Jo Burke, Kyle Suczynski, and Humna Tak
Forest Bakery | Oak Park, MI
July 2025
After working as a cashier at a pizza shop in New Jersey, Jo Burke made a switch to the kitchen—trading the frustrations of customer service for dough and the deep fryer. Later, she spent time working at grocery stores and vitamin shops, but always found her way back to cooking. When Burke got a job in Detroit working the line at a nearby restaurant, she quickly realized the high-stress environment wasn’t for her. So, she left and took a job at Ochre Bakery, where she met her future business partner, Humna Tak.
Tak grew up in the kitchen, cooking with her parents and playing with an Easy-Bake Oven. She spent her summers in high school working for a catering company in the suburbs of Windsor, Ontario, and eventually moved to Detroit to finish up her undergraduate degree with the goal of becoming a dentist. While pursuing her Master's and working at community clinics, Tak got a weekend job at Sister Pie, tackling the basics of high-volume baking under Rising Stars alum Lisa Ludwinski. When the pandemic hit, she left her dentistry dream behind and decided to commit to baking and pastry full-time. She went on to work at Warda Pâtisserie before joining the team at Ochre Bakery.
There, Burke and Tak forged a lasting friendship with their general manager, Kyle Suczynski. Suczynski—who got her start working front of house at ice cream parlors and takeout spots—learned to cook under Chef Marc Djozlija at Wright & Company before becoming the kitchen manager at Astro and then joining the opening team at Ochre, where she hired Burke and Tak. When the bakery closed in 2022, the three friends parted ways, but soon came back together with an idea. In 2024, Burke, Suczynski, and Tak opened Forest Bakery in Oak Park, where they bring their varied kitchen experiences together to create seasonally inspired baked goods, prepared foods, and pastries like their Pacific Beach pie with passion fruit, key lime, lemon, mascarpone whip, and a graham cracker crust, for their local community and beyond.
