The new bakery RYE by Martin Auer has been turning heads in New York City and online with its $60 loaf of rye bread.
"As a baker myself, I’m honestly shocked. $60 for a loaf of bread is completely out of touch," reads one comment on the SoHo bakery's "opening day" Instagram announcement post. "At a time when we should be talking about sustainability, respecting food, and making it accessible, turning a basic food into an overpriced luxury item for the wealthy feels deeply wrong.”
Many others echoed that sentiment across social media, commonly in response to food influencers promoting the place. The chatter added to RYE's virality, making people curious about its story and appeal.
Rye sourdough loaf from RYE by Martin Auer in New York City.
Price points
RYE focuses on one thing: sourdough rye bread. In addition to the $60 loaf, the bakery charges between $6 and $14 for slices of toast with different spreads, such as jam or brie.
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Other products listed on the company’s website include an $80 baseball cap, a $230 knife and a $480 storage container "meticulously crafted and fitted perfectly to accommodate an entire loaf of RYE.”
The bakery opened Sept. 10 on Lafayette Street, and it's owned by father and son Martin and Tim Auer. The family's original bakeries are in Graz and Vienna, Austria.
Tim and Martin Auer at the RYE bakery in SoHo, New York City.
Tim Auer said RYE's sourdough starter is 57 years old, and when looking to start a business in New York, he wanted to sell something the city didn't have.
"If you walk around SoHo, you're going to be able to find some pretty good croissants, right? And if you keep walking, you're going to find some very decent, or even good, baguettes … But there's one thing that's not in the U.S. yet, or hasn't been in the U.S.,” he said, “and that is real rye sourdough bread."
Tim said the $60 price point came from a few factors, such as importing the flour from Austria and operating on one of the most expensive streets in the city. "We try to really (not) shy away from any efforts or costs in order to create the best possible space, but also product,” he said. “So the price is really the result of all the efforts and costs that went into making those.”
Show and sell
Martin Auer told Falstaff in 2024 that he wanted to make a "show bakery" with a fully visible workshop. At the New York location, customers can see the bakers working behind a glass pane.
"We wanted to create this space for people to slow down and experience the bread and the bread-making in the best possible way," Tim said.
Sabrina Carey is among influencers who visited RYE and shared their experiences in short-form videos. She told USA Today she preferred the time she spent visiting over the toast she purchased.
"I think they're really trying to make it like an experience,” she said. “So you're basically going to the rye bread tasting, and then you're going to the toast counter, and then you can see them all making the rye bread."
One RYE clerk she interviewed in her TikTok video told her the bakery only uses four ingredients: 100% rye flour imported from Austria, water, salt and 48 hours of time.
Simplicity seems to be key. In Carey's video, which has more than 1 million views, RYE loaves are the only art on a beige wall in the bakery.
Loaf it off
"I did not buy a loaf of bread because I think the price of that is crazy like everybody else is saying," Carey said.
People in her comment sections expressed similar concerns.
"As a European, I’m just mad that I didn’t come up with this scam myself," reads one comment on her video with over 36,400 likes.
Her video also gained attention on X, formerly Twitter, where users sounded off in quote-tweets and replies, boosting the tweet to more than 9 million views in three days.
"New Yorkers go into debt to eat what I shove into my piehole when I dissociate in front of the fridge for 10 minutes and haven't found absolutely anything else edible," an X user wrote in their native German, receiving more than 38,000 likes.
"There has been quite a lot of noise online," Tim Auer acknowledges. "But it's not like we deliberately aimed for that or tried to push it in any sense. We had an opening where we invited people from the food industry, and that's it."
Others related the RYE craze to the so-called "little treat economy," a trend among Generation Z of buying expensive small snacks to feel luxurious in lieu of large purchases they can't afford, such as a home or car.
Last year, Los Angeles-based grocery chain Erewhon went viral for its $20-plus smoothies promoted by high-end influencers like Hailey Bieber. In July, a $150 chicken tender tower sold in the Hamptons raised eyebrows online.
In 2024, a restaurant in New York's Flatiron District charged $28 for one chicken nugget with caviar on it. The same restaurateurs went viral recently for selling $100 caviar nuggets at the U.S. Open.
