Bend sourdough baker builds a home business from scratch

Jessica Natvig brought her dehydrated sourdough starter from Marco Island, Florida, to Bend, Oregon, and turned it into Lady Sourdough, a small-batch kitchen operating out of her home. The setup is modest, but the business is real: bread, English muffins and artisan cookies now go to customers at the Northwest Crossing Saturday Farmers Market.

That home-based model is the point. Natvig does the work herself, from rolling to shaping, and she keeps the business visible on social media so buyers can see the labor behind each loaf. In a bakery world crowded with polished brands and expensive storefronts, Lady Sourdough leans on something simpler and harder to fake: direct contact, a local market table and the proof of handmade production.

Natvig’s path into the business was shaped as much by family as by flour. She left a property manager job so she could spend more time at home with her children while continuing to bake. She and her husband are raising three sons, ages 7, 4 and 6 weeks, while trying to recreate in Central Oregon the customer base she had already built in Florida, where her sourdough following had grown large enough to support the family.

That kind of transition is what makes the microbakery model portable. Natvig did not need a retail buildout or a full production line to restart. She needed a home kitchen, a farmers market and enough repeat customers to keep the orders moving. For sourdough bakers looking at selling bread beyond a hobby scale, that is the appeal of the cottage-bakery path: low overhead, direct sales and a personal story that customers can follow from starter to finished loaf.

It also comes with the grind that sourdough hides so well when the crust comes out right. Natvig said her first attempts were frustrating, and one starter went straight into the trash. That detail matters because it cuts through the romance that often surrounds artisan bread. The skill is not just in producing a good boule or a batch of English muffins. It is in absorbing the failures, rebuilding the starter and showing up again the next Saturday.

In Bend, Lady Sourdough has found a setting that fits that rhythm. A home kitchen, a market stall and a dehydrated starter carried across the country are enough to turn a hobby into a business, one hand-shaped batch at a time.