Avalon International Breads

When Ann Perrault and Jackie Victor opened Avalon on Willis Street in 1997, the Cass Corridor was no one’s idea of a comeback neighborhood — it was, as Victor put it, a food desert, and rent was $500 a month. They opened anyway, with a mission as big as the bread: a women-owned, fiercely community-minded bakery built on a “triple bottom line” of earth, community, and employees.

They hand-stir their starter in a 260-pound mixer and bake in a steam-injected oven the size of a small car, and they got there early — Avalon is widely credited as one of the first businesses to bet on what’s now thriving Midtown. Nearly three decades later it serves a thousand people a day, supplies bread to restaurants all over Southeast Michigan, and still feels like the warm, scrappy, mission-driven heart of the neighborhood it helped build. Get the sea-salt chocolate chip cookie.