Sweetmore Bakeries Buys Fantasy Baking to Cover Both Coasts

Sweetmore Bakeries bought Fantasy Baking Co. on Aug. 25, taking a California plant as its sixth bakery and its first on the West Coast. The Chicago group, backed by Shore Capital Partners, did not disclose a price. Grocery and restaurant chains that already buy muffins in Ohio or pan dulce in Phoenix can now pull cookies and protein bars from Sylmar without adding a second baker.

Sweetmore Completes a Coast-to-Coast Bakery Map

In a statement that day, Sweetmore said it had completed an acquisition of Fantasy Baking Co., a private-label and branded sweet-goods bakery based in Sylmar, Calif. The plant is the group’s first on the West Coast and extends production across the Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest and West. Terms stayed private.

Sweetmore called the buy part of a plan to build a “coast-to-coast network for premium sweet baked goods,” and said it strengthens the company in cookies and baked bars. The group now counts nearly 500 employees and six plants. It sells into retail in-store bakery and foodservice, and also serves club and convenience stores. Products ship as frozen dough and batter, fully baked thaw-and-serve, and shelf-stable packs.

Chief executive David Veenstra said Fantasy “gives us a true West Coast manufacturing footprint and deeper category capabilities that strengthen our ability to serve customers’ various product needs nationwide.” Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP was legal advisor to Fantasy Baking, with Alantra, LLC as financial advisor. DLA Piper LLP advised Sweetmore. Brody Lynn, Sweetmore’s head of M&A, was listed as the deal contact, a sign the group keeps a dedicated buying team.

Just Food and Food Business News both filed the announcement the same week and both noted that the price was withheld. That silence is normal for a private sale. It also fits a deal that reads less like a one-off factory grab and more like the next add-on in a roll-up Shore has been running since 2019.

What Fantasy Baking Brings to Sweetmore

Fantasy Baking, long known in the trade as Fantasy Cookie, makes private-label and branded cookies, fruit-filled bars and dessert bars, and also supplies protein and breakfast bars, dry blends, and ice-cream ingredients and inclusions. The company is SQF-certified and runs an in-house R&D lab. Sweetmore said the range includes organic, high-protein, non-GMO, gluten-free and Kosher recipes, which it tied to better-for-you and functional snacking.

The bakery started in 1979 in a small building in San Fernando, according to its own history, making hand-decorated novelty cookies and gingerbread houses. It later bought tunnel ovens and moved into private label and co-packing. Hans Semder founded the shop; his sons Joe and Rich later ran the commercial plant. Russ Case, the current chief executive, was brought in after a 2016 private-equity buy and still leads the bakery.

A May 2023 feature in Baking Business, written when the company still traded as Fantasy Cookie, described an 85,000-square-foot operation with four lines for wirecut, rotary-moulded and sheeted cookies plus co-extruded, fruit-filled and baked bars. Package sizes ran from 1 oz to 20 oz, including in-store bakery tubs and club packs. Case told the magazine the plant used “real butter, cane sugar and not a lot of preservatives,” and called its bars “functional products that are nutritionally on-trend.”

FANTASY BAKING’S PRODUCT RANGE

• Cookies: Wirecut, rotary-moulded and sheeted cookies for store brands and smaller national lines.
• Filled and dessert bars: Fruit-filled and baked bars, with protein and breakfast bars on the same bench.
• Other formats: Dry blends plus ice-cream ingredients and inclusions for customers outside the cookie aisle.
• Diet claims: Organic, high-protein, non-GMO, gluten-free and Kosher recipes, per Sweetmore’s Aug. 25 release.
• Speed to market: In 2023, sales director Matt Cobb said a line extension or limited-time offer could move through the in-house lab in six to eight weeks; a brand-new item typically took five to six months.

Joe Rivera, then director of operations, said the bakery did not charge for lab work, a contrast with shops that bill $50,000 or $100,000 to write a recipe. A companion Baking Business piece that June said the plant had cut SKUs from about 200 to about 70 so it was no longer running some items once a year. Those 2023 figures are the last detailed public look at the floor; Sweetmore did not refresh plant size or SKU counts this week.

Fantasy Baking gives us a true West Coast manufacturing footprint and deeper category capabilities that strengthen our ability to serve customers’ various product needs nationwide. Between their R&D bench strength and their reach into better-for-you trends, this addition makes Sweetmore an even stronger strategic national partner.

David Veenstra, Chief Executive Officer, Sweetmore Bakeries, Aug. 25 statement

Case said the Fantasy team had spent “over 45 years” doing right by customers and that joining Sweetmore would give the bakery “access to scale and resources” to reach a broader audience. He did not discuss the seller or the price.

One Ohio Plant Became a Six-Bakery Network

Shore Capital first recapitalized Main Street Gourmet in September 2019. At that point the business was a single 50,000-square-foot plant in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, with a few dozen workers and a limited customer list, according to Shore’s own write-up of the investment. Main Street Gourmet then bought Biscotti Brothers of Greensburg, Pa., in November 2020 and Meurer Brothers Bakery of Fond du Lac, Wis., in November 2021. In June 2022 the three shops took the Sweetmore Bakeries name while keeping their local brands on the floor.

The buying did not stop. Sweet Eddie’s, a cinnamon-roll bakery in Smyrna, Ga., joined in May 2024. Azteca Bakeries, a Phoenix maker of pan dulce founded in 1954, joined in January 2025. Fantasy Baking is the sixth name in that line and the first after Shore’s 2025 recap.

