Isgro Pastries aims for even better baked goods — and a cafe — with its second South Philly bakery
After more than a century, Isgro is planning an expansion that will move production out of the South Philly rowhouse basement. The retail store will not go away, an owner says.
For more than a century, most of the baking at Isgro Pastries — the rum cakes, the pesca con crema, the cookies — has been done out of a South Philadelphia rowhouse basement.
Holy cannoli, that is one challenging environment.
“There’s no air conditioning in the summertime, and no heat in the winter,” said A.J. Sarno, who, with his brother, Michael, is the fourth generation of the retail bakery, a semifinalist for a James Beard Award last year. “Doughs and batters are very sensitive to heat and humidity.”
The bake shop is cramped, too. “I only have room for an 80-quart mixer that powers the whole place,” Sarno said. “It’s about 65 years old, and it’s a workhorse — the thing never shuts off.”
Relief will come in the first quarter of 2026, when Isgro begins moving into a new production facility — more than double the space of the basement, and triple the oven capacity— about 10 minutes away. The Sarno family has leased the second floor of 21 Wolf St., a century-old building a block off of Columbus Boulevard and down the street from John’s Roast Pork.
Sarno said the original shop at 1009 Christian St. would remain as a retail location.
The area just off of I-95, a long-ago warehouse district serving the nearby South Philadelphia piers, is ripe for development.
Federal Donuts & Chicken opened a location across the street last year in a rehabbed building. City records show that a demolition plan was filed last month for the former Inolex Chemical Co. plant nearby, making way for a long-planned shopping center housing a Lidl supermarket, Advance Auto Parts, Chase Bank, Shake Shack, and Raising Cane’s.
Isgro will open another retail location on the ground floor of the Wolf Street site, featuring cafe tables — the dream of Sarno’s father, Gus, whose grandparents Mario and Crocifissa Isgro founded the Christian Street shop. The idea is to “get a cup of coffee, have a biscotti or a pastry, and then go on about your day,” Sarno said.
The cafe’s timeline is unclear, as the bakery is the priority. “You have to worry about, first and foremost, the quality of the product,” Sarno said.
The Sarnos began to consider expanding and moving production in 2019 as online business increased. The pandemic only heightened demand. (Isgro’s national shipping is handled mainly by Goldbelly these days.) “We’re basically maxed out,” Sarno said. “We’re on top of each other.” The bakery now employs about 30 people.
Any new facility had to check off a number of boxes. “We didn’t want to leave the city, number one,” Sarno said. “A lot of my staff is from the surrounding neighborhoods. We looked at Camden, which was and still is offering crazy tax benefits, but we didn’t want to move from Philly. It’s where we’ve been our whole lives. We wanted parking and the possibility of a storefront.”
Making this move is “something I have struggled with,” Sarno said, declining to disclose the price tag. “I’m taking a big risk financially.”
His father, who put what was a neighborhood bakery on the map in the 1980s by shipping cookie tins and winning awards for the cannoli, had considered expansion over the years but never pulled the trigger.
“Every generation is in a situation like this — they want to take the business to the next level,” Sarno said.
A.J. and Michael Sarno signed the lease on the Wolf Street property about 2½ years ago, and “it’s been a slow process,” he said. “The building’s an old warehouse, so it definitely needs a lot of work.” The deal was first reported by the Philadelphia Business Journal.
Because the Christian Street storefront will remain, some Isgro items that are finished on-site will continue to be made there after production moves south. “There will always be a level of baking being done here, too,” Sarno said.
As nostalgic as the brothers are, “being able to be in a facility that’s climate-controlled should — and hopefully will — make us produce an even better product and a more consistent product,” he said. “We’re not going to have to beat our heads against the wall every time a batch of sponge cake doesn’t rise in summertime.”