The Grocery Store Bakery That Always Makes Its Bread From Scratch

A trip to the supermarket isn't always fun. You need paper towels, milk, dish detergents  — not nearly as exciting as shopping for, say, a designer handbag. But there's one thing that makes grocery shopping so much more bearable: When you're hit in the face with the delightful smells of freshly baked bread and rolls, and sometimes even cookies, wafting past the Frito display and in your direction. Such is the case at Publix.

That's because the Publix bakery is busy making bread right there in the store — from scratch — and you get to enjoy the flour of its labor. Some of its in-house baked bread products include the Italian five-grain, sourdough, French bread, baguettes, and hoagie rolls. The bakers take pride in producing fresh bread for customers daily. "I love making Publix Handcrafted breads. I love it," one worker posted on Facebook. "Yesterday I mixed five different flours to make, from scratch, 14 different products. Today I baked those products," another employee said.

Although Publix makes much of its bread from scratch within each store's bakery department, that's not the case for every item in its bakery. Some items, such as certain cookies (think Crumbl dupes), muffins, cupcakes, and breads, are made in a centrally located Publix bakery plant and then shipped either ready-to-eat (and sell) or as dough, ready to proof and bake fresh in each store. Either way, you're sure to find fresh, good-tasting bread and baked goods at every location.

In Publix's early days in the 1940s, it didn't have the great selection of baked goods that it has today, like the viral Dotcakes dessert dupe. Some items were baked in-store back then, but many came from various outside bakeries. Then, in 1950, a bakery in Lakeland, Florida, began regularly supplying bakery items to Publix stores, and the concept of a Publix-specific bakery quickly caught on.

In 1957, a new Publix location opened with a Publix bakery right nearby, and other stores soon followed with their own next-door bakeries. As time went on, the bakeries moved inside Publix stores, and every new store that opened had its own bakery department.

Publix's first centralized bakery plant opened in 1972 in Lakeland and still serves as one of its two main bakery facilities today (the other one is in Atlanta and opened in 2004). Lakeland's massive bakery workshop is 225,000 square feet and, according to Fox 13 Tampa Bay, is capable of cranking out 2,400 cookies per minute, along with 20,000 carrot bar cakes per week. In the course of about a year, the bakery can go through 500,000 pounds of blueberries, and in a week, 2 million pounds of flour. Both of these bakery plants are responsible for producing thousands of baked goods that Publix doesn't make in-store and the dough for thousands more.