Always on
This project successfully funded on 28th June 2025, you can still support them with a donation.
Rise with Us: Growing Our Sourdough Bakery
Fordingbridge, Hampshire, United Kingdom
Aim: Help us raise £10,000 to expand our sourdough bakery with new equipment, more breads, and a dedicated space to grow and hire locally.
Hi, I’m Kate, and I run a small sourdough bakery from our family home in Rockbourne, Hampshire. I’ve always believed food should nourish, comfort, and bring people together — and that’s the heart of what I do.
Before this, my husband and I ran successful catering businesses together. But when the pandemic hit, we lost everything. With four young kids to care for and no way to return to the long hours of catering, I needed to find a new path — one that could work around family life and still reflect my love of feeding people well.
I retrained as a Nutritional Therapist, and my passion for real, honest food only deepened. I started baking sourdough at home — slow-fermented, gut-friendly, nutrient-rich bread — using traditional techniques and the best ingredients I could source. I wanted to go back to the old ways of preparing food with care, intention, and love.
What began as a handful of loaves shared with neighbours quickly grew. A year later, I have 10 wholesale customers, weekly orders, and new enquiries coming in all the time. We’ve added granola to the offering, and customers are asking for more — from pizza bases to focaccia, baguettes, and sandwich loaves.
Why I Need Your Help
The demand is there — but I’ve reached the limits of what I can do in our current space, with our small domestic equipment. I’m ready to grow — to convert a room in our home into a dedicated bakery, invest in a proper mixer and bread oven, and take the next step towards hiring a baker to help share the load.
To do that, I need to raise £10,000.
My vision is to continue to grow the bakery, aquire more wholesale customers but also create a delivery arm so we can reach more individual customers in the local villages.
As a Nutritional Therapist, I'm incredibly passionate about helping people move away from highly processed foods which are damaging to the microbiome, immune system and even mental health. Bread is a UK staple and yet so many people tell me they can only eat bread in Europe, as at home it leaves them feeling bloated, and with digestive complaints. This is because of the way wheat is so often treated; hybrid dwarf wheat is heavily sprayed with a chemical of pesticides, ground using industrial machinery which removes almost all nutrients. Commercial processing aids are then added during the baking process along with preservatives to ensure a long shelf life.
Real bread should have only Flour, Water & Salt. The Sourdough fermentation process makes the gluten in the wheat gluten asker on the digestive system and enhances the nutritional value of the product.
I use the best quality, organic flour I can source including heritage grains, ancient grains such as Spelt & Rye and I've also partnered with the local Mill at Alderholt to use their Wholemeal flour, ground using the water mill and French burr stones.
I believe in keeping real food alive, rooted in old traditions and honest ingredients and bringing people together through the simple joy of good bread
I would use the funds to invest in the following to grow the bakery:
- Extra fridges and bannetons to increase capacity
- A commercial mixer to save my sore shoulders and allow more time to increase my offerings into baguettes, focaccia, pizza dough and more.
- A second bread oven to double my output. We invested in a Rofco B40 which bakes 12 loaves in one cycle, it's proved wonderful but I'm already maxing it out as I'm now reaching 150 loaves a week....to double my deck space would mean I could launch extra product lines.
- Either to convert a large room in my home into a food safe bakery space or invest in an external unit for the garden which can be converted and optimised for space for making dough, shaping loaves, baking, cooling & packaging all in one space.
If you believe in real food, small businesses, and helping people rise after tough times — I’d love your support.
Thank you for reading and for being part of our journey.