When we announced Golden Grain would be closing, we were unprepared for the response our family and the bakery staff would receive from the community.
The support received was awesome, absolutely over the top and incredibly warming.
When the first Andlar, Peter, and his partner, Joseph Mihelchic, started this business back in 1932, one has to wonder if they knew what a relationship would build up between Golden Grain and this community and region or how long it would last.
Bread is a staple for families. It’s something sacred and we have been honoured to earn the trust of so many families and restaurants and homes to have our breads and other products welcomed around their tables and incorporated into their meals, for generations.
We’re enormously proud to have served Sudbury, from a downtown location and to have done so in a manner that saw our family and our staff do so in a face-to-face way with our patrons, so many of whom have become like relatives to us.
It has been difficult, emotional and wonderful to receive so many testimonials and stories from our customers in the past several weeks about how important our products and our team have been in their lives.
We’ve been through a lot with Sudbury. We’ve had our doors open during ugly labour disputes, through huge changes in our downtown core, through COVID-19 and so much more.
And, we’ve been honoured to greet customers each day we’ve opened those doors.
We’ve also been grateful to have helped many great organizations, like the soup kitchen and Elgin Street Mission and those citizens they support, to assist in making this community stronger.
There is so much history in Golden Grain Bakery. It has seen countless great conversations and legions of families bring successive generations to visit and shop at our front store area.
As we reflect on the legacy of the bakery, we’re also so appreciative of the dozens of restaurants and other businesses that have featured our products and supported us in our work.
Baking is a labour. Doing so as a business, requires a lot of care and effort. We never could have been in this line of work, for so long, without our incredibly dedicated staff, those with us in the past and those with us until the end. Of course, we also could not have operated Golden Grain without such a loyal customer following as well.
So, thank you to all those who supported Golden Grain. We’re unsure what the future holds for us but we’re so grateful for the run our business enjoyed, the people we connected with and the relationship we’ve enjoyed with the people of this community.
John and David Andlar, on behalf of the owners of Golden Grain Bakery, the Andlar family.
You can read about the final baking day at Golden Grain in a story by Heidi Ulrichsen here. As well, a reader wrote in a tribute to the iconic local bakery, which you can read here.
