Behind the scenes of huge KC bakery whose sweets supply coffee shops across the metro
By Natalie Wallington,
24 days ago
Inside Look is a Star series that takes our readers behind the scenes of some of the most well-known and not-so-well-known places and events in Kansas City. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email our journalists at InsideLook@kcstar.com.
Scratch KC is the most prolific bakery in Kansas City that you may never have heard of.
From the outside, Scratch’s headquarters is an unassuming brick building on an industrial block in North Kansas City. But inside, it’s a whirlwind of delicious activity, with dozens of bakers in hairnets and aprons bustling around giant mixers, dough rollers, prep tables and a funnel-shaped batter extruder.
The operation looks enormous to an outsider. But to the bakery’s CEO, Brad Killen, it’s more like a before photo compared to the massive expansion he has planned for the coming years.
“We’ll be moving out of this space in the next 18 to 24 months,” he said. “We keep rearranging, because we’re growing in massive, massive ways.”
The bakery currently sends out around 40,000 pastry items every day — but Killen is thinking even bigger.
He’s in talks with a yet-undisclosed partner in St. Louis to produce cheesecakes and the city’s signature gooey butter cakes by January 2025.
Packages of protein balls — the bakery’s most popular item — may soon hit grocery shelves around the Midwest.
And every year, customers inundate the business with requests for whole pies around the holidays and fresh bread year-round.
Scratch started in 2013 as a solution to what Killen saw as a problem in Kansas City’s coffee shop community: Nobody was selling really good cookies.
Killen wasn’t much of a home baker — “I really only made banana bread,” he says with a laugh — but he quickly advanced from baking at Opera House Cafe & Food Emporium in the River Market to baking in the evenings for wholesale clients out of SoHo Cafe’s kitchens downtown.
Eventually he and his colleagues bought SoHo Cafe’s space, and have been growing ever since into the massive wholesale operation they run today in the Northland. The bakery now offers over 100 different items to a massive list of wholesale clients, and is quickly expanding its shipping footprint beyond just the Kansas City metro.
Currently, Scratch employs three drivers who work eight-hour overnight shifts delivering pastries to wholesale clients around the metro. But new partnerships with major food distributors are expanding that capacity to a much larger area.
“Our next phase is going to be heavily focused on restaurants, grocery markets, a lot of sports stadiums — not even just in Kansas City, but all around — just because of our shipping capabilities,” he said.
On a recent tour of the bakery’s North Kansas City facility, one worker placed sticks of marzipan on long dough triangles waiting to be rolled into almond croissants.
Another piped a long squiggle of blue icing on top of the bakery’s well-known homemade pop-tarts — which they now have to call “Scratch-tarts” after a sternly worded email from Kellogg’s.
Inside a giant oven, trays of pumpkin cream cheese muffins revolved Ferris wheel-style on giant racks.
Outside another oven, hundreds of bacon strips destined for breakfast sandwiches and salads glistened as they cooled in wheeled towers stacked with baking sheets.
Although Killen now runs the business side of the operation, he still knows how to make everything the bakery produces — and exactly how each item should look and taste when it heads out the door. As we passed a cluster of cooling racks, he pulled aside a baker to point out the uneven icing on a tray of rainbow-sprinkled “Scratch-tarts.”
“Let’s get that fixed,” he said.
The pastries are part of a massive order for 20,000 tarts. (We won’t ruin the surprise, but a local hospital system plans to soon gift a pastry to every one of its employees.)
It’s the largest custom order the bakery has ever filled. But as he shops around for buildings up to five times the size of Scratch’s current facility, Killen envisions a day when orders like this one will be commonplace.
“Our entire front office staff is creating a game plan for how to increase what we’re doing from 40,000 items a day to hundreds of thousands of items a day that will leave our facility,” he said.
But amidst it all, he plans to keep an eagle eye on the quality control that has helped make the bakery so popular.
“The biggest thing is that Scratch is us, and Scratch is from Kansas City,” he said. “We’re trying to become that household name.”
Inside Look takes you behind the scenes of fascinating places all around Kansas City. Where should we go next? Let the Service Journalism team know at kcq@kcstar.com .
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Lucille Taylor-Rhoades
23d ago
Awesome! Thank you ALL for your hard work and dedication to making what seems to be amazing pastries and such!
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