Swarthmore bakery Pastry Pants has closed amid rising costs and waning business
Owner Robert Smythe said a constellation of factors pushed him to shut down the bakery, formerly located at 10 Park Ave. in downtown Swarthmore.
Pastry Pants, a bakery that brought international flavors and homemade breads to downtown Swarthmore, closed Saturday after three years.
Owner and longtime Swarthmore resident Robert Smythe said a constellation of factors pushed him to shut down the bakery, located at 10 Park Ave., including rising ingredient costs, staffing shortages, and a lack of predictable business during weekday hours.
Smythe, a playwright and actor by trade, opened Pastry Pants in fall 2023 in his Swarthmore driveway.
What Smythe first thought might be a sleepy home baking business exploded overnight. He hired his first full-time staff member six days after opening, as lines of customers stretched down his driveway and around his house, eager to buy fresh breads and pastries in a town devoid of its own bakery.
When downtown Swarthmore brunch joint Occasionally Yours closed in March 2024, Smythe pitched its owners on opening Pastry Pants there. He wrote a multi-page proposal outlining his “vision of a bakery in a community as something more than just a store.”
Pastry Pants opened in the Occasionally Yours space in May that year.
On Saturday mornings, lines poured out the door as customers stocked up on fresh baguettes, sablé cookies, lemon curd tarts dusted with pistachios and pomegranates, and apple cider donuts. Pastry Pants made wedding cakes, birthday cakes, and more gender reveal cakes than Smythe can count. Smythe broke out of the conventional American bakery menu, stocking his pastry case with Portuguese pastéis de nata, German Brötchen, and Mexican panes de muerto.
Smythe said it was “humbling” to be a part of customers’ most celebratory moments.
“I guess I could say we were a fixture in the community,” Smythe said.
Former customers recalled their favorite Pastry Pants goods and said the bakery brought something unique to the suburban community.
Bethany Formica, a Swarthmore resident and friend of Smythe’s, said Pastry Pants’ closure leaves “a big hole” in town.
A lover of Pastry Pants’ savory goods, Formica reminisced on picking up quiches and sandwiches, from baguettes stuffed with brie to ham and cheese croissants.
The “level of foods was just so much higher” than other local options, Formica said.
For Media resident Nathan Renner-Johnson, trips to Pastry Pants became a regular weekend routine with his husband and son. They’d stock up on bread and pick out sweet treats from behind the pastry case.
“I was always so impressed by how many different things that they were making — all sorts of different kinds of doughs and treats and pastries,” Renner-Johnson said.
The synergy of Pastry Pants and Celia Bookshop, which opened in October 2025, on Park Avenue made it feel like “there was an anchor to our downtown,” Smythe said.
Despite his adoration from local pastry eaters, the math of running Pastry Pants was no longer adding up, Smythe said.
The cost of ingredients has risen tremendously since Pastry Pants opened in 2023, Smythe said. Both vanilla, which Smythe sourced from Madagascar, and cocoa, were hit by the Trump administration’s tariffs in April 2025 (the tariffs on vanilla beans and cocoa were lifted last November).
“In a bakery like mine, most of the good ingredients that we use that give things flavor — chocolate, spices, whatever — all come from overseas,” he said.
Beyond rising costs, downtown Swarthmore, a sleepy, off-the-beaten path commercial corridor, saw little foot traffic outside of Saturday mornings. Some weekdays, Pastry Pants had no customers.
This summer was “very, very bad,” Smythe said.
On top of the particular challenges of operating in quiet Swarthmore, economic headwinds have damped consumers’ spending across the board. An annual KPMG consumer survey this summer found that 67% of consumers were eating at home more often than dining out, with 76% citing budget constraints as the primary reason.
Smythe also struggled to find a bread baker. A limited labor pool in the suburbs made it difficult to hire staff, Smythe said, as did the challenge of finding culinary professionals in the city who could commute out to Swarthmore.
Because he was unable to find a bread baker, Smythe was doing the baking on his own, work that took away from his other managerial responsibilities.
A few weeks ago, Smythe’s son got married in a quiet backyard celebration. The next day, after sleeping for just a few hours, he was back at the bakery feeding sourdough and rolling baguettes.
“I had to get up at 5 [a.m.] so I could make bread and hope that people would buy it,” Smythe said. “Everything just clicked and said, ‘Why am I spending more time in a bakery helping other people celebrate their lives than I am taking time to celebrate my own?’”
With Pastry Pants in the rearview, Smythe plans on sleeping (a lot) and recuperating. He described being in “autistic burnout,” a state of intense fatigue experienced by autistic individuals working overtime to fit into a neurotypical world. He’s now working on a book.
Smythe said he hopes customers can realize “there is a responsible time to close things.”
By closing now, he said, he can pay his staff, sell his bakery equipment, and wind down before the slow winter season.
“I don’t want to be a cautionary tale,” he said. “But I do want to be a cautionary tale.”
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