When Sarah Grunewald moved into her neighborhood in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, she filled up a wagon with freshly baked sourdough and walked door-to-door to meet her neighbors.

Grunewald is one of a growing number of stay-at-home moms across the country who run a home-based bread bakery – what this community of sourdough makers has dubbed a “microbakery.” She launched the bakery in her previous neighborhood, first baking wholesale for a local grocery store then offering pickups directly from her porch. When her family moved – into a house that is far more conducive to her scale of baking, with a porch and Dutch door that is ideal for porch pickups – she wanted to alert her new neighbors to what was going on.

“It surprised me how many people were open,” she says, referring to the number of neighbors who accepted bread from a stranger with a wagon. “About 50 percent were weirded out, but the other 50 percent thought it was so cool.”

Many of these neighbors became regular customers.

Not long after, Grunewald’s microbaker friend Macey Merlak moved too – from Aurora, Illinois, to the nearby town of Sugar Grove. Like Grunewald, Merlak loaded up a wagon with loaves and took them to each of her neighbors.

“I love hospitality and meeting new people, and I wanted to meet new people in our neighborhood,” she says. “Which was super-foreign to some people!” Merlak says that many were taken aback at the thought of a random neighbor bringing them a loaf of bread.

In his recent Atlantic cover story, “The Anti-Social Century,” Derek Thompson writes that our culture is increasingly home and phone based, with more and more time spent in isolation. This has the ironic effect of strengthening our closest and most distant connections, what he calls the “inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities).” But, he writes, this dynamic is “wreaking havoc on the middle ring of ‘familiar but not intimate’ relationships with the people who live around us.”

We used to know our neighbors well, he says, and now we do not.

When I read Thompson’s analysis, I immediately thought of microbakers like Grunewald and Merlak: a network of home-based bakers, connected and encouraged through digital relationships with other home-based bakers, yet providing bread in a manner that strengthens connections within their individual neighborhoods.

The microbaker trend has emerged on Instagram and TikTok over the last three years. The majority of bakers who use the microbaker hashtag are stay-at-home moms, many of whom began learning sourdough in 2020 or soon after. These bakers, who also tend to homeschool and include Bible verses on their social media profiles, often describe their digital bond as a gift from God.

The content these bakers create shares a familiar aesthetic: lots of natural light, neutral linens, and wooden furniture. They invite viewers not only into a possible career path, but into a family- and community-centric lifestyle built by bread.

“As a stay-at-home, in-the-home-all-the-time mom,” says Amanda Hobbs, a self-described hobby baker with a weekly porch pickup in Hanford, California, “it’s allowed me to still have community and know that I’m not alone. It’s really helped me mentally.” The community she refers to includes both the digital community of fellow microbakers as well as the in-person community that she connects with each week as they pick up bread.

Hobbs says that while she hasn’t met any of her online baker friends in person, she regularly prays with them and receives encouragement from them through group chats.

“I feel like I was really placed here … like it was God-ordained for me,” says Hobbs.

Long before the term “microbaker” emerged among the social-media-savvy mom crowd, professional bakers burnt out by the pace of the hospitality industry were fostering similar community through home-based bakeries under various cottage industry laws.

Like today’s microbakers, these cottage bakers formed digital community through an online forum called the Fresh Loaf and through the nonprofit Bread Bakers Guild of America. Many continue to gather every April at the Asheville Bread Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and at the Maine Grain Alliance’s annual Kneading Conference each July in Skowhegan, Maine.

Some, like Californian Bonnie Ohara and Tara Jenson, based in the southeastern United States, also garnered large audiences by sharing their community-building lives online.

Ohara, who launched her home-based bakery, Alchemy Bread, in 2014, has long used bread to connect with neighbors. She documented her journey through her blog, where she shared images of the children’s story time she held in her front yard garden and her weekly “Friendship Bake” – a homemade food swap she hosted for neighbors and friends. In 2020, she began teaching digital baking classes and writing blog posts for these new hobby bakers interested in starting up cottage bakeries of their own, before finally releasing two popular cookbooks: one on the basics of baking bread and the other on baking with kids.

Jensen grew her audience by sharing images of bread and pie from her Smoke Signals bakery in the mountains of western North Carolina, where she lived and worked alone. Followers traveled from states away to visit her homestead and take bread-baking workshops. A decade later, after marrying and giving birth to three kids, she and her husband moved to Virginia to be closer to family. Today, Jensen’s posts show snippets of family life and reflect on the complexity of raising kids while writing cookbooks and running a business. Though she still bakes for her new community and teaches workshops, both in-person and online, she’s open about the reality that her life is far more stressful and less aesthetically pleasing than the life she lived before.

My own baking career has followed a similar trajectory to these women. After burning out of the restaurant industry, I began a small-scale bakery subscription in Durham, North Carolina, in 2019. My goal was to balance my work as a baker and as a writer, avoiding further burnout by allowing both sides of my life to complement each other rather than relying on either one as the sole source of income. However, I soon found that the scale that turned any profit at all proved physically unsustainable for me – I could not do either job, baking or writing, well.

All of these bakers are united by their portrayal of the cottage baker’s life as a life that elevates home, beauty, and community. Their businesses grew out of the joy and rest they found in the practice of baking bread, followed by the delight they experienced in sharing loaves with others.

The visual nature of social media, which highlights the cottage bakery’s aesthetic appeal, together with loosening cottage food laws, has made the practice of running a home-based bread business feel more accessible than ever.

But these digital trends can be misleading: running a bakery at a scale that turns a livable profit is physically demanding work. Whether a baker is looking to bake enough to support their family with a full-time income, or simply create some extra cash flow while home with kids, the profit margins are slim and the hours are long.

