WORDS Tara Crutchfield
PHOTOGRAPH Amy Sexson
Honeycomb Bread Bakers You’ve had their warm bagels at N+1 and lined up for their country sourdough at the farmers market, but soon you will have more opportunities to enjoy Honeycomb Bread Bakers. The bee brand bakeshop is expected to open in Winter Haven later this month.
Bread should also come from a brand you trust and believe in. “When people see the little gold bee, it should have a resonance or a meaning.” Even before he genuinely knew he wanted to be a baker, Vickers envisioned a bakery called Honeycomb as a kid. “I’ve always had this affinity with bees as a symbology, […] they represent a place where the natural, wild world meets the more rigorous and architectural world which as an aesthetic, I’ve always really liked,” he said.
Benjamin Vickers thought he’d go to college for English Lit and become a “bookish academic” type. His hobby of home baking for his friends and family slowly took center stage. He called his parents one day and said, “I’m going to New York for culinary school, guys.” He was accepted into the Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York for a slot opening three weeks later. “It was a whirlwind starting out, but I haven’t looked back since,” said Vickers. Benjamin did his externship at Manhattan bakery, Dominique Ansel. He was even part of the team that brought into being the popular croissant, donut hybrid – the cronut.
“With our bread, for example, I love the wild and rustic – it is what it is, but also, we do a lot to make it have a beautiful ear and a nice golden crust, and it’s a certain shape, and everything is precisely measured. When those two things meet, I think that’s a nice sense of beauty,” he said. “Also, Honeycomb in bakery parlance, when you slice a loaf of bread, and you see that whirl pattern of air bubbles – bakers call that the honeycomb. Whenever it’s properly fermented, it should be a nice open honeycomb.”
After graduation, he was invited to work at a high-end catering service in Ithaca, New York. The business catered many of the galas and banquets for nearby Cornell University. The company didn’t have a pastry or dessert program at the time Vickers joined them. Fresh out of culinary school, he stepped up to help them build one from the ground up. Initially, he was catering weddings and banquets. Understanding that dessert and cakes were the most in-demand pastry jobs, he knew he wanted to be a bread baker. He noted that the rest of his journey was “carving out that career.”
It was essential for Vickers to pay homage to the tradition of bread baking. According to Vickers, the version of bread that Honeycomb produces is only slightly modernized from the ancient Greeks. “What I love about us being one tiny piece of that long timeline is that it’s not necessarily about reinventing the wheel,” he said. He isn’t looking for a gimmick. He wants to do his part to make the simple staples incrementally better over time – a blip in bread’s evolution.
The next stop in his bread baking journey led him into the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains at world-renowned Blackberry Farm in Maryville, TN. There, he was able to foray from desserts into bread. Vickers remembered fondly, “We would bake bread all night, [...] [and we] would go down these twisting paths through the farmlands to deliver to all the houses and restaurants. You’d see the sun rising over the mountains and all the sheep as you’re driving your little bread cart.”
Honeycomb’s most popular items are their Country Sourdough, followed by their Wild Maine Blueberry Muffin. Among the many things that make his muffins stand out are the tiny Maine wild blueberries he uses. He said they grow wild in bushes on the sides of the road there. They are notably smaller than Florida’s plump blueberries that tend to hold more water. These berries offer a sweet, tart, “punch of flavor,” says the baker. “We have to bend over backward to get these berries, but it is so worth it.”
Vickers got his next pastry gig by happenstance while out to dinner at Nineteen61. Chef Marcos needed a pastry chef, and there was Vickers. He became the pastry chef for Chef Marcos and worked for about two and a half years. Vickers started his cottage food business making bread, Honeycomb Bread Bakers, in February 2018, though Honeycomb’s official birthday is October of that year. He joined Catapult and began selling at the Lakeland Downtown Farmers Curb Market a month later.
Honeycomb continues to sell at the Downtown Lakeland Farmers Curb Market and the Winter Haven Farmers Market, at which he was a debut vendor in January 2020. In addition to various wholesale locations, Vickers opened a Bay Street bakery in Lakeland in the Fall of 2019. Due to a real estate dispute, the bakery could not renew the lease and closed the storefront in April 2020.
“Our first day was one loaf of bread to Concord,” Vickers said. Word spread, and the baker began to realize just how much of a need there was for quality bread from an honest source. “That’s one of the things that I’m trying to cultivate – a brand on one hand that is really accessible because bread should be humble. It shouldn’t be too expensive or unattainable. It should be easy to find and delicious and nutritious and fill your belly,” said Vickers.
Vickers described his reception in Winter Haven as ‘extremely warm’ with folks lining up every Saturday at the Winter Haven Farmers Market for his baked goods. Along with the name recognition from Winter Haven partners such as N+1 Coffee and Haven Coffee Roasters who sell or utilize Honeycomb products, Honeycomb fills a niche for this side of the county. Whereas most - CONTINUED ON PAGE 46 -
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