From college apartments on Greene Street to a busy new bakery that got its start at Soda City Market, homemade bread has become one of Columbia’s most popular food trends.

The local movement mirrors a growing national interest in homemade breadmaking. Sourdough was one of the fastest-growing bakery trends of 2025, according to Puratos Taste Tomorrow research. There are more than 1.4 million posts under #sourdough on TikTok. It’s more than a social media moment in Columbia though. It’s a ground-level shift toward health and sustainability.

College students represent a younger group following the sourdough trend. University of South Carolina student Jenna Glies started baking bread about a year ago after seeing it repeatedly online.

“I kept seeing it all over TikTok, Instagram, everywhere,” Glies said. “And then one of my friends – she already had a starter going – and she was like, ‘Here, just take some of this,’ and I was like, ‘OK, I guess I’m doing this now.’”

What she thought would be a one-time boredom buster turned into a weekly hobby. She bakes out of her college apartment, sharing the loaves with her roommate and any friends who stop by. She was certain her first loaf would be a disaster, she said, until she opened the oven.

“I pulled it out, and it had this beautiful crust on it, and it had actually risen,” she said. “I cut into it, and I was like, ‘Wait. This is actually good?’ I was genuinely shocked.”

Stay-at-home mom Emily Sizemore began baking her own bread about two years ago, starting out with yeast bread before discovering sourdough and never looking back.

“When you take your first bite of fresh homemade sourdough, you will never want to buy bread from the store again,” Sizemore said. “It’s three simple ingredients. I bet you can’t find a single loaf of bread in a store with only three ingredients.”

Sizemore bakes to order and hopes to eventually start up as a farm stand. Her first sourdough loaf tasted good but looked like a hockey puck, she said, which did not slow her down.

“Don’t over complicate it,” she said. “The millions of videos make the process look so tedious and messy, when the reality is all you need is flour, water, salt and a container to put it in. After that, learn as you go.”

A West Columbia destination

For Janice Caldwell and Andrew Reininger, sourdough is not a hobby — it is their career.

The two are co-owners of JJ’s Place, a small-batch bakery in West Columbia.

Neither of them started out as breadmakers. Caldwell had been working at an insurance company, while Reininger was running a graphics company. The pivot to bread was not planned.

They knew they wanted to eventually open a bakery, so they applied to be vendors at Soda City Market, Columbia’s Saturday morning farmers market on Main Street. They were originally supposed to sell sweet baked goods, but the market had other plans.

“They immediately said no,” Reininger said. “They said they had enough sweets vendors already, but there was no one doing bread.”

On the application, they had mentioned they also made bread — the problem being that they only had two bread recipes at the time, and neither was sourdough.

“So in about two weeks, we came up with six bread recipes that, looking back, were not our best work,” he said. “We’ve gotten significantly better in the last four years.”

They started doing the market every week, building a reputation as the “bread people,” before eventually opening their brick-and-mortar space in West Columbia. They tore out everything inside the building and renovated the interior themselves. They have been open in that space for less than a year.

Caldwell and Reininger are first-hand observers of the sourdough trend. There are a multitude of reasons people are pulled into it, Caldwell said, including relating to health and sustainability.

“Sourdough is the thing,” she said. “As long as it’s got sourdough in the name, people want it.”

Customers have asked about the ingredients used at JJ’s Place, often comparing the short list on their labels to the paragraph of additives on a supermarket loaf.

“The amount of comments that we hear here about, ‘Yeah, I start looking at the bread in the store, and there’s this long list of ingredients, and yours is four,'” Caldwell said. “Well, yeah, because it doesn’t need to be chemicals.”

JJ’s Place makes around 70 loaves on a given “bake day,” all shaped by hand. The duo has no interest in scaling up with machinery or opening more locations. Instead, their goals are to eventually offer a sit-down lunch service and to convert their backyard space into a food garden for fresh ingredients.

Rosewood sourdough purists

The craft of breadmaking also has bloomed in the Rosewood neighborhood, where Sour & Salt Bakery has become a new destination for bread-lovers.

Before the sun rises each morning, co-owner Oleg Uvarov is already inside the bakery, kneading and folding dough. The process takes over 24 hours from start to finish.

Sour & Salt was founded by Eleni Adkins, who grew up loving the restaurant world but pursued accounting at her father’s suggestion. It wasn’t until she began getting serious about sourdough that she realized the breadmaking skills she had been slowly perfecting could become a business.

The bakery uses a naturally occurring sourdough starter, which is a living culture of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria, for everything it makes.

The result is a lineup of handcrafted loaves, rolls, cookies and other treats, with prices accessible. Loaves are around $8, brownies are $5 and cookies are $4. The mission is straightforward, Adkins said.

A simple food

JJ’s Reininger said he sees the popularity of sourdough as the start of something bigger.

“I really think that the sourdough trend is beginning a whole revolution in the food industry,” he said. “People are realizing that over-processed foods are not great for you.”

Reininger said bread has a long history as a food staple, with food processing in recent years tainting its long-standing reputation.

“Basic bread was the main calorie source for 4,000 years for all of humanity, and then in the last 100 years we kind of ruined that for people,” he said. “Hopefully we’re going back 100 years in that style of just making good food with good ingredients and sharing.”

Caldwell does not describe herself as a fancy baker, something she takes pride in.

“Bread should be simple,” she said. “Pastries should be simple. I’m a simple girl, so you’re not going to find fancy French stuff here. To me, that’s homemade. That’s like opening my home to you. It just should be made with care and love.”