HOW THE SWEETMORE NETWORK WAS BUILT

1. September 2019: Shore Capital recapitalizes Main Street Gourmet in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, the seed asset for the group.
2. November 2020: Main Street Gourmet buys Biscotti Brothers in Greensburg, Pa., adding biscotti and pizzelle for in-store bakeries.
3. November 2021: The group buys Meurer Brothers Bakery in Fond du Lac, Wis., a third-generation pastry shop.
4. June 2022: The three bakeries unite under the Sweetmore Bakeries name while legacy brands stay on the floor.
5. May 2024: Sweetmore buys Sweet Eddie’s in Smyrna, Ga., and adds cinnamon rolls and yeast-raised goods.
6. January 2025: Sweetmore buys Azteca Bakeries in Phoenix and moves into Mexican pastries.
7. May 2025: Shore recapitalizes Sweetmore through a special purpose vehicle and funds the next round of deals.
8. August 25, 2026: Sweetmore buys Fantasy Baking Co. in Sylmar, Calif., its first West Coast plant.

A 2024 private-equity write-up put Main Street Gourmet at about 68,000 square feet, Biscotti Brothers at 60,000 and Meurer Brothers at 20,000, with Sweet Eddie’s adding a 36,000-square-foot plant near Atlanta. Those older floor plans are useful as a snapshot, not a current census. By the 2025 recap, Shore said the five operating entities held over 230,000 square feet of manufacturing space, hundreds of employees, and a much wider customer and product list than the original Ohio shop.

Shore Recapped Sweetmore to Keep Buying

In May 2025, Shore announced a recapitalization of Sweetmore through a special purpose vehicle, keeping the bakery group as a food-and-beverage holding after an original 2019 check. Richard Boos, a Shore partner and Sweetmore’s chairman, said the firm was “proud and excited to continue to partner with Sweetmore to support its next phase of growth.” He pointed to what he called exponential growth over the prior five years under Veenstra.

Veenstra, in that same recap, said Shore’s capital would let the team invest in the company, fund a pipeline of add-on acquisitions, and chase more product development. Fantasy is the first named buy that fits that script. Azteca closed in January 2025, before the recap papers. The California deal is the first public add-on on the new vehicle’s watch.

Monroe Capital said in June 2025 that it acted as joint lead arranger on a senior credit facility supporting the recap and further growth. Shore’s deal notice this week described the firm as a Chicago shop with a Nashville office and about $17 billion in assets under management, investing in lower-middle-market companies across healthcare, food and beverage, business services, industrial and real estate. The same notice said Inc. Magazine named Shore a Top Founder Friendly Investor six times from 2020 through 2025.

Shore’s website still files Sweetmore under “realized,” with an exit date of May 2025, because the original 2019 fund cashed through the recap while a new vehicle kept the bakeries. The Fantasy purchase is how that second chapter starts on the map: five regional plants were not a national network until someone owned an oven west of Phoenix.

Grocery Buyers Get a National Cookie Partner

Sweetmore’s customers sit in grocery in-store bakeries, restaurants, warehouse clubs and convenience stores. Those buyers already juggle thaw-and-serve muffins, Danish, cinnamon rolls and pan dulce. A West Coast cookie and bar plant lets the same purchasing team add store-brand cookies, fruit bars and protein bars without opening a second vendor file, which is the pitch Veenstra is making when he calls Sweetmore a “strategic national partner.”

The group describes itself as a family of premium bakeries and still lists each shop by its old name. Headquarters is in Park Ridge, Ill. The operating plants remain local: Cuyahoga Falls, Greensburg, Fond du Lac, Smyrna, Phoenix and now Sylmar. Each one sells a different slice of the in-store case, which is the point of the roll-up. A chain that wants one invoice for muffins, biscotti, cinnamon rolls, conchas and protein bars now has a single door to knock on.

THE SIX BAKERIES NOW UNDER SWEETMORE

RaboResearch, as reported by FoodNavigator-USA in 2024, put U.S. private-label grocery at 19% of spending in 2023 and said that share could rise toward 25% or even 30% over the following decade. Sweetmore is built for that shift. Fantasy’s 2023 positioning was even more specific: Case said the plant sat between tiny rack-oven shops and “mega bakery” lines with 300-foot ovens, a size that suited fast-growing brands and premium store brands rather than the largest national cookie names.

Independent regional bakeries still fill local in-store programs, and they still win on a single SKU or a short truck run. They will now bid against a group that can quote the same cookie in Pennsylvania and California and throw in a protein bar from the same lab. That does not end the regional model. It does raise the minimum size of a supplier that a national grocer will bother to onboard.

Encore’s Decade in Cookies Comes to a Close

Sweetmore’s release never names the seller. Baking Business reported in 2023 that Encore Capital, a San Francisco investment firm, bought Fantasy Cookie in 2016, kept Joe Semder as a part owner, and hired Case as chief executive from a nearby snack and nutrition-bar bakery. PitchBook and other company databases still listed Encore Consumer Capital as an investor heading into this month’s sale, and listed the deal as a buyout closed on Aug. 25, 2026. Alantra’s role as Fantasy’s financial advisor is the one seller-side fact Sweetmore put on the record.

That structure is a private-equity handoff, not a founder cashing out on the courthouse steps. Encore had already been buying other bakeries, including a 2024 platform around Chalet Desserts in Sacramento. Shore had already been stitching regional sweet-goods plants into one sales story. Fantasy sat in the middle: a midsize co-packer with a lab, a West Coast dock, and a bar business that Sweetmore’s older muffin and Danish shops did not have.

Case’s public comments stayed on customers, quality and scale. Veenstra’s stayed on footprint, bars and the lab. Neither man gave a revenue figure, a headcount for the Sylmar plant, or a plan for the next target. The papers closed with six bakeries, nearly 500 people, and a map that finally includes California. The price is still blank.