Somewhere in the U.P. right now, somebody is holding a slice of toast so hard it could survive a fall down a mine shaft, dunking it into a cup of coffee, and feeling completely at home. It is Trenary Toast, the cinnamon-sugar korppu that has come out of one small-town bakery in a plain brown paper bag since 1928, and it might be the most quietly beloved food in the Upper Peninsula.
A Finnish idea in an American logging town
The story starts with Jorma and Elsie Syrjanen, Finnish immigrants who opened the Trenary Home Bakery in 1928 in Trenary, a little logging town on the road between Marquette and Escanaba. What they baked was korppu, the twice-baked hard bread every Finn knew from home. In Finland, korppu began as a waste-nothing food, a way to use up leftover bread and harvest wheat by baking it a second time until every bit of moisture was gone. That second bake is the whole secret. It is what gives the toast its famous crunch, loud enough to interrupt a conversation, and it is why the stuff practically never goes bad.
The cinnamon is doing a job
Here is the detail most people never think about. The cinnamon-sugar coating was not just for flavor. It was preservation. Between the bone-dry bread and the cinnamon’s natural preservative properties, a bag of Trenary Toast keeps for a full year with zero artificial ingredients, which made it perfect food for the U.P.’s mining era. Like the pasty, korppu rode along in lunch pails into the mines and the logging camps, because it would not spoil and would not crumble. Finnish families even gave it to teething babies, since no baby on earth was getting through one. The proper way to eat it has never changed: dunk it in hot coffee, or break it into a bowl of warm milk, and let the Big Lake winters do their worst.
Nearly a century, one little bakery
The bakery has passed through generations of hands, from the Syrjanens to the Hallinen family, who ran it for sixty years, to its current owners, Bri Wynsma and Marco Dossena, who bought it in 2019 and opened a Trenary Toast Cafe in downtown Marquette in 2021. What has not changed is the product. The toast is still made in Trenary, still sliced and sugared largely by hand, still sold in that plain, unmistakable brown paper bag, close to a thousand bags a day. There are newer flavors now, cardamom and chocolate chip and cinnamon raisin among them, but the original cinnamon still rules. And people cannot let it go. The bakery ships to all fifty states, and it says most of its overseas orders go to active-duty military members from the U.P. who just want one taste of home.
Try it like a Yooper
If you have never had it, the rules are simple. Do not bite it dry, that is how downstaters chip teeth. Brew coffee, dunk generously, count to three, and eat over the cup. You can buy it at the bakery in Trenary, at the cafe in Marquette, in grocery stores all over the peninsula, or straight from the bakery online. Trenary itself is worth the stop, a town of a few hundred people that also happens to host the U.P.’s famous Outhouse Classic races every winter. Any town that gave the world both of those things is doing something right.
Nearly one hundred years, one recipe, one brown paper bag. Some U.P. institutions are made of sandstone and steel. This one is made of toast, and it has outlasted almost everything else.
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Sources: Trenary Home Bakery; MyNorth / Traverse Magazine; TV6 / Upper Michigan’s Source; Atlas Obscura.
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