Ask anyone who grew up in Bay Shore in the seventies or eighties what the town smelled like and you will get the same answer. It smelled like cake.

The Entenmann's bakery on the north side of Bay Shore was that kind of landmark. Not a building people visited, a building people navigated by. It closed in August 2014 and took 176 jobs with it, and the smell went with them.

Food is being made in it again.

What is going in

Redefine Meals, a fresh meal-prep company, is redeveloping the 107,000-square-foot former Entenmann's property in North Bay Shore into its centralized production and operations headquarters.

The numbers are not modest. Once fully operational, the company says the site will be capable of producing up to 200,000 meals per day.

The company currently employs around 390 people and expects to add roughly 200 more once Bay Shore is running. It is building a commercial kitchen on site and consolidating manufacturing and distribution that currently sits in Ronkonkoma and Bohemia, with the move targeted for as soon as August.

Who they are

Redefine Meals was founded in 2016 by Matthew Riss and Mark Ciaburri, childhood best friends and Long Island natives. The business is grab-and-go prepared meals: 25 retail locations plus an e-commerce operation delivering across Suffolk and Nassau, into New York City and up into Westchester.

That is a ten-year climb from a local idea to a company that needs a six-figure square footage plant, executed entirely on Long Island. It is worth saying plainly because the more common version of this story ends with the company leaving for New Jersey or Pennsylvania the moment it needs real industrial space.

The building they are moving into

The Entenmann's history in Bay Shore is longer than most people realize, and it did not start with the plant.

William Entenmann founded the company in Brooklyn in 1898 and moved it to a small store in Bay Shore in 1905. The business stayed and grew there for half a century. In 1961 it built what was described at the time as the largest baking facility of its kind in the United States, on five acres in Bay Shore.

At its peak the company employed about 1,500 people in the town. It was, for a couple of generations, simply what Bay Shore did.

By 2014 the plant was owned by Bimbo Bakeries USA, a division of Grupo Bimbo, and the company concluded it could no longer compete efficiently from the site. Production moved out of state, largely to Pennsylvania. Of the plant's 265 workers, 176 lost their jobs. The closure took effect on August 13, 2014.

Why a reoccupied food plant matters more than a warehouse would

Long Island has no shortage of demand for big industrial boxes. What it mostly gets when one becomes available is distribution: a warehouse, a fleet of trucks, and jobs that are real but thin.

A food production facility is a different animal. It needs food-grade infrastructure, refrigeration, compliance staff, quality control, kitchen labor and management, which is a more varied and better-paid mix. It also needs the building to already be built for food, which is precisely why a former bakery is the right shell and why it sat as long as it did waiting for the right tenant rather than being flattened.

Roughly 200 new positions in North Bay Shore is a meaningful number in a hamlet where the industrial corridor along Brentwood Road and the Sunrise Highway service roads has been more about storage than production for a decade.

The part that is hard to quantify

There is a category of Long Island building that carries more weight than its square footage. The Entenmann's plant is one. So is the Grumman campus in Bethpage, and the Pilgrim State grounds in Brentwood.

These places employed a generation, and when they emptied out they left something worse than vacancy behind. They left the sense that the thing the town was good at had moved somewhere else.

Two men who grew up here putting a food company back into the bakery is not a policy fix for that. But it is a specific building, on a specific road, where something is made again.