Our story

We are Polina and Vlad (Volodymyr) and after immigrating from Ukraine in 2022 we started a new life and a gluten-free bakery producing healthy celiac safe gluten-free sourdough breads in Minneapolis, MN.

Long before we could dream about baking healthy GF bread, in our past lives, we lived in Kiev, Ukraine, and were working in IT (me) and aromatherapy (Polina), and few days before our reality has changed forever we enjoyed a walk in a park on a sunny February weekend of 2022.

We landed in Minnesota in OCT 2022 and after months of being on the road our cat Mira was finally happy to be in a place she could call home. Here is a proof of how she was eager to get her paws to Minnesota:

Why Minnesota, of all places, you would ask? The answer, is friendship that has started over 20 years ago, in a small town of Mankivka, Ukraine, where a Peace Corp Volonteer named Emily Awaijane (Kanz back then) was teaching English at my school for over two years and opened a new world for me, called Америка (America).

Fast forward to OCT, 2022, Polina, myself, Mira and our three suitcases landed in Minneapolis and got our first jobs in St. Louis Park and, gradually started to get back to normality. We were struggling with finding fresh GF bread and Polina got back to baking bread at home, just as she used to do in Kyiv.

The idea of baking bread started brewing in our heads, and as we shared home baked loaves with our GF friends, we immediately got positive feedback and orders for more. Summer 2023, we decided to pitch the bread to the owners of Hold The Wheat GF Bakery in St.Louis Park - Spencer Justiniano and Ed Snyder, just to see if we could produce for the bakery. They tried samples and loved the bread.

To our surprise, the owners insisted that we started our own brand, use their kitchen in the after-hours to bake the bread, and sell on our own during the day in order to get started. We LOVED the idea, applied for cottage food license, and with few sleepless nights, number of test runs in the oven and racing hearts we announced first sales to launch on a hot August Saturday. Our jaws dropped when 40 loaves were sold out in under 90 minutes after the sales started at 8:00 AM that Saturday... and there it began...

We both had full time jobs during the day (Polina started helping at Hold The Wheat bakery and I worked for IT service company), baked during the night, packed the bread super early morning, and sold the bread at the bakery during Friday and the weekends leaving time for only few hours of sleep. After two months we decided to pivot, leave our jobs and dedicated ourselves to perfecting the loaves (which they desperately needed):

The demand grew and we started thinking about our own kitchen and offering bread to more people through retailers. It made sense, our capacity was limited, the demand grew and we have never done anything with more passion than crafting a sourdough loaf. So we started looking for a place in October 2023, and our options narrowed down pretty soon to one location that was small but had everything we needed to provide celiac safe bread and it was expensive. We found a way to finance equipment, we made a business plan and signed our lease.

In the meantime, Polina's health deteriorated as sleepless nights started catching up with us, but ahead of holiday season we kept on pushing. Christmas week kept us on our feet and without any sleep for 3 days... and that's when Polina's thyroid decided to completely shut down sending her into 3 week break from baking. We were not aware of what was going on until blood tests showed that her organs were on the brink of failing. Very gradually, after starting hormone replacement therapy, she started getting back to normal. Phew.... We kept on going.

January 2024, we were supposed to move into our kitchen and get our commercial license, but utilities at the facility could not support our needs and it came out of the blue along with expensive invoices and delays.

February, 2024, we moved in, passed inspections, and got our commercial license!!!! We could not believe ourselves when we made our first batch at the new kitchen!!!! We started adding on new partnerships like Brim restaurant, Eastside Coop to name a few.

The story goes on...