QUECHEE — It started with some leftover cream cheese.
Kelly Simpson decided that to use it up, she’d make a batch of bagels, something she’d never attempted before. To the surprise of her husband, Scott Simpson, who grew up in Westchester County, N.Y., near the nation’s bagel capital, they were good, great even.
That episode unfolded in January 2025 in the log cabin the couple were sharing with their four children on a back road in Woodstock, a home that had belonged to Scott’s grandmother. They had moved up from Massachusetts, where Scott was still working for a chain of car dealerships.
The bagels were so good that Scott urged Kelly to package some up and take them to F.H. Gillingham and Sons, the Woodstock version of a Vermont general store, where they quickly sold out.
Since then, on the strength of those bagels and thousands more like them, the Simpsons have started to build an accidental baked good empire.
“We truly fell into it,” Kelly Simpson said in an interview at The Woodland Fairy, which took over the Vermont Snack Shack in Quechee Gorge Village in December.
The Woodland Fairy, which takes its name from a wellness brand Kelly Simpson experimented with, now bakes and sells not only bagels but a growing list of doughnuts, cookies and other treats. Its bagels are now in stores up and down Vermont. The Quechee storefront, which is open 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays and 9 to 3 on Saturday, gives them a place to serve breakfast and lunch and a commercial kitchen that works almost around the clock.
In conversation, Kelly and Scott Simpson speak in a rush about their first year in business, which has seen them go from making bagels in their galley kitchen to sending their New York-style bagels and other goods to stores in New York State and New Hampshire. They seem poised between pride in their own gumption and surprise at where their efforts are taking them.
“Every day I come in here and I have no idea what can happen,” Kelly, 36, said. “We literally have just been riding a year-long wave.”
For the first three months of bagel production, Kelly worked alone while looking after the couple’s four children, now ages 11, 6 (twins) and 4.
Eventually, the volume of bagels they were making grew so large that they moved out of the log cabin into a rented house in Quechee and turned the cabin into a full-time bagel factory. They ran four Kitchen-Aid countertop mixers to make their dough. Scott, 40, quit his job and started making bagels and handling the books.
“We decided that wholesale was our way to survive,” Scott said.
When they got enough accounts, they bought a van and hired someone to drive it. Moving into the Vermont Snack Shack space enabled another round of growth and they added the Snack Shack’s doughnuts to their product line. With all of their children in school at least part of the day, they can devote more time to the business.
They now have 10 employees, a mix of full- and part-time. “We wouldn’t be where we are today without our awesome staff,” Kelly said.
As hard as they’re working, the Simpsons said they keep things simple.
“We come from high-stress work environments,” Kelly said. “At the end of the day, we’re making bagels and doughnuts.”
Kelly grew up on the South Shore of Massachusetts and operated a bridal gown boutique in Plymouth, Mass. Her sister, a hair-stylist, had a storefront downstairs and Simpson worked upstairs. The coronavirus pandemic shut her business down and restarting it was no fun.
“People were not as polite or nice as they were before COVID,” she said.
Scott Simpson had summered in Vermont with family and his father lives in Woodstock. The Simpsons moved their family north in search of a simpler life. Kelly’s baking began as a quest for healthy food for her kids, including making her own pasta from scratch.
The bagels are similar, in that they contain only King Arthur flour, water, sugar, salt and yeast. They’re still hand-rolled. Kelly Simpson said she can tell by looking at a bag of Woodland Fairy bagels who rolled them. When they moved to the Quechee location, they doubled production to 1,500 to 2,000 bagels a day. A bag of three bagels costs $5.99 at the store in Quechee.
The fresh bagel is a prized entity this far north of Midtown Manhattan and south of Montreal. Over the years, there have been many purveyors in the Upper Valley, from the Bagel Basement locations in Hanover and Lebanon, and White River Junction’s Baker’s Studio in the 1990s and early aughts to the Orford-based Goose & Willie’s, which made 7,500 hand-rolled New York-style bagels a week before closing a few years ago.
Existing bagel outposts include The Wild Fern, in Stockbridge, Vt., which sells bagels through Roma’s Butchery and First Branch Coffee in Royalton, Wee Bird Bagel Cafe in Randolph, which makes bagels fresh daily, and The Works, a New England chain that has outlets in Hanover and at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.
Selling the Simpsons’ bagels appealed to Gillingham’s because there was a gap in the local market, Rozana Ndreca, the store’s grocery buyer, said.
“There’s not really a place to get them fresh,” Ndreca said in a phone interview. She prefers The Woodland Fairy’s Asiago bagel.
“It’s hard to find a good bagel, and they made that happen,” she said. Even the gluten free bagels pass muster.
Gillingham’s now stocks The Woodland Fairy’s entire wholesale offering, including bagels, doughnuts, cinnamon rolls and cookies, Ndreca said.
The company’s products are available at the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society’s stores, at Woodstock Village Market, Woodstock Farmers Market, South Woodstock Country Store, Jake’s Markets and smaller locations around the Upper Valley.
The company’s expansion is ongoing. They have moved into catering and are working on expanding their wholesale business. They also are planning to reopen the classic Worcester diner visible from their storefront in Quechee Gorge Village as a place to sell their wares and such American classics as ice cream and shakes. And they’ve been invited to represent Vermont at the annual Eastern States Exposition.
They also donate wares to food pantries, rather than toss them out, and offer discounts to police, firefighters and teachers. They feel they’ve been blessed with good fortune and want to pass it on.
“It’s just been a great journey,” Scott Simpson said.
For more information about The Woodland Fairy, go to thewoodlandfairyvt.com.
