At 3 a.m., while most of Iowa City is asleep, Colleen Brennan stands at her kitchen counter cutting coffee cake, with trays of croissants cooling behind her. The ovens have been running since noon the day before, and the house smells endlessly of butter and sugar.

By 6 a.m., Brennan and her partner, Erick Dole, will load their car and head to the Iowa City Farmers Market. By 7:30 a.m., they’ll be serving chocolate and almond croissants from behind an antique glass display case. By noon, they’ll be sold out.

Roughly 24 hours after they first turned on the ovens, they will finally go to bed.

For five years, Brennan and Dole have run Bread Worthy out of their home in Iowa City, baking through the night and selling at the farmers market, Daydrink Coffee, and through scheduled online preorders. But with the bakery selling out nearly every week, the kitchen has outgrown the house.

“My plan was always to run this business as long as we can until we run into that tipping point we just can’t solve anymore. In the beginning, it was like, ‘Oh, we need more refrigeration, let’s buy a new refrigerator.’ About two years ago, we ran into everything being a chokehold. There was no space to buy anything new,” Brennan said.

 Brennan said the demand eventually made it clear the home kitchen was no longer enough. The bakery is renovating 203 N. Linn St., formerly home to Goosetown Café and plans to open this summer. 

The storefront will employ five people — three in the kitchen and two in the front-of-house — and operate Thursday through Sunday. The couple has yet to set business hours. 

Originally from New Jersey, Brennan had always wanted to own her own business and cook, coming from a family that cooked, with her mom making every meal and her family hosting every holiday.

In her junior year of high school, she began finding recipes in magazines to make herself, specifically remembering making mozzarella tomato pasta and the excitement her family had trying it.

“I think just the aspect of being able to share food and see how happy it makes people is like when it was like, I would like to be a chef. And literally that night, I ran upstairs and was writing my application to go to culinary school. I think that’s when I was really like, I really like to do this,” Brennan said.

However, her parents were not totally supportive, recognizing the difficulties of the food industry.

“This is a really hard industry, and it’s low pay, horrible hours. You don’t often see your family. It’s not a great sustainable life, so they really tried to talk me out of it, and I actually ended up going to Penn State,” Brennan said.

Halfway through Brennan’s first semester at Penn State University, she realized that going to school for forensic science was “the worst idea.” Brennan then went to her counselor, ready to transfer, but discovered Penn State offered a bachelor’s degree in hotel, restaurant, and  institutional management.

During her time at Penn State, she studied abroad in Florence, Italy, making many friends and meeting Dole, her partner in business and in life. 

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Brennan laughed, describing her first few encounters with Dole and how, initially, they barely talked.

“We didn’t date while we were in Italy. We were in pastry class. There were only eight of us. I really made good friends with my friend Lauren and Jess. They were friends with Eric, and Eric and I didn’t talk very much,” Brennan said. “He was the only guy in the whole entire class. I remember our pastry chef kept trying to pair us up for things, and we would barely talk.”

A year later, with Brennan at the Culinary Institute of America, Brennan, Dole, and her friends from their time in Italy met back up in New York to see each other. Brennan said they “really clicked” and began dating long-distance.

Following Brennan’s graduation, the couple lived in various places, including New Jersey, Australia, and Chicago. Realizing they weren’t city people and wanting to live near family, the couple moved to Iowa City, where Dole is from.

“Iowa was more tempting because they had the cottage food law, so we could actually start the business in our home, because if we were to go to Jersey, we’d have to rent a kitchen and spend all of this money,” Brennan said.

According to Iowa State University’s small farm sustainability website, Iowa’s cottage food law allows for food that doesn’t require refrigeration and is shelf-stable to be sold directly to consumers from a home or farm without a license. 

Moving to Iowa City in 2019, Brennan and Dole planned to start selling at the farmers market the following year, and then the pandemic started.

Brennan said COVID-19 “destroyed” the food industry, making her and her partner question for the first time whether they really wanted to be in the industry anymore.

“We made the choice to go 100 percent, and so we quit our jobs,” Brennan said.

On May 1, 2021, Bread Worthy became a full-time vendor at the Iowa City Farmers Market, serving a variety of croissants, including chocolate and almond, as well as cinnamon and pecan rolls and cookies.

“I kept trying to tell myself this is really happening because it didn’t feel real,” Brennan said. “I was like, this should be like the most exciting day of my life. I’ll be honest, I didn’t feel like that. It was more like just trying to convince myself like this was actually happening.”

Iowa City resident Ariel Glassman went to Bread Worthy when it first came to the farmers market, initially attracted to the antique glass case they used to display their baked goods.

“We’re the kind of people like once we’ve tried it, we’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t really feel the need to go back,’ but we like this stuff so much that we can have it as many times as we’re able to buy it, and then we really love taking her things to our friends and sharing,” Glassman said.

David Stenerson runs Iowa City Baked Goods, selling baked goods out of his home, and has become friends with Brennan and Dole over the years, with them offering advice on running a business out of a house. Stenerson said one of the reasons why Bread Worthy is so successful is its consistency.

“Every time I have bought their coffee cake, it has been the same coffee cake I’ve ever had, and it never disappoints. They’re always trying little new things, but everything is so consistently good. I have not had a single thing that I didn’t like,” Stenerson said.

Looking forward, Brennan said she hopes to expand the menu with the increased space.

“We right now have only focused on pastries and baked goods. We’ve always wanted to make bread because it’s in our name,” Brennan said.

With a brick-and-mortar on North Linn Street, Brennan said she sees Bread Worthy joining the Northside’s tradition of locally owned gathering spots — places where customers don’t just grab food but build relationships.

“Northside itself has this amazing atmosphere, where each of those places is a gathering space,” Brennan said. “I just think we’re adding in a really cool bakery gathering space.”