Motor repair company sues shuttered Hope bakery and its parent over $19,870 in unpaid invoices

HOPE, Ark. – A Tennessee industrial repair company has become the latest supplier to take the closed Hope Baking Company and its Massachusetts parent to court, suing Friday in Hempstead County Circuit Court over three unpaid bills for motor work done at the plant in the year before it shut down.

Mock, Inc., which does business as Hi-Speed Industrial Service, says Hope Baking and East Baking Company Inc. owe it $19,870.66 for inspecting, repairing and replacing electric motors at the bakery at 2700 E. Third St. between June and September 2025. The complaint, filed just after noon Friday and assigned to Circuit Judge Joe C. Short, asks for the unpaid balance plus a 5 percent late fee on each invoice, attorney’s fees, collection costs and interest.

It is the third suit filed against the bakery in Hempstead County this year and the second since the plant closed July 25, putting roughly 250 people out of work.

Hi-Speed, based in Millington, Tenn., with a shop in Little Rock, repairs and rebuilds electric motors, pumps, gearboxes and overhead cranes for factories across the region. According to the complaint, East Baking’s maintenance, inventory and purchasing manager, Curtis Morris, requested and approved the work. Each invoice was billed to Hope Baking in care of East Baking at its headquarters at 104 Whiting Farms Road in Holyoke, Mass.

The three invoices, attached to the complaint, tell a small story about the plant’s final year. In late June 2025, Hi-Speed picked up a 150-horsepower General Electric motor, inspected it and sent it back July 1 without repairs, billing a $650 inspection fee. On July 24, 2025, it delivered a new 150-horsepower motor to the plant for $8,666.66. In September it tore down a second motor, rewound the stator, fabricated a new shaft, replaced the bearings and seals, balanced the rotor and returned it to Hope on Sept. 16, 2025, for $10,554.

Each invoice was due in 30 days. None was paid, the complaint says.

Hi-Speed says it pressed for payment by phone, email and letter, and on May 29, 2026, its lawyers sent a final demand to both the Hope plant and the Holyoke headquarters giving the companies until June 15 to pay in full. The letter went unanswered, the complaint says. Seven weeks after that letter, Hope Baking told its workers the plant was closing.

The suit pleads breach of contract and, in the alternative, unjust enrichment, and asks that the two companies be held jointly liable. Joseph W. Price II and Ally D. Shaw of Quattlebaum, Grooms & Tull in Little Rock represent Hi-Speed. Summonses were issued Friday for both defendants.

A growing stack of unpaid bills

The Hi-Speed suit joins a Hempstead County docket that has filled up with the bakery’s creditors.

Booth Electronic Distribution Inc., a Texarkana, Ark., seller of commercial bakery parts at 617 Laurel St., sued Hope Baking and East Baking on Aug. 4 over about 20 invoices for parts and equipment delivered between May 15 and Oct. 1, 2025. Booth says it is owed $58,614.44 and has demanded a jury trial. Its attorney is Matthew Q. Soyars of Soyars & Soyars in Texarkana, Texas.

Serving East Baking took some doing. According to an affidavit filed Wednesday, a process server went to the Holyoke headquarters on Aug. 24 and was told by a receptionist that the company does not accept service and that she would not say whether it had a registered agent. He left the summons and complaint in front of her and walked out. The docket shows no answer from either company and no proof of service yet on Hope Baking, whose registered agent is listed at a West Fifth Street address in Hope.

Before the closure, Sysco Arkansas LLC won a default judgment of $11,075.39 plus costs against Hope Baking on June 22 after the company never answered a suit filed in February. Judge Short signed that judgment too. TXKtoday reported in July that Hope Baking had been sued by at least three creditors beginning in 2023 and defaulted every time.

Together, the two suits filed since the closure seek about $78,500. That is small next to the fight in federal court in Texarkana, where the plant’s former owner, Southern Bakeries LLC, sued East Baking and Hope Baking on Oct. 2 for more than $5.6 million it says it is owed under the 2023 sale of the plant and the lease on the building. A class action by former employees under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act is also pending before U.S. District Judge John Thomas Shepherd, with the companies asking that it be dismissed on the ground that their finances were too dire to give 60 days’ notice.

Hope Baking and East Baking have not filed anything in either Hempstead County case. Under Arkansas rules, a defendant has 30 days after being served to answer.