This Garden City bakery has built a steady following since 1992. Now it’s been sold
An artisan bread bakery from Ketchum quietly entered the Treasure Valley recently and bought a Garden City bakery.
Bigwood Bread, which already supplied its breads to a number of Boise-area grocery stores and restaurants, is the new owner of Wildflour Bakery.
Already, the company is looking to expand its Treasure Valley footprint. Co-owner George Golleher told the Idaho Statesman in a phone interview that he’s looking for a building to bake bread for area stores and restaurants.
“We’re looking for real estate now,” Golleher said. “We’ll probably have to build something in the next 12 to 18 months.”
The family-owned company bought Wildflour — which specializes in specialty breads such as pumpkin walnut and sour cream blueberry, as well as cakes, cookies and scones — in March, Golleher said.
“We had seen Wildflour and their products down there for years,” Golleher said. “They have a great reputation, like we do, and when the business came up for sale, we were interested.”
Wildflour was founded in 1992 by Boise resident Mary Cogswell, who originally baked cookies and other treats from her home kitchen. She later expanded into the garage of her North End house before moving into a newly built bakery at 304 E. 42nd St. six years ago.
Cogswell got her start at age 22 selling her giant-size cookies, crunchy on the outside yet soft on the inside, at the Boise Co-Op, where she now serves as president and treasurer of its board of directors. Later, they could be found at the Co-Op’s second store, in Meridian, at Whole Foods in Boise, and in WinCo stores in Boise and Eagle.
Cogswell sold Wildflour in February 2020, “two weeks before the shutdown and any understanding of what was coming with COVID. I was just ready to retire,” Cogswell said by email.
Buyer Kraig Nagy, in turn, has sold Wildflour to Bigwood Bread, and stayed on to manage the Garden City operation, which has about a dozen employees.
“I’m really pleased to see it fall into good hands,” Cogswell said.
Since acquiring Wildflour, Bigwood Bread has remodeled one of its two Ketchum cafes and renamed it Wildflour Café Coffee Bakery! It’s located at 380 N. East Ave.
“It made a lot of sense to rebrand the downtown restaurant as Wildflour and introduce it with a whole new menu, basically all the Wildflour items, cakes and scones and cookies and breads,” Golleher said. “All the items they bake in Boise, we bring up here fresh daily.”
Bigwood Bread, which was founded in 1997 and uses sourdough starter that originated in France, has 85 employees. Golleher’s family has owned it since 2005.
Its breads, dinner rolls, bagels and pastries are distributed to stores and restaurants throughout Idaho, Utah, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota and South Dakota. They can be found in the Treasure Valley at Albertsons stores and the Boise Co-op.
“We even ship bagels to New York, if you can believe that,” Golleher said, laughing.
Products get shipped mostly through Albertsons and Sysco, a wholesale restaurant supplier, he said. Previously, Bigwood used its own trucks to bring its products to Boise.
Wildflour, he said, gives his company great added potential.
“We’re very excited to own the business,” Golleher said. “And we will continue to develop it and build it, probably at a much faster level than has been built in the past.”
This story was originally published June 30, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
