Forsyth County’s first sourdough bakery opens in Cumming

Forsyth County now has its first sourdough bakery, and Scout’s Sourdough opened a storefront at 5535 Bannister Road in Cumming after years as a home-based operation. The bakery marked its arrival with a grand opening on June 19, giving local shoppers a dedicated sourdough stop in the county seat.

Owner Scout Samples built the business from home before taking the leap into brick-and-mortar retail. In her online profile, Samples described Scout’s Sourdough as a self-taught bakery she built from the ground up, and said it grew by more than 80% in the past year. That growth helps explain why the business could support a storefront now: the customer base was already large enough to move beyond a home kitchen and into a permanent shop in Cumming.

The opening also lines up with the way sourdough has held its place in the broader baking market. The Kitchn updated its sourdough bread guide on Sept. 21, 2023, and King Arthur Baking maintains a sourdough baking guide of its own. In other words, sourdough has stayed visible well beyond Forsyth County, and Scout’s Sourdough is betting that the category’s national appeal now has local traction in Cumming.

The shop’s schedule points to a bakery designed to pull in destination traffic. Its grand opening ran from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., while other public posts promoted a 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. opening or until sold out. That kind of timetable suggests a business built around early bread runs, limited-batch sales and planned visits, not just drive-by convenience.

For Forsyth County, the opening says something about the next wave of small businesses choosing the area. Scout’s Sourdough is not a general bakery trying to do everything. It is a focused, single-category shop that found enough demand to open in Cumming, and enough confidence in local spending patterns to make a specialty product its only storefront draw.