When Lane’s Bakery closed in 2023 after 69 years, “that left a lot of people sad,” said Kristie Maurer, owner and founder of the newly opened Maurer’s Urban Market in South Madison, Wisconsin.
The beloved bakery has since been revived, but not in South Madison and not as a storefront. Tim Lee and Christina Sutherland, co-owners of catering company Innovation Eats, brought Lane’s back as a wholesale bakery supplier operating from a facility in a Middleton business park, a few miles outside South Madison. The bakery offers limited retail hours – early morning to early afternoon Monday through Friday – with founding family members Chuck and Becky Lane still involved in production and training, as the Cap Times reported back in March.
Now, through a partnership with the bakery’s new owners, Maurer’s Urban Market is bringing Lane’s classics – including its Wisconsin Kringle and layer cakes – back to the neighborhood the bakery left.
“We’re excited to be able to allow people to come here and pick them up when they don’t necessarily want to go all the way to the outskirts of town,” Maurer said.
For the cakes Maurer’s sells, Lane’s produces the base cakes and then Maurer’s bakery manager decorates them in-store.
“It’s a great way to reduce the labor and the specialization that comes with some of these high perishable items,” Maurer said. “We’re able to utilize their production facility and their ability to make really delicious cakes, and then we finish them off, which allows us to reduce labor and reduce our square footage” that’s needed for production.
Maurer, who opened the 25,000-square-foot store at 801 Cedar St. on Oct. 10, said local partnerships are standard practice for stores like hers: “I think independent retailers in general are great about the local connection.”
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