The parallel evolution of Bake Fresh and its CEO

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The parallel evolution of Bake Fresh and its CEO

13 Mar 2026

Joanie Spencer

Since 2008, Joanie Spencer has covered the retail and wholesale sides of the baking industry.
Serving associations such as the American Society of Baking (ASB) and BEMA, Joanie is also in demand as an industry presenter on bakery operations and trends. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from Rockhurst University and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.

When she’s not running or playing soccer, Joanie spends her time with her husband and 11-year-old son.

KANSAS CITY, MO — Every minute Brandy Lee McNamee has spent in the baking industry has been with Chesapeake, VA-based Bake Fresh. She’s been there from the time it was a small Dunkin’ Donuts franchise to its current status as a four-facility commercial donut manufacturer providing customers coast-to-coast a variety of fresh and frozen sweet goods including donuts, cookies, croissants and more.

She started as an hourly employee working a typical after-school job … 30 years later, McNamee is president and CEO.

“The evolution this company has experienced,” she reflected, “has, on a personal level, been my evolution, as well.”

Over the years, McNamee made it her job to learn everything she could about not only the production process but also the ins and outs of the business. In those early days, when her office work was finished, she’d busy herself by helping out on the production floor. It fed her innate curiosity (and, some say, her inability to sit still), but it also created real-world experience to supplement her education.

“Putting in that work gave me a great respect for what really happens in our bakeries,” she said. “It helped me understand where and how we make our money and what’s important for the business. And it gave me this unique experience to learn firsthand how things worked. Then I could apply that knowledge to my education in college and business courses while I was growing in my career at the same time.”

Rising into leadership in the same company is not only a rarity these days — 30 years with one employer is usually reserved for baby boomers or Gen Xers — but it also comes with specific challenges. For starters, muscle memory can become the enemy, especially when one of the hardest adjustments for leaders is letting go of task-oriented duties.

“But a big part of my development is how I develop teams, and that means sitting back, asking questions and allowing them to get to the answers themselves.” — Brandy Lee McNamee | president and CEO | Bake Fresh

McNamee enjoys turning challenges into opportunity, so she’s always seen job growth as professional development. In that respect, she’s learned a great deal from the example set by her mentor, Bake Fresh’s previous CEO Jeff Saunders, as he often empowered her to learn her own lessons along her path.

“When you get into a leadership role, it can be easy to just go on ‘autopilot’ and jump in on tasks because you think you can solve something really fast,” she said. “But a big part of my development is how I develop teams, and that means sitting back, asking questions and allowing them to get to the answers themselves. That’s my next stage: helping others find the same opportunities that I was given.”

Letting go of muscle memory means learning how to use new muscles, and that gave McNamee the chance to focus on big-picture endeavors, creating new growth opportunities.

In 2017, while she was helping to lead operations, Bake Fresh completed an unorthodox acquisition that more than tripled the company’s size practically overnight. It resulted in structural changes to the business that required bringing higher-level roles to the organization. While change management can be one of the hardest hurdles for organizations to overcome, McNamee’s power of observation revealed a gap she could fill, while her love of a good challenge got her moving.

“I knew everything there was to know inside our bakery’s four walls, but I needed to bring something else to the table,” she recalled. “I realized quickly that I needed to ‘know what I don’t know.’”

She found the answers in the MBA program at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, where she enrolled with support from partners at Coppermine Capital, the family-fund private equity firm that took ownership of Bake Fresh in 2005. In the program, McNamee created a network of peers and professors who are still in her circle today.

“[Coppermine] cares about us,” McNamee said. “They want us to do well, show growth, and continuously set plans and follow them. They’re great supporters of the business, in good times and bad, and they’re the catalyst for the growth we’ve had. It’s enabled our long-term strategy that sets us apart in terms of being able to scale while maintaining flexibility.”

This story has been adapted from the February | Q1 2026 issue of Commercial Baking. Read the full story in the digital edition here.