La Segunda is celebrating its 110th anniversary July 18, but no one is actually sure of the exact year the family-owned Tampa Bay bakery was launched. Nor does anyone outside the inner circle know the precise bake time of La Segunda’s famous Cuban loaves.
It’s not even certain how founder Juan Moré learned how to make Cuban bread.
Copeland More at the St. Petersburg La Segunda Cuban Bakery & Cafe. Catalyst file photo.
There are a lot of unknowns in the Moré family story, but one thing that’s for sure is that they’ve been at the top of the baking game since they tapped into the market sometime in the early 1900s.
“My great-grandfather was born in Spain and came to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War,” said Copeland More (the family dropped the accent many years ago), Juan’s great-grandson and the current owner and operator of La Segunda Bakery & Cafe.
“A lot is lost in the history, but at some point he learned how to make Cuban bread. And then either when the war was over, or sometime after he served, he came to Ybor City with the huge rush of the cigar industry.
“Ybor City was the world’s largest producer of cigars at that point in time, so it had a booming economy. His trade was making Cuban bread, and that’s what he did.”
The bakery has always been a family business. Juan passed the bakery down to his sons, who eventually passed the business down to their sons, who expanded La Segunda to include retail. Copeland’s father was Anthony “Tony” More, who passed away in 2023 at age 80.
Copeland, who joined the business full-time in 2009, takes pride in putting out a successful product. However, he says that the people behind La Segunda are what bring him the most joy.
“We’ve had several employees that were there before I was born; I grew up with them. One employee who retired last year, Sheila, she was just family. They become family. She watched me grow up and at some point I became her boss. That’s cool to me.
“And there’s a lot of people that have been there across generations. Their grandfather was a baker and then their uncle. There’s just so many stories and cross-tales of people that come into the bakery and say, ‘Oh, when I was little, I took a tour of the bakery, and now I bring my grandson who’s also going to take a tour of the bakery.’ It’s a big part of the community in Tampa, and I just feel lucky to be a part of that.”
Each loaf is triple-proofed and scored with a palmetto leaf before heading into the oven.
While many people call La Segunda a Cuban bakery, Copeland More prefers a different classification.
“No, it’s not a Cuban bakery – we’re an Ybor City bakery,” he insisted. “We’ve got Italian influence, Spanish influence, Cuban influence and even some German-style pastries. Some people don’t like that, you know, but people that were born around here understand it. It’s just the influence of the city [Tampa]. All the immigrants from your city are from those different cultures, and that’s how the food evolved.”
La Segunda has continued to evolve and expand, and as its fourth generation owner Copeland has been responsible for much of this growth. There are now three locations in Tampa – and one in St. Pete, which has been operating at 2436 4th Street N. since 2022.
One of the biggest contributions that Copeland has made to La Segunda’s brand presence is the expansion of its wholesale market. The bakery turns out over 20,000 loaves of Cuban bread daily, and Copeland takes pride in the fact that they still make it the old-fashioned way: each loaf is triple-proofed and scored with a palmetto leaf before heading into the oven and shipped out across the world. Bakers work around the clock at the main bakery in Ybor.
La Segunda’s biggest clients include names like Beef O’Brady’s, Publix, Raymond James Stadium, and food service companies like Cisco and Gordon Foods – but the bakery also services lesser-known markets.
“I think what people find most surprising is that our bread gets shipped up to Alaska,” Copeland said. “Oh my gosh, yeah, we sell quite a bit of bread up there.”
Through July 18, all La Segunda locations will offer certain bread and espresso anniversary discounts.