Eighteen months ago, no one would have blamed Jake Lazar for coasting through his senior year at Indiana University (IU). After all, he had already completed much of his required coursework by then.
Instead, Lazar was working up to 13 hours a day, racing between classes and a commercial kitchen, organizing taste tests among his friends, and shipping packages to family and friends around the country.
What was in those packages? Mandel bread, made according to a fourth-generation family recipe, now in the hands of a 21st-century entrepreneur.
“When I was growing up, I always wondered why there wasn’t mandel bread on the store shelf,” Lazar says. “I didn’t understand why someone hadn’t made this into a business.”
In near record time, Lazar has now created a successful mandel bread business—Lazar Family Bakehouse—with his mother, a professional baker, perpetuating the recipe of her grandmother Jeanne for a new generation.
The company’s signature product, MandelBites, bite-sized mandel bread in chocolate chip, gluten-free chocolate chip, almond, and confetti, is available around Denver and has recently arrived on the national food scene on Goldbelly, the popular website that ships gourmet foods directly to customers’ front doors.
Lazar Family Bakehouse mandel bread is softer than the more traditional biscotti-style version. So what’s the secret to this recipe?
“I always say, ‘If you get five Jewish grandmothers together, you will have 20 mandel bread recipes,” Lazar says. “Our secret is the way we process the ingredients, producing a consistent product for customers who expect to receive the same cookie every time.”
The path to that successful product has been a non-stop lesson in entrepreneurship for Lazar, who founded the business with the same spirit, energy, and philanthropic intentions of his great-grandmother Jeanne.
‘Please make more.’
You could trace the origins of Lazar Family Bakehouse to Jake Lazar’s childhood swim practices.
“I would come home hungry from swimming and devour the entire batch of mandel bread my mom had just made,” he says. “All my friends who had it raved about it.”
Lazar’s mother Victoria worked from Jeanne’s legacy recipe. But for Jeanne, making mandel bread meant “handfuls and pours”—a handful of flour, a pour of oil, repeat. Victoria had the foresight to stand at her grandmother’s side and write down precise measurements for the recipe on a piece of lined yellow notebook paper that the family still treasures to this day.
When Lazar found himself with time on his hands his senior year, he started his search for a “greater purpose.” His mind returned to all the people who, through the years, had eaten Grandma Jeanne’s mandel bread and told his mother, “You should start a business.”
He rented a facility near the IU campus and started baking. Then, he started sampling the mandel bread with the many friends he had met by being active and involved on campus. Most of his friends were not Jewish, so he was introducing them to something they had never experienced.
“I said, ‘Here is a dessert I want you to try—let me know what you think,’” he recalls. “They said, ‘We love it. Please make more.’”
In between classes, Lazar kept baking, and when he wasn’t baking, he was packaging the mandel bread and shipping it around the country for more feedback.
When he graduated in May of 2025 with a degree in finance, he moved back to Denver and had an epiphany: “I said to myself, ‘Wow, I know I can make this into a business.’”
By July, Lazar Family Bakehouse was born.
“Everyone in the family has been instrumental in developing the brand,” Lazar says. “My dad is a constant supporter, my brother always offers his feedback, and my mom is our head baker. I could not do this without them.”
‘Philanthropy makes our business different’
In summer of 2025, Jake Lazar started selling Grandma Jeanne’s mandel bread at farmers’ markets in the Denver area. It was a chance to explain to the uninitiated what the dessert is and to hear immediate feedback.
“I learned from the farmers’ markets that I could keep scrambling every week to keep up,” he says. “Or I could find a more sustainable way to grow the business.”
He brought on a small team to help his mother bake and started selling the mandel bread at Denver hotels, specialty stores like Spinelli’s Market, Leevers Locavore, and Congress Park Market, and at Denver International Airport’s Sky Market. By July of 2026, the company had hit the big time with its debut on Goldbelly.
“We had customers encourage us to apply to Goldbelly, but we didn’t think we would make it because it’s hard to get in,” Lazar says. “As it turned out, they loved the product.”
In the spirit of Grandma Jeanne, who had a philanthropic mindset, Lazar Family Bakehouse donates five percent of its profits to organizations that support food insecurity.
“I grew up in a house with incredible food and it’s hard to see people who don’t have that privilege,” Lazar says. “I also connect with the value of tikkun olam. This philanthropy makes our business different and also makes us feel good at the end of the day.”
Grandma Jeanne lived to be 102 years old. She was famous for bringing her mandel bread with her when she traveled—sometimes in her suitcase and often loaded into shoeboxes. She once commandeered a wheelchair at the airport and stacked the shoeboxes on her lap because she was bringing so much mandel bread she couldn’t even carry it all.
Today, Jeanne’s mandel bread is flying across the country to national customers—thanks to a recipe of handfuls and pours now in the hands of a new entrepreneurial generation.
“When you start a business, it is your utopia because you can do anything and everything you want to do,” Lazar says. “This has been a chance for my vision and passion for entrepreneurship to blossom and it all started with a product I love.”