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Krista Veryzer, Norma Card, Edith Card & Jen Moon
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In the early 1970's, Edith Card (Card's Bakery owner Jen Moon's grandmother) started baking fresh homemade bread from her home kitchen in rural Kingston. Ever the entrepreneur, Edith put up a 'Fresh Bread' sign at the road to encourage travelers to stop in and taste her baking. Edith's customers liked her bread so much that they soon started asking her to bake pies, squares, loaves, cookies and more. Edith's home was on Hwy. 38, a well travelled 'cottage route' from downtown Kingston North to cottage country. The home-style bakery kitchen's following grew, and soon no one was going to the cottage without stopping by her house for sticky buns, a pie and a loaf of bread for the weekend! And thus began a family tradition of shopping at Card's Bakery that continues on strong to this day. As the home bakery grew in popularity, Norma Card (Edith's daughter and Jen's mother) worked alongside Edith as Norma raised her three small children from the Hwy. 38 location. In the late 1980's Norma decided to take a big risk. She rented a tiny 800 square foot space at the corner of King & Johnson in downtown Kingston to open the first dedicated retail outlet of Card's Bakery. This risk paid off in spades. Card's Bakery was a huge success in Kingston, and quickly became the name that was on the tip of everyone's lips as the place to go for quality, fresh, traditional homemade baking. The success at King & Johnson continued on strong for just shy of 2 decades, when the unthinkable happened.
In December of 2004 at 3 am, a fire started in the kitchen of Card's Bakery, and the location was destroyed. Jen Moon (granddaughter of Edith and daughter of Norma) decided to turn this tragedy into an opportunity. Jen decided that the timing was right for her to buy the bakery from her mom and open up in a new, and quite a bit bigger, location on Bagot Street in downtown Kingston. Jen's new bakery was a roaring success right from day one. By this time Krista Veryzer (Jen's sister) had made quite a name for herself in the wedding cake business. The opening of the new and bigger store brought forth the perfect opportunity to have both girls operate their separate businesses out of the same location for the ultimate in customer convenience.
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