Rise & Shine: Inside Sweet Tides Bakery

You will smell Sweet Tides Bakery before you ever see it. Aromas of sugar, cinnamon and freshly baked bread draw customers in like a force field pulling on your senses. It is a place where the coffee is fresh, the food is homemade, and the service makes you feel like you are family. Owner Shawna started baking sourdough bread out of her home during the pandemic, then opened a small counter space with a back alley entrance in March 2022. “Customers literally had to wind their way through a dingy alley to the counter. People always wondered if they were going the right way.” Directly behind the counter was the full kitchen where everyone could watch her bake. The stars aligned because this unusual space connected to a retail space at the front of the building. When the retail store moved out, Shawna converted the entire back portion into the kitchen and the front into a cafe.

Shawna has always been about feeding people. She grew up in Washington State with nine brothers and sisters. Large families require large amounts of food, so she started baking at a young age.

In 2005 a good friend had a commercial fishing boat and needed a deckhand, “I bought my crew license, bought the gear he told me I needed, which I didn’t have a clue what it all was, bought a plane ticket and headed to Alaska.”

The crew of this 34 foot boat consisted of just her and the captain. “I liked to cook, and he liked to eat.” Her appliance was a small diesel stove, propane hot plate and a cooler. Sitting on the deck, they would eat steak and gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches, which was a favorite. A bonus was that every meal came with an incredible ocean view.

A few years later, Shawna was a cook on a tender boat, which is a large boat that stays put while all the other fishing vessels offload their catch. Shawna had a much larger galley and made sure that all fisherman who came to the tender left with cinnamon rolls, cookies or some type of pastry. The captain was a traditional meat and potato person, and while Shawna didn’t think she was that great of a cook, the captain thought she was the best. “It really inspired my love for cooking to have people tell me my food was good.”

While killing time in-between fishing jobs, Shawna visited friends in Wrangell, where she met her husband and decided not to get on that next fishing boat. Putting down roots in Wrangell involved baking wedding cakes after she found out there was no one in the town who could provide a cake for their wedding. Now, Shawna and her team at Sweet Tides bake breakfast items such as cinnamon rolls, scones, and breakfast burritos. For lunch, you will find sandwiches with homemade bread, baked mac with pulled pork, salmon caesar salad or halibut curry. And while there is no set menu, customers can always find warm chocolate chip cookies at the counter.

“I work best with procrastination and I tend to not like recipes because I don’t like being told what to do.”

The one thing Shawna never compromises on is the quality and freshness of her food. She makes everything in her cafe from scratch, including the coffee syrups, croutons, mayonnaise, salad dressings, and of course, all the bagels, sourdough, and hoagies. It is this desire to make her cooking stand out that has customers buying the entire pan of cinnamon rolls as soon as they come out of the oven, and the reason they had to expand their winter hours when many businesses reduced for the season. “Each day the alarm goes off at 3:00 a.m. and I think what sounds good today and I let inspiration guide the menu. The thing that we pride ourselves on at Sweet Tides is making things from scratch, putting that home in homemade.”

Address: 310 Front St, Wrangell, AK 99929.

Phone: 907-874-3900.

For more information visit their Facebook page at Sweet Tides Bakery