How a Fayetteville Cottage Bakery Built Financial Systems to Grow

In Fayetteville, Arkansas, customers line up for Hopwood Breads before owner Tyler Hopwood has finished setting up his booth at the farmers market.

Hopwood started baking six years ago in a two-bedroom apartment kitchen. He’s since built a lineup of naturally leavened breads, English muffins and sourdough donuts that customers buy up before he can restock the table.

Over the summer of 2026, the bakery’s weekly revenue grew by more than 50%. Since spring, Communities Unlimited (CU) has worked alongside Hopwood as he has focused on the financial side of the business and considered what it will take to grow beyond his home kitchen.

From Boredom to a Business

However, Hopwood did not set out to become a baker. Fresh out of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, he started baking bread because he was bored and had time to fill.

That led him down a series of YouTube rabbit holes. One channel stuck with him, Proof Bread, a cottage bakery in Mesa, Arizona, that started in a home garage before growing into multiple locations.

“Hearing how they spoke about bread, and specifically sourdough bread, inspired me to start baking in general,” Hopwood said. “It made the prospect of being able to do it out of my house and make a living off of it a lot more realistic.”

A Sourdough Starter and Fresh-Milled Flour

Hopwood Breads is built around a sourdough starter he has kept alive from the beginning. He also mills his own whole-grain flour on a tabletop stone mill, using grain shipped from a family-owned farm in Illinois.

“Using fresh milled flour versus whole grain flour you buy off the shelf is light years of difference,” Hopwood said. “You’re preserving a lot of the natural oils and vitamins and nutritional value, and it’s going to have a lot punchier of a flavor because it’s so fresh.”

The bakery’s biggest seller is its sourdough donuts. 

“That’s by far what has made us as successful as we’ve been,” he said.

A Grueling Market Schedule

Getting those products to market takes a lot of time and effort.

Hopwood starts dough on Thursdays. Fridays are devoted to roughly 12 hours of baking. Then he gets up around 1 a.m. Saturday to fry, fill and pack roughly 200 donuts before heading to the Fayetteville Farmers Market. He also sells at a Tuesday evening market in Fayetteville, though Saturday mornings remain his main event.

Working entirely from home meant Hopwood had to find new ways to get more out of a small space.

“Trying to envision how can I scale up while still being in my house,” Hopwood said. “It’s a very do-it-yourself kind of vibe when you’re doing it cottage, constantly trying to grow in a space that isn’t growing with you.”

Putting Numbers Behind the Sales

As output increased, Hopwood also began paying more attention to the business behind it.

When he began working with CU, Hopwood Breads already had strong sales and customer demand. The next question was how to use the numbers behind those sales to make decisions about growth.

CU’s Entrepreneurship Team worked with Hopwood on bookkeeping, cost tracking and growth projections, part of Communities Unlimited’s entrepreneurship work supporting small business owners across the region.

“We were very, very impressed with the levels of market pricing he’d already taken to generate a strong margin based on his cost of goods and time input,” CU Management Consultant Joe Meszaros said. “He already demonstrated he could sell everything he had. How much more was reasonable to expect?”

Testing Decisions Before Making Them

With better financial information in front of him, Hopwood could test decisions before making them, including how much additional overhead the bakery could support and where his own time was most valuable.

Here’s one of them. After years of mixing dough by hand, he recently purchased a spiral mixer using money the bakery had earned, without taking on debt. Along with an industrial oven and a large butcher-block work table, the equipment has made higher-volume production more manageable and opened the door to expanding what he can bring to market.

“I’ve hit the point that I was imagining when I first decided to start selling bread in my tiny apartment,” Hopwood said. “What I have now is what I was envisioning.”

Another decision was hiring his first part-time employee to work the farmers market booth.

With someone else handling sales, he could step away from the table and put more of his time toward baking or resting after several days of long hours.

“I feel like I have my life back now,” Hopwood said. “It’s completely changed my life, and it really has made having a team in that vision of expanding into something even bigger a lot more realistic.”

Beyond the Cottage Model

There are still limits.

Hopwood is now testing how far the cottage model can go before taking on the additional cost of commercial space. One possibility is leasing a production space that would allow him to bake at greater volume and supply multiple selling events during the week.

The longer-term goal is more ambitious. Hopwood wants a customer-facing bakery in Fayetteville where people can walk in for fresh bread, pastries and donuts throughout the week.

“It’s been nice being cottage. There’s very little overhead,” Hopwood said. “But over the last year I’ve had this deep desire to do something so much bigger, and really tap more into this community here in Fayetteville.”

Who knows? Maybe even that potential brick-and-mortar will sell out, too.