Dot bakery fills ‘national niche’ with its local fare
Stone & Skillet’s English muffins array.
By Isabelle Zhang
The bread aisles at Target stores offer a bazaar of competition, with dozens of brands and bake houses clamoring for attention to their products. But when it comes to the English muffin, the company has limited the number of suppliers to just a few, and one of them is Dorchester’s Stone & Skillet bakery.
Its “New-England Style English muffins,” which are made in the bakery’s facility on Quincy Street, were launched onto Target stores’ shelves in August, according to Stone & Skillet’s announcement.
Cam Meekins, co-founder and CEO of Stone & Skillet, said he feels “blessed” to partner with a large chain like Target. “From making these English muffins in one bakery in Dorchester, and being able to see them on the shelves across the country was a pretty cool moment,” he said.
Meekins founded Stone & Skillet with his brothers Kyle and Nick in 2014. They got the idea when Kyle, a salesman for a bread company at the time, repeatedly received requests from restaurants to carry an “artisan English muffin.”
Cameron Meekins, co-founder and CEO of Dorchester-based Stone & Skillet, said he feels “blessed” by the company’s growth. Image courtesy Stone & Skillet
Kyle’s boss was uninterested, but the idea appealed to the brothers, who grew up baking and cooking. They wanted to create a product so delicious it would change people’s opinions about English muffins, Cam Meekins said.
“We all got together in Kyle’s apartment, and we started working on a recipe,” he noted. “One night we were rolling the dough balls on a stone countertop in his kitchen, and then griddling them on a cast iron skillet. So we thought, let’s name the company Stone & Skillet.”
The brothers developed the muffins specifically with restaurants in mind, making them dense and thick so they could be used as burger buns. They then began selling them at local farmers’ markets, where they were discovered by Whole Foods.
“That brought us into our first retail environment, and that’s when we realized this could be a real brand,” Cam Meekins said. “An opportunity to not just make great muffins for chefs but for just the average consumer as well.”
Since then, Stone & Skillet has expanded into Fresh Thyme, Wegmans, and a handful of other grocery stores. While gaining Target space is a huge milestone for the company, Meekins said they plan to stay local.
“We’re so blessed to have found that space, and the community of Dorchester and the people that work with us,” Meekins said. “If anything, this Target business has allowed us to invest more into the facility, into bringing more employees, more jobs into the area.”
Despite its large-scale production, Stone & Skillet operates entirely out of its facility on Quincy Street near the Commonwealth Kitchen enterprise — a commitment that director of operations Jocelyn Pacheco values.
“We’re reaching customers across the country, but the work’s still being done right here,” Pacheco said.
“Every new partnership creates opportunities for our employees to grow alongside the company, and that’s something I’m incredibly proud of.”
Stone & Skillet employs dozens of workers in its bakery and produces millions of English muffins a year out of the facility, said Meekins.
Teresa Virgilio, a fan of Stone & Skillet who lives in New York, said she was surprised to see the muffins in Target, as she usually purchases them at Whole Foods.
“I love the taste and texture of the muffins — especially the garlic herb flavor,” she wrote in an email to The Reporter.
For Cam Meekins, the expansion into Target reinforces Stone & Skillets’ desire to keep growing.
“We don’t take it lightly, and we definitely want to keep spreading the word about how great these things are,” Meekins said.
This story is the product of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism’s Newsroom Initiative.
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