Trompeau Bakery is on the rise.
The local bakery and café, which has spots along South Broadway and the 16th Street Mall, will soon open a third store in Cherry Creek, owner Beth Ginsberg told BusinessDen.
“Being in a good neighborhood like Cherry Creek is exactly our niche,” she said. “We’re not a destination. We’re more of your local favorite.”
The outpost will be on the ground floor of the Global Down Syndrome Foundation building at 3239 E. Second Ave., between Adams and Steele streets.
Besides serving drinks, sandwiches and Trompeau’s trademark croissants, the Cherry Creek store will also have a space for artists with Down syndrome to sell their work. Ginsberg also runs a company called Threads Worldwide, which sells household goods, jewelry and other gifts made by women in developing countries. Some of those items will be on sale as well.
Ginsberg plans to hire some people with Down syndrome to work at the cafe too.
“Cherry Creek has a lot of high-end, fancy restaurants. Not so many cafes,” she said. “So we’re filling in a niche there, and I think we’ll be able to really supply the neighborhood, both the residential and the commercial markets.”
Ginsberg signed a 10-year lease for the 1,500 square feet. The building, which was constructed in the late 2010s, was designed to have a cafe on the ground floor, she said. But the foundation wasn’t able to find the right tenant until a friend on its board introduced Ginsberg to CEO Michelle Sie Witten.
Itap a full build-out of the space for Ginsberg, who said concrete will start pouring this week. She hopes to be open this fall.
“Itap got a beautiful patio. If you walk by, the whole front of the building is glass doors, and they all open up,” Ginsberg said. “So itap really quite stunning.”
As for her other stores, the original Englewood location at 2950 S. Broadway is down 10% in sales year over year. That location, opened by founder Pascal Trompeau in 2015 after a nearly 20-year run near University of Denver, is more dependent on neighborhood spending.
That compares with Trompeau’s location at 16th and Curtis streets, where things have steadily grown since the store opened in early 2024. The location is on the ground floor of a Courtyard by Marriott, and the hotel’s 175 beds combined with traffic from the nearby Colorado Convention Center have propelled it to contribute one-third of Trompeau’s “several million” in annual sales.
The remaining two-thirds are evenly split between the Englewood spot and Trompeau’s wholesale and catering business. The latter stream has more than doubled since Ginsberg took over the business in 2019, she said.
“Itap just a lot of competition, and with the economy, people are holding onto their money,” she said of the Broadway spot. “Itap a little retrenchment, but 16th Street really makes up for it because they’re just continuing to grow.”
Ginsberg got into the dough game after a career as an engineer working for Hewlett-Packard in Massachusetts and then a consulting firm in Singapore. When she was living overseas, she was often traveling and left her young kids behind with a Filipino nanny. The nanny would also come back to the States with the Ginsbergs during summertime.
“And she would eat so many bagels,” Ginsberg said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this woman who eats rice every single meal likes bagels. And, well, maybe that means that other Asians will like them. And then Singapore, of course, has a very large western community too.”
So, in 2003 Ginsberg founded the New York City Bagel Factory, a wholesale distributor to coffee shops, restaurants and caterers across Southeast Asia. That was her first foray into the food world, and when she moved to Denver years after, she began gobbling up more.
Those include The Bagel Store, Freestyle Pizza and Zaidy’s Deli & Bakery. She bought Trompeau in 2019 when Pascal Trompeau was looking to retire, similar to her other ventures.
“I didn’t want to start something from scratch,” she said. “I felt a lot more comfortable with my skills with buying existing businesses that I knew were already profitable. I could do the payback period pretty quickly and understand what I was in for.”
With Trompeau, she hopes to open one new location in each of the coming years, she said. That will likely start with an outpost in south Denver, though she hasn’t nailed anything down just yet.
“Maybe as far south as the Highlands Ranch, or possibly just south Denver,” she said. “We’ll see when the time comes.”
Read more from our partner, .
