Step into John Goncher’s stone-faced home in Rosemont and you’ll find the trappings of a Main Line living room: plush drapes, hardwood floors, a painting above the fireplace. But don’t be fooled. This is a production bakery.
Where you might expect a loveseat and an armchair, Goncher has an industrial refrigerator and a 5½-foot wood-top table with several 50-pound bags of flour stacked on the stainless-steel shelf underneath. Instead of framed family portraits and knick-knacks, surfaces are lined with loaf pans, proofing baskets, and tubs of whole-grain flour. Next to a floor lamp there’s a speed rack, ready to wheel dough across the room to one of two freestanding Belgian bread ovens.
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Somehow, this setup flies in the Goncher family. “We were in the living room on Christmas... maybe one or two other times,” Goncher says, noting one dissenter. “My wife will disagree, my son and my daughter will back it up.”
Goncher transformed this space to accommodate his one-man sourdough outfit, Wild Yeast Bakehouse, which bakes up 350 naturally fermented loaves a week. He delivers a hundred or so loaves to a handful of wholesale clients along the Main Line; he takes a similar amount to the Sunday morning Media farmers market, where he’s often cleaned out in the first hour of business. The rest are delivered to the doorsteps of roughly 130 subscribers in a 6-mile radius from Goncher’s house, from Ardmore to Berwyn, Havertown to Wayne, just hours after they’re pulled from the oven. The bread is usually still warm when Goncher arrives.
Goncher is attempting to fill what he identifies as a surprising dearth of sourdough specialists in his pocket of the Main Line. Sure, you can score a naturally leavened loaf at the bakery counters of Carlino’s Market or Whole Foods, but between Bala Cynwyd and Berwyn, Goncher argues, sourdough from a small-batch maker is in short supply.
Of course, you can find some: Malvern Buttery sells sourdough baguettes, sandwich loaves, seeded boules, and more daily. Bryn Mawr’s Up-Ryes Bagel bakes up crusty country-style levain for its breakfast and lunch sandwiches; customers can nab a whole loaf if they order one 48 hours ahead. Northeast Philly’s Wild Flour Bakery vends at the Bryn Mawr farmers market, and High Street attends Bala Cynwyd’s market. In Downingtown, Brandywine Valley Bread incorporates heritage wheat flours into its naturally leavened loaves.
» READ MORE: Dead King Bread, an offbeat sourdough bakery, finds a home in a Northwest Philly sawmill
But Goncher has a point, especially if you compare Radnor, Merion, and Haverford townships to Philly, where sourdough bakeries abound, from early entrants like Metropolitan Bakery to newcomers like Downtime Bakery. There’s definitely room for more bread on the Main Line.
That’s part of why Goncher was confident in Wild Yeast’s trajectory when he launched the bakery in 2021, after a 30-year career in corporate finance. He started nurturing his half-rye, half-bread flour starter during 2020, “when probably 50% of the country was making sourdough starter,” he acknowledges. But Goncher’s path was different from the get-go.
From finance to fermentation
Many cottage businesses grow organically, often inspired by a cherished family recipe or friends urging someone to pursue a longtime hobby professionally; sometimes they’re side hustles that spool up over time.
Goncher’s story is less romantic. In 2019, Goncher left a job as the CFO of an energy company. He looked for another role in the field but found his heart wasn’t in it anymore. “The accounting side [of being a CFO] just bored me to tears,” he says. “I lost the creativity that I had earlier on in my in my career and it just wasn’t the same.”
Instead, he decided to capitalize on his past experiences working with small businesses, but this time, it would be his own. Influenced by Michael Pollan books like Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Goncher gravitated toward food businesses. He considered culinary courses, food trucks, restaurants, market storefronts. “And then the pandemic hit and that made it a lot easier for me, because most of those things went away.”
One type of food business seemed to fare better than most during the pandemic: bakeries. Goncher took note. He assessed what he might bake — pastries felt more complicated and less nutritious — and landed on a sourdough subscription model.
He investigated home-based sourdough bakeries online and contacted a few for advice, finding blueprints not only for baking success but business practices. With his starter steadily percolating, he dove into bread-baking, calling on his family and honest neighbors for taste-testers. Over a few months, his sourdough loaves became consistently airy, crusty, and chewy.
With that, Goncher got his limited food establishment license with the state. Though he was still baking in his home kitchen — cooking two loaves at a time in twin cast-iron Dutch ovens — he earmarked his living room as expanded production space. He invested $5,000 in equipment and ingredients.
“When the first 50-pound bag of flour showed up on the porch, my daughter looked at me and ... and she said, ‘You’re never gonna go through this,’” Goncher remembers.
Wild Yeast Bakehouse officially opened in April 2021 with 10 bread-share customers, each receiving a large (2.2-pound) or small (1.2-pound) loaf of bread weekly for $26 and $36 a month, respectively. It gained another handful of subscribers each month as word spread through neighbors.
Then, in July 2021, the nonprofit Farm to City approached Goncher about joining the Media farmers market, to replace a bread vendor that had departed. He had been budgeting for something like this, but the opportunity came much sooner than expected. The market indicated he could do 200+ transactions each week — quadruple the amount of bread he was baking at the time.
“That was mind-boggling. How could I go from two loaves at a time to serving a few 100 people at a farmers market?”
Living room forever?
Thanks to the fortuitous arrival of his Rofco brick oven in October 2021, Goncher has been able to meet Wild Yeