Crust Vegan Bakery opens in East Falls

Frosted vegan pop-tarts, swirls of dairy-free soft serve, and meatless bacon-egg-and-cheese croissants have officially arrived in East Falls.

Crust Vegan Bakery opened Thursday at the intersection of Ridge and Midvale Avenues, just off Kelly Drive. The move from its two-space operation in Manayunk to a larger location enabled the confectionery to consolidate its retail storefront and commercial kitchen, said owner Meagan Benz.

Benz spent more than nine months transforming a 3,000-square-foot office along the Schuylkill River into what she called a “cake-like retail space” with baby-pink walls piped with white paint and ceiling tiles modeled after Lambeth-style cake trims. Light from oversized front-facing windows dapple a trio of pastry cases filled with batches of all-vegan sweets, from cheesecake slices and cinnamon buns to black-and-white cookies and crumb-coated coffee cakes. Baristas-slash-bakers pull espresso shots and whisk matcha for lattes sweetened with house-made syrups.

“I wanted to create a place where people think, ‘Oh, I can get everything I need there,’” Benz said.

Benz, who went vegan in 2009 while a freshman at University of North Carolina Greensboro, launched Crust in 2015 as a wholesale vegan bakery out of a commissary kitchen at 220 Krams Ave. in Manayunk. When custom cake and wholesale orders dried up almost overnight in 2020, she and then-co-owner Shannon Roche opened their storefront at 4409 Main St. as a way to keep on staff they would’ve otherwise had to lay off during the pandemic, a move Benz said ended up making Crust profitable enough to bring on more employees.

“Retail is where we make more money,” said Benz, 35.

Now, the business has outgrown the satellite storefront that saved it.

Splitting time and staff between the retail space and commercial kitchen proved logistically challenging. Benz said Crust’s storefront manager wound up spending most of her time ferrying pastries between locations, a half-mile journey that led to lots of wasted product.

“It was a really short distance, but people drive crazy —someone slams on the brakes in front of us and we’re done for,” Benz said. “We had many times where things would tip over and we’d have to determine if it was still usable.”

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At Crust’s new location, a sparse yet cozy cafe area with two tables and a large, lived-in green couch bleeds into the kitchen, where staff pivot from packaging cakes and swirling soft-serve cones to frosting pop-tarts. The streamlined setup has allowed Benz to dream big. Already on her wish list for the future: a separate convection oven for made-to-order breakfast sandwiches, a backroom for cake-decorating classes, and more room for colorful displays.

Benz spent two years looking for the right location, unwilling to compromise on a short list of non-negotiables. Most of the bakery’s 15-member team live in Northwest Philly, she said, so the new space needed to remain in the area while being more transit-accessible.

Crust’s new location sits at the convergence of five bus lines. It also will leave Manayunk without a pastry specialist when Crust’s former commercial-kitchen neighbor Flakely decamps for Bryn Mawr in February.

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Crust’s move also marks the launch of its first-ever coffee program, headed by cake decorator-turned-beverage coordinator Jordan Fuchs.

The bakery will serve a short but sweet menu of coffee and tea drinks, with beans and matcha sourced from Rise Up Coffee, a fair-trade roaster based in Maryland. Crust makes its own vanilla and mocha coffee syrups, and Fuchs has plans for a rotating menu of seasonal additions. The signature drink will be a black sesame latte, Fuchs said, and she’s currently perfecting a chocolate-covered strawberry latte in time for Valentine’s Day.

Crust will also continue selling two thing Benz said many of her vegan customers desperately miss from their dairy-consuming days: soft-serve ice cream and hulking breakfast sandwiches.

Benz’s breakfast sandwiches are served on flaky vegan croissants or thick biscuits, both made in-house, with Just Egg patties and seitan bacon that crisps up like the real thing.

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The bakery started offering non-dairy soft serve year-round in 2023, Benz said, as a way to satiate her own craving. Crust uses a vanilla base made with pea protein and then adds mix-ins for flavors that rotate every two weeks. The ice cream is silky, and curls out of the machine with the flourish of a Dairy Queen swirl. It’s sweet, but doesn’t quite capture the essence of its full-dairy counterpart; Benz said that’s the point.

“If our ice cream doesn’t exactly taste like dairy ice cream, that’s OK,” she said. “I just want it to taste really good.”

Pastries are still the main event at Crust’s new location. The bakery’s staff make roughly 22 dozen pop-tarts a week, with some bakers spending a full eight-hour shift solely on rolling out dough, preparing fillings, and sealing the edges for baking. To make the process smother, Benz made a custom crimping tool that creates cartoonishly perfect hash marks. Her favorite flavor is the wild berry, a dead ringer for the purple-frosted Kellogg’s version.

Also on offer: slices of sweet potato, Oreo, blueberry lavender, and funfetti cheesecakes (gluten-free and vegan) that take up a pastry case’s entire top shelf. The secret to Benz’s recipe is Tofutti cream cheese, which is versatile enough to be customizable and easily whipped into a dairy-accurate texture.

“I make a lot of things because I want them, I miss them,” Benz said. “Then I hope other people do, too.”

Crust Vegan Bakery, 4200 Ridge Ave., Philadelphia, 215-298-9969. Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 8 a.m to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday.