Bread By Us: Care in Every Loaf, Room for Everyone

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Map showing location at 45.3991846, -75.7358082

Some people grow up with the smell of fresh bread waiting for them after school. Jessica Carpinone was one of them, second-generation Italian with her grandparents in the house, and when she left home in her twenties she noticed the absence right away. “If I don’t make this bread, will I ever eat it again?” she remembers thinking. She opened Bread By Us in December 2013 with her partner Sarah Alahdal, with long-time team member Rachel Danesin later joining them in ownership in 2021.

A Little Plant That Needed Repotting

For 11 years the shop ran out of a small Hintonburg space: bread, pastry, coffee, grab and go, and demand kept outgrowing the room. This past year they moved into a Wellington Village address four times the size, a former central kitchen for Bridgehead and later Pure Kitchen, never retail before. Most of it stays a production kitchen, with a 30-seat café carved out of the front. “We’re like a little plant that needed to be repotted,” Carpinone says. The address sits off the main road, so they splashed the facade in bright orange.

Every Mug Thrown by Hand

Alahdal is a ceramicist, and her work is all over the room. She made every mug in the house, each one a little different, glazed in the bakery’s colours and stamped Bread By Us. “People will grab a mug from the espresso machine and just be like, oh my God, this is so beautiful,” says Carpinone. She also made the ceramic plaques set into the tables, hand-lettered with the names of everyone who backed the move on Kickstarter. The walls carry family photo collages and art tied to both founders’ roots.

The Trifecta

Start with the focaccia, a three-day process that turns up as sandwiches, slabs, buns and versions with toppings baked right on. The white sourdough is the bestseller, a hybrid of starter and yeast, tangy but never dense or punishing. The croissants get the same treatment, mixed, laminated, cut and shaped by hand, a real labour of love. Coffee is Happy Goat espresso, with syrups made in house and a hazelnut latte with real hazelnut butter. “It’s like if a bunch of bakers made a coffee menu,” Carpinone jokes.

The Us in Bread By Us

Every detail that goes into Bread By Us is filled with intention and care, staff included. Livable wages, benefits since the bakery’s second year: nobody here is treated as temporary labour. There’s no tip jar either, on purpose: “It’s our responsibility to pay our employees,” says Carpinone. The same thinking shaped the hiring, a workplace with real room for women, queer folks and newcomers to stay a while.

More than a decade in, they finally have a space that can hold everything they want to build, and the bread is reaching more corners of the city. Carpinone once worried that leaving home meant leaving that bread behind. She has spent every year since making sure nobody else has to.


Photography by Bread By Us





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