Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has been renowned for St. Ludmila Catholic Church’s Kolach Festival for more than 50 years. The annual fundraising event typically includes carnival rides, bingo games, raffles, a silent auction, a beer and wine garden, and live entertainment. The main attraction, however, are the kolaches, traditional Czech and Slovak fruit-filled pastries.

In April 2024, St. Ludmila’s festival took on an entirely new dimension. The church’s community center opened with a full-service bakery in time to produce kolaches for the June festival. “The 35,000-square-foot building cost about $9 million, with the bakery accounting for nearly $500,000 in construction costs,” says Tom Day, who volunteers as community center project manager. Several other volunteers assisted with the project, including Dalton Simonsen. Day and Simonsen worked directly with Solutions Engineer Luke Green, Rapids Foodservice Contract & Design, Marion, Iowa.

Families enjoy volunteering together. Here, youth volunteers place dough balls on trays.The new community center building includes office space for church administration, classrooms for religious education and faith formation, youth space activity center and much more. A large portion of the building houses an industrial bakery specifically designed for baking kolaches, cooking community meals and catering social events. The social hall, which resides directly adjacent to the bakery, hosts church events, including funeral luncheons and Thanksgiving meals. The social hall also is available for rent and has housed events such as graduation parties and wedding receptions.

The community center replaces two buildings, the St. Ludmila Elementary School, built in 1958, and a former convent that had been converted into the parish center, which housed parish offices. All education and activities that were held in the school and parish center transitioned to the community center. 

Simonsen, whose role was to figure out how to design and implement a sustainable bakery, was involved in the project from its inception. “Early on, the buildings and grounds team and I did an audit on all the church’s buildings to determine their physical condition and what they needed for the future,” he says.

“We could have updated the school and the other buildings, but the investment would have been the same as for a new building, but without allowing us to create certain spaces desired by the parish,” Day adds. 

Finished kolaches are packed by the dozen.The whole process took five and a half years due to decisions about the school and other buildings and how and where the new community center was to be built. Green was involved for two and a half years. “The bakery is now a perfect blend of tradition and modern efficiency,” he says.

The community was elated to attend the 2024 festival. The church hadn’t held festivals in 2020 and 2021 because of COVID-19 and had held a smaller version in 2022. And because of construction, the festival did not take place in 2023. In 2024, event-goers had more times available to buy kolaches during the three-day event than at any previous festival. The 2025 festival is scheduled for June 20 through June 22.

Designing in Efficiency

Usability was a prime focus of the new bakery design. “This is in sharp contrast to the previous kitchen, which required an immense amount of labor-intensive processes with makeshift equipment,” Green says. For example, volunteer staff did the first dough proof in buckets with space heaters and shower curtains blocking off a section in a corridor. They did the second proof in six different cabinets that were donated by various facilities in town. Volunteers deposited fillings into each kolach using spoons, then cooked them in only a few convection ovens that operated with varying temperatures, which required pans to be shuffled and turned several times during the cooking process.

Volunteers roll racks of kolaches into ovens.“Throughout the design process of the new bakery, we started with what the church forecast as max capacity and did line balancing studies to find equipment that best suited each individual process,” Green says. “We kept a few of the old processes, specifically tamping and indentation of dough balls, so they still had the handmade look, but we engineered and built a tool to tamp five dough balls at a time.”

The new bakery’s storage includes a walk-in cooler and a reach-in freezer. For kolach production, the bakery uses a 60-quart floor mixer; a water meter; a dough divider rounder; a first-in, first-out proofing machine; and a roll-in proofer. Kolach bakers also use two automated dispensers for fillings, two double-rack ovens and a conveyor dish machine.

The custom tamping tool enables volunteers to prep five kolaches at a time.“We were given a space to work with and had to engineer everything to be exactly precise to fit into the space,” Green says. “We knew certain areas, like forming the dough balls and putting them on sheet trays, would take the most space for the largest number of people. We decided we had to do a serpentine shape with a specific starting and ending point.”

The bakery’s volunteers, totaling 54 per three-hour shift for the June 2024 festival, produced 5,000 dozen (60,000) kolaches. “The baked goods are packaged in new doughnut boxes with viewing windows,” Day says.

“Cars started lining up at 3:30 a.m., and we sold out early,” Green says.

“In future years, we expect to produce upward of 10,000 dozen kolaches,” Day says. The new bakery will increase production of kolaches by nearly double, from nearly 5,500 dozen (66,000) in 2024 to 10,000 dozen (120,000) in 2025.

As part of creating a more comfortable environment for volunteers, designers installed much-welcomed air conditioning into the new bakery. 

The bakery not only supports the church’s long-standing tradition of the Kolach Festival, but it also positions the community center as a versatile venue for future events. “It has a lot of potential,” Day says. “Maybe we’ll offer pizzas, cinnamon rolls and cookies at activities.”

The church actively supports the community. Day says kolach sales “help us with the annual budgeting process, which in turn allows our parish, via the social justice team, to support local charities, including supporting a food pantry and other organizations in need.” 

About the Project

• Opened: April 2024
• Scope of project: new full-service bakery in a community center
• Website: kolachfestival.org
• Owner: St. Ludmila Catholic Church, Cedar Rapids, Iowa
• Pastor: Reverend Kenneth J. Glaser
• Community center project manager: Tom Day, St. Ludmila volunteer
• Size: Community center, 35,000 sq. ft.; which includes the bakery, 2,500 sq. ft.
• Seats: 200 in social hall space; 400 in activity center
• Average kolach cost per dozen: $18
• 2024 Kolach Festival transactions: 5,000 dozen
• 2025 Kolach Festival projected transactions: 10,000 dozen
• Staff: 50-plus volunteers per three-hour shift
• Architects: Emergent + Novak Design Group, Cedar Rapids
• Foodservice consultant and equipment dealer: Rapids Foodservice Contract & Design, Marion, Iowa: Luke Green, solutions engineer
• Total project cost: $9.2 million for the community center
• Bakery equipment investment: $500,000