A single loaf of sourdough takes around twenty-four hours from start to finish, its needs and characteristics changing with the weather. To bake multiple loaves at once requires an attentive baker with an awareness of how to balance both the structure of her day and the flexibility to accommodate the dough’s fluctuations.

“I don’t actually understand how they do it,” Jensen remarked about the growing microbakery trend among stay-at-home moms. While the content shared online offers the illusion of a balanced life, she says that baking bread at scale with small kids underfoot has been impossible for her.

Another reality that is less visible through digital content is the difficulty in building a regular customer base.

Oona O’Toole discovered this the hard way.

After moving from Los Angeles to Carrboro, North Carolina, O’Toole found that the business practices that worked in Los Angeles didn’t translate to her new home. Though she and her husband purchased a home specifically with the goal of converting the garage into a bakery – completing the renovation immediately upon moving – it took a couple of years for her business to get off the ground.

While in California it was common for business owners to first connect with customers through digital platforms like Instagram, O’Toole struggled to find customers this way in North Carolina.

“I needed to be customer-facing at markets,” she says. Her business finally took off when she walked into a local cheese shop and asked if she could supply them with baguettes. From there, she worked her way into a nearby farmers’ market before finally getting a stall at the famed Carrboro market, where she now sells bagels, waffles, and fresh loaves.

Some of her farmers’ market customers have become her closest friends. “I can’t go anywhere in town without someone being like, ‘you make the bagels!’” she laughs. “I’m the infamous bagel lady.”

But even though O’Toole’s bakery, While You’re Up, maintains a line throughout the entire Wednesday and Saturday market, it doesn’t generate enough income for her family. With slim profit margins, even the most beloved baker needs another gig. O’Toole recently accepted a part-time job as a pastry chef at the very cheese shop that helped her bakery get its North Carolina start.

For Merlak and Grunewald, social media influencing is the revenue stream that has allowed their microbakery business to turn a real profit. The income opportunities made possible by creating social media content about running a microbakery far outpaces the revenue from the baking itself. Merlak says that she has actually scaled back her weekly bakes in order to focus more time on creating social media content. Her biggest revenue stream is a digital course that helps other women launch microbakeries of their own.

Watching microbakery-influencer content circulate, as peaceful and aesthetically pleasing as it might be, I can’t help but wonder if the women buying into the microbakery life understand just how difficult of a journey lies ahead. Will they be able to pay back their upfront investment and also earn the income they need to sustain their weekly labor? Or will they burn out, their bodies exhausted by the long hours and heavy lifting required to earn enough to cover their upfront expenses?

When confronted with the realities of running a home bakery, the influencer promises of rich community and financial flexibility begins to sound eerily similar to the promises made by multi-level marketing companies. While in-person, neighborhood relationships are the ultimate goal, the parasocial relationships that promote it obscure the reality of its physical and financial costs.

But perhaps my concerns are beside the point. For many of these women, the financial incentives seem to be secondary to both the digital and in-person relationships the microbakery scene offers in this season of life.

For Hobbs, who claims the term “hobbybaker” rather than “microbaker,” the goal has never been profit or scale. She purposefully caps her weekly bake at just twenty loaves. “I want to find that balance of peace and quiet,” she says, reflecting on the ways she connects with God while alone in the kitchen. “Not so much of the pressure to get sixty loaves out on time.”

Like Merlak and Grunewald, teaching has become the most profitable path forward for me and my breadmaking career – though my own teaching takes place through in-person workshops on baking as a spiritual practice, rather than through content online.

Like Hobbs, I found that baking for others brought me the most joy when limiting myself to a small number of loaves each week for neighbors and friends – the goal of my small home bakery now is not to turn a profit, but to remember the joy and connection made possible through bread. It’s to live out the values I write about in my books and teach in my workshops within my own geographic community.

When it came time for me to upgrade to a wood-fired bread oven, the baker who sold it to me was Tara Jensen, the microbaker who was one of the first on Instagram’s breadmaking scene. “In this phase of life, I just need to go to work in a bakery and draw a regular salary,” she said as we sipped coffee on her porch while her kids picked flowers and snacked on raspberries. The stress of raising a family while running a home bakery and maintaining a social media presence was simply not worth it, she found.

I look around at my life today and see many of the aesthetic markers that perform well online: sunlight, linens, wooden counters, chickens clucking just outside my bakery door, laying the eggs I use in all of my sweets. When neighbors swing by and say hello, or comment, “Hey! You’re the bread lady!” when I’m in town, it really does feel as magical as these digital depictions of the cottage bakery life appear.

The path to making this life financially viable has been long and difficult. While I am eager to support women in building stronger bread ecosystems in their neighborhoods, I would never advise another person to embark on the same journey I have taken to get here.

Perhaps I’m simply jealous that some women appear to be thriving in their home-based bakeries, reaching a profitable level without having to face the struggle of finding a customer base or getting physically worn out in order to succeed. Or perhaps I’m suspicious that the digital mediation of the microbakery trend obscures the true cost of success … even when the communal benefits are very real.

At its best, the growing popularity of home-based bread businesses has the ability to counter the trends Thompson identifies: strengthening relationships with neighbors through farmers’ markets and porch pickups while using digital relationships as a tool to encourage one another in this work.

At its worst, it has the ability to exacerbate them: using digital tools to provide the illusion of an idyllic life, fostering a longing in followers for an unattainable aesthetic ideal, an ideal that is often funded not by bread but by the follower’s desire to imitate.

I am hopeful that, with honesty on the part of influencers and wise discernment on the part of followers, the former can prevail: that bread can serve as a tangible tool for connection in neighborhoods all across the country, and the world.