The Artisan: Chancey

The baker behind Banana Manna puts love in the loaves.

The word manna is mentioned three times in the King James Bible. In the Old Testament, manna is a blessing sent on the morning frost to save the starving Israelites who had escaped from Egypt. The Israelites ground this manna and pounded it into cakes before baking. When done, manna tasted something like bread baked in oil. In the New Testament, manna becomes the foundation for the living bread that promised everlasting life. Chancey Lindsey-Peake does not make such a bold promise about her own bread, but Banana Manna bread was certainly good enough to change at least one life—her own.

Like Oprah who is known by one name only, Chancey is beloved throughout her community and known by just her first name. She retired after working for eighteen years as a surgical nurse. During that retirement, she made choices that led to an incarceration. Upon her release, Chancey felt a call to start a prison ministry and found employment with a prominent Greenville family as a nanny and housekeeper, a job she loved. It was by request that she made her first loaf of banana bread, a simple recipe passed down from her employer’s mother.

The first loaf quickly became a fan favorite with the family she worked with and their circle of friends, but Chancey knew that she could make it better. “I come from a long line of bakers. My grandmother baked, my mother baked, and my brother baked. I was a cook,” she says. “I never wanted to bake. I mean, who wants to compete with their brother? I’d rather stay in my lane.” But an inner voice encouraged her to keep at it.

Even with a dedicated fanbase, Chancey gave loaves away for free while working to improve upon the recipe. It wasn’t until the family she worked for moved away that the real impetus occurred to take those loaves of love seriously. “They moved away, but the bills stayed,” she says. This life change gave her to the opportunity to have “an ear to hear” what everyone had been telling her about the banana bread.

“God woke me up one morning and filled my spirit with a name,” Chancey says. Her business vision for Banana Manna was born.

Chancey set up her first booth at the Pickens Flea Market and remembers she had no idea what to charge for a loaf. As customers came by her booth, she began to get the impression that she was underselling her wares. Customers also informed her of other local markets where she could set up shop, including the TD Farmer’s Market. Nine years later, Chancey and Banana Manna are a fixture at the lucrative market where she sells eight traditional loaf bread flavors as well as seven varieties including paleo, sugar-free and gluten-free variations, all produced by hand at her commercial bakery just off Wade Hampton Boulevard.

The slot at the Saturday Market has allowed Chancy to dream bigger. In 2017, Lowes Foods opened their first store in Simpsonville. As a company who boasts, “you can’t fake local,” they reached out to local vendors, one of whom was Banana Manna. Chancey’s loaves are in both Upstate stores, Five Points and Suber Road in Greer, as well as all three of the stores in Columbia. With all of this going on, you would assume that Chancey has a crew of people backing, transporting, and manning the tables at the farmers markets. But outside of her sister who helps her run the tent at Saturday Market, Chancey and her husband Denis fully run all day-to-day operations; not even a recent knee replacement has managed to slow her down.

And that’s a good thing, since business is only growing. As more people discover Banana Manna, Chancey has found more and more fans of the bread that only be described as a gift.