am working I focus on the breakfast. We also do lunch, not quite as busy, but even easier since there’s no cooking eggs. I think you’re missing a big market skipping meals, but I guess it depends on what other cafes in your town are offering.
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Pulled from 535 threads and 7,050 comments across r/KitchenConfidential, r/restaurantowners, r/barista, r/cafe, r/restaurateur, r/restaurant, r/smallbusiness and r/Entrepreneur, collected in September 2026 and quoted unedited. One pair here is deliberate: two comments give opposite verdicts on buying a bread route, and they sit together because a single unanswered verdict on somebody's livelihood is not what this section is for. Its own corpus: no comment here appears on any other page of this site. Comments are unedited and link back to the original thread. They are individual experiences, not evidence about any distributor in general, and we deliberately do not aggregate them into a score.

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Questions

Bakery distributors: common questions

What is a bakery distributor?

The phrase covers two different businesses. One bakes bread, rolls and pastry and delivers them to restaurants, cafes and stores. The other sells flour, mixes, fillings, chocolate, packaging and equipment to bakers. Nationally the search results for the term are dominated by the second kind, which surprises most buyers looking for the first. Each row on this page says which it is, read from the company's own product categories.

What is the legal difference between bread and a roll?

Weight, and nothing else. 21 CFR 136.3 provides that the standardized bakery products in that part are called bread when they weigh half a pound or more per unit after cooling, and rolls or buns when they weigh less. The same dough and the same bake can be either. The standards also require bread, rolls and buns to contain not less than 62 percent total solids, and separately prohibit white flour in anything labeled whole wheat bread.

Is there a federal standard for croissants, bagels or tortillas?

No. Part 136 of the regulations, which covers bakery products, runs to six sections and defines bread, rolls, buns, enriched bread, milk bread, raisin bread and whole wheat bread. Part 137 defines flours. Croissants, bagels, tortillas, cakes, muffins and doughnuts have no federal definition at all, so for those the words on the case carry only whatever the supplier's own specification says.

Is potassium bromate banned in the United States?

Not federally. 21 CFR 136.110(c) permits potassium bromate, calcium bromate, potassium iodate, calcium iodate and azodicarbonamide in bread at stated limits, and bromated flour has its own standard of identity at 21 CFR 137.155. California's AB 418 bans potassium bromate from manufacture, sale, delivery, distribution and holding from 1 January 2027, and Texas requires a warning label on a list including bromated and bleached flour from the same date. Both are future dates and both bind manufacturers and distributors rather than restaurants.

When does a bakery count as a distributor rather than a shop?

When more of its food sales go to businesses than direct to consumers. 21 CFR 1.227 defines a retail food establishment by that test and states that consumers does not include businesses, and such an establishment does not register with FDA as a food facility. A separate threshold at 21 CFR 117.3 treats a facility under $500,000 in food sales selling mostly to restaurants within 275 miles, or under $1,000,000 in total, as a qualified facility with modified requirements. It is about the sales mix, not the size of the building.

What should I ask a wholesale bakery about allergens?

Ask for a spec sheet naming the allergens rather than a verbal assurance, and ask specifically about sesame. FDA names bakery first among categories with undeclared allergen recalls, and wheat is the allergen most often involved. When sesame became the ninth major allergen, part of the industry responded by adding it to products so a blanket label would be accurate, which FDA has itself recorded. A restaurant's own written-notification duty for unpackaged food under the Food Code can only be met from what the supplier documented.

Is bakery covered by the FSMA traceability rule?

No. Bakery products do not appear on FDA's Food Traceability List, so the recordkeeping rule that applies to leafy greens, soft cheeses, shell eggs and certain other foods does not reach this category. That is worth knowing mainly because the rule is widely discussed and a supplier citing it as a reason for anything in a bakery context is citing something that does not apply.

How many bakery distributors are there in the United States?

Nobody publishes a count, and no federal register would support one: a wholesale bakery registers as a food facility, but so does every other kind of food facility, and the register is not public. The American Bakers Association publishes industry figures, and they are a trade body's own claim rather than a government statistic. This page lists 176 suppliers verified from their own published sources across 8 metros, which is a documented subset rather than an estimate.