Where once stood a rusting, dilapidated warehouse on Hollins Ferry Road, in Halethorpe, now stands the 210,000-square-foot home of Bakery Express-Ms. Desserts.

The commercial baking company, which consolidated its locations in Woodlawn and Baltimore into the new building, is one in a line of new businesses, including FedEx and Cowan Systems trucking company, that have transformed the long-ignored industrial stretch of Hollins Ferry into a booming business center in recent years.

"This is part of a pretty tremendous transformation of this pretty aged and rough industrial area," said David Iannucci, executive director of the county department of economic development, during a Nov. 13 ribbon cutting event for the bakery.

Charles Burman, the company's owner and chief executive officer, credited the county and Iannucci's office for making the growth of his company possible.

Two loans -- one for $500,000 from the county's Small Business Loan Partnership and one for $250,000 from the county's Business Growth Fund -- helped the company buy the 13-acre Halethorpe property.

The loans were issued because the property falls within the county's Southwest Enterprise Zone, an area the county has targeted for redevelopment initiatives, Iannucci said.

Before the new building was constructed, the site looked like "an old 'Terminator' movie" with "broken glass, weeds, roofs caving in (and) parking lots with big potholes," Iannucci said.

To turn that space into its new headquarters, Bakery Express partnered with Merritt Properties, of Woodlawn, to demolish the site's existing warehouse, dig out its thick foundation and start fresh.

According to Steve Shaw, who handles regional leasing and development for Merritt, Bakery Express currently occupies about 120,000 square feet of the building.

The rest of the space will be leased to other tenants and may be used for Bakery Express to expand in the future.

Bakery Express has been producing doughnuts, cakes and other baked goods at the new location for about two months.

It opened a fresh bakery for local business two weeks ago and "business is hopping," said Steve Borsh, the company's vice president.

The fresh bakery at the front of the building has its own entrance to the parking lot and features a variety of items not found on the commercial production lines in the back.

In just two weeks, the store has been a big hit among new customers and those who followed the business from Woodlawn, Borsh said.

"The reaction we get when people come out is phenomenal," he said. "They see what we have and are floored."

Bakery Express supplies doughnuts and other desserts daily to more than 1,000 7-Eleven stores in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland, Borsh said.

On a tour after the ribbon-cutting, guests were wrapped in sweet smells and shown how glaze is placed on cinnamon buns, how doughnuts were puffed up with fillings and how everything was prepared, packaged and shipped out on a tight schedule.

"It's a much more technical process than it looks," Burman said.

"It's not just throwing a bunch of stuff in the mixer."

Orders that come into headquarters at 11 a.m. daily from the 7-Eleven stores that Bakery Express services must be filled and on trucks by 6 p.m.

There are no standing orders, and individual stores can adjust how many doughnuts, cakes, pastries and other products they need on a daily basis, Burman said.

The bakery only keeps three days worth of ingredients on-hand at a time, in order to keep everything fresh, Burman said, so changes in orders have to be dealt with rapidly.

"We turn over our inventory more than 100 times a year," he said.

With the number of 7-Eleven stores in Maryland expected to grow in the next three to five years, Burman said the company could expand by another 100 employees -- adding to the 300 it already brought to Halethorpe.

"It looks like we didn't build a big enough employee parking lot," he said with a smile.

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