Meet Helene

By the Way Bakery began in 2010, when I gave up a 22-year career as a workaholic intellectual property and media attorney. After graduating from law school, I worked for NBC and Bloomberg, Reader’s Digest, and Audible.com. I loved practicing law, but I was done. I wanted to do something completely different.

My goal was to connect with my neighbors and bring more people to the table – literally. I had a hunch that people were eager to try gluten-free and dairy-free treats (which were far less common a decade ago). More than that, people were hungry for an authentic experience, something local and handmade.

So, with no formal training, I decided to open a bakery. The challenge was to create baked goods that were, without exception, worth a special trip. I refused to compromise. I needed everyone to be able to say, “This is delicious!’” without a qualification. As in, “By the way, that cookie you just ate was gluten-free, but you didn’t notice.” 

In my twenty-plus years as an attorney, I spent little time baking. Determined to exceed all expectations in my post-legal career, I invested the same focus, determination, and energy I had devoted to the law to winning cases in the kitchen. Extensive research and hundreds of experiments over the course of many months finally led to the first successful recipes. From there, I was unstoppable. 

Our First Location (and more)

I opened the first By the Way in my hometown of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York in 2011. The retail space was small, and the kitchen was even smaller — only 400 square feet. Nevertheless, I found myself — and my cookies — baked into the community. By the Way became a regular shop for the commuter in need of a muffin for the morning ride, a staple at birthday parties, and a favorite stop for children looking for an after-school treat.

I now oversee four retail shops. In addition to the By the Way Bakery in Hastings, there are two New York City locations: one on the Upper West Side and another across town on the Upper East Side and one in Greenwich, Connecticut. The company also has a burgeoning wholesale business. By the Way products are available in 100 Whole Foods from Northern New Jersey to Maine, 440-plus Sprout Farmers Markets across the country, and numerous other retail markets nationwide. And my wonderful team of bakers no longer bake out of a 400-square-foot kitchen. Instead, they practice their craft in a 16,000-square-foot state-of-the-art commissary, which opened in late 2016.

Our Bright Future

Sitting at my desk (the first desk I’d had since leaving the corporate world), I paused for a moment and thought, “I used to be a lawyer at Reader's Digest. If you had told me then that I’d be running a fast-growing company with at the time 65 (now 85) employees, a food company(!), just down the street from my old office, I’d have told you that you were crazy. Now, I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

- Helene