New French Bakery is shutting down both of its Minneapolis production facilities, a move that will eliminate 166 jobs starting Dec. 29. The closures come just weeks after a Toronto-based company quietly picked up the two plants for a combined price under $2.5 million, far less than the bakery's wholesale operation once generated in annual sales.
The job losses, which will hit technicians, managers and sanitation employees, were disclosed in a letter sent to Minnesota officials, according to the Star Tribune. The two facilities set to close sit on 26th Avenue S. and Kasota Avenue in Minneapolis, both longtime hubs for a bakery that once supplied grocery stores and food-service companies across the country with artisan breads.
FGF Brands, a family-owned Canadian bakery company based in Toronto, bought the 26th Avenue site for $598,865 and the Kasota Avenue facility for roughly $1.9 million in September, per the same Star Tribune report. The company is known for owning the Stonefire brand, which makes naan bread and other products, and operates more than 30 facilities worldwide, according to a METRO Inc. announcement detailing an earlier FGF deal. That same announcement noted FGF also agreed to acquire Première Moisson Group's commercial bakery facility in Baie-D'Urfé for $90 million, underscoring the company's recent pace of acquisitions.
A Minneapolis Bakery's Long, Winding Ownership Road
New French Bakery's story began in 1995, when baker Peter Kelsey founded the company. By 2013, Kelsey had built it into a 300-employee operation generating millions in revenue, the report notes. But after struggling to borrow $6 million from banks to fund an additional production line, Kelsey sold the business that year to Arbor Investments for millions of dollars.
Ownership has shifted repeatedly since then. Arbor folded its baking businesses into Rise Baking Co. and sold that operation to Olympus Partners in 2018. Olympus later sold Rise Baking in 2024 to Platinum Equity and Butterfly for a deal potentially worth $2.5 billion, according to the Star Tribune's reporting. At the time of that sale, Minnesota-based Rise Baking had nearly 4,000 employees across 20 facilities.
Rise Baking then sold New French Bakery to the Canadian company in September 2026, the same month FGF Brands closed on the two Minneapolis properties. A Rise Baking spokeswoman said the company is committed to supporting affected employees through the transition and expressed gratitude for their dedication and contributions, the station's report states.
From Neighborhood Bread Bargain to Wholesale Giant
Before its various sales, New French Bakery had grown into a wholesale powerhouse, baking 3 million pounds of bread per month and grossing $40 million in annual sales, according to earlier Star Tribune coverage. That growth eventually came with a cost to local shoppers: Rise Baking discontinued the company's fresh-bread retail business to focus instead on wholesale frozen bread products, the same report noted.
Part of a Rougher Stretch for Minnesota Food Manufacturing
The coming layoffs land amid a tougher period for Minnesota's food-processing sector. Pearson's Candy Company shut down its 67-year-old St. Paul factory and laid off about 80 employees, citing rising production costs and higher prices for ingredients like chocolate that made the plant unsustainable, according to MPR News. Revol, which makes lettuce and greens in a greenhouse near Owatonna, has also drawn scrutiny after its executives postponed planned layoffs until at least Nov. 6, attributing the delay in a state filing to ongoing efforts to close a transaction that could keep the facility running.
Nationally, the backdrop looks different: food manufacturing employment recovered from a dip during 2020 to reach a record 1.77 million workers in 2025, according to a report cited by the Mesabi Tribune. That broader recovery offers little comfort to the 166 Minneapolis workers now facing a Dec. 29 layoff date at the plants where New French Bakery built its three-decade run.
