Formica Freitag Bakery merges with Valenti's to go national with Atlantic City bread

ATLANTIC CITY — Formica Freitag Bakery has merged with Valenti’s Italian Bakery to create a larger entity to market its “Atlantic City bread” nationwide, General Manager Frank Formica said Wednesday.

The name will stay the same, but the new company will be able to bake more bread — and add Valenti’s bagels to its offerings — while combining delivery routes to serve more customers, Formica said.

“We do have a lot of similar customers, so we will be able to combine routes and service customers from one location,” Formica said.

The merger will also allow the company to ship quick-frozen bread to every corner of the country through a new method it has perfected over the past two years.

“The secret is that we are using what they call the quick freeze technology,” Formica said. “Normally it would take six hours (to freeze bread). This bread is frozen in about 30 seconds with liquid nitrogen.”

Quick freezing allows the bread to be fully baked, and to taste and feel like fresh baked bread after thawing at room temperature, he said.

“We have trial tested it in large venue sandwich places locally, and shipped it to California and Florida,” Formica said. “We had end users use it who were from Atlantic City, and they are thrilled with the way this works.”

Founded more than 25 years ago by the brother-and-sister team of Frank and Donna McGlynn, Valenti’s also specializes in baking dinner rolls, pretzel rolls, potato rolls, brioche, New York style kettle-boiled bagels, challah bread and pizza shells, according to its website.

Frank McGlynn will continue to lead production as part of the leadership team, and Donna McGlynn will continue with the expanded bakery, Formica said.

The McGlynns started the business making Atlantic City bread in a vacuum-sealed, brown-and-serve format, delivering to supermarkets, Donna McGlynn said in a statement.

“With the creation of a new system to ship our bread across the country without losing any of its character, I love the idea that now people will be able to enjoy Atlantic City bread across the whole country,” McGlynn said.

Formica Brothers Bakery was almost 100 years old when it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2019. But before the filing, Formica, who took over his family’s business in 1987, leased its equipment and location to Pat McKenna of Egg Harbor City’s A Taste of Italy food company, allowing the bakery, name and about 70 jobs to continue.

Formica has been the new bakery’s consultant and manager since.

The bankruptcy case closed in 2020, and in January 2022, the family of South Jersey Democratic political boss George Norcross bought into the business and renamed it Formica Freitag.

As part of the new ownership agreement, the bakery began an expansion to allow its bread to be distributed nationally.

Norcross’ great-grandfather August Freitag founded the Freitag Bakery in Camden in 1890, and it continued until the 1950s, Formica said.

The new company will keep the bakery in Atlantic City as well as add Valenti’s Egg Harbor Township location, Formica said.

For more information about Formica Freitag, visit formicasbakery.com.