Lauren Ellis pitched a French viennoiserie bakery on a Wednesday night at the Wayne State University Industry Innovation Center, in front of judges and a public that had cast 21,000 votes. She won. Walter Pat's Bakery Cafe took home the 2025 Comerica Hatch Detroit Contest, and with it the $100,000 grand prize and a TechTown business-support package that Ellis will use to open a brick-and-mortar in Detroit's District 5.
Walter Pat is Ellis's grandmother. The bakery is named for her. Ellis spent more than a decade as a pastry chef in New York, Chicago, and Sydney, Australia, and her plan for Walter Pat's is to make the kind of viennoiserie that small Parisian bakeries are known for: laminated doughs, butter-heavy croissants, brioche, Danish, specialty breads, the standard French breakfast canon.
Then she plans to bend the menu toward Michigan seasonal produce and Southern flavor combinations she grew up around. Hatch Detroit has been doing this since 2012. The 13th annual contest pulled in $1.3 million in cumulative Comerica investment over the program's history and crowned Walter Pat's after narrowing 10 semifinalists to four: Detroit Culture & Clay, Halie & Co, Livy's Sweet Rolls, and Walter Pat's.
The runner-ups each took home $10,000 from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation's Small Business Support Hub program. The grand prize package, sized to seed a real storefront, has historically gone to businesses that survived. G.L.A.M.
Body Scrubs, Bouncing Around the Motor City, Little Liberia, Baobab Fare, Sister Pie, and Batch Brewing have all been past winners. Ellis is District 5 by family history. Her grandmother lived there.
The plan is to put the storefront on a corner that Walter Pat herself would have walked past, sized for the morning rush of croissants and the Saturday line. Construction has not started. The grant doesn't equal the full build; it covers what a Detroit-based small bakery needs to bridge the gap between the kitchen Ellis trained in and the one she's trying to open.
The Hatch alumni list is the better measure of what comes next. Most of the past 12 winners are still operating. The few that aren't faced their failures publicly.
Ellis is now at the start of that arc. Walter Pat's Bakery Cafe, District 5, Detroit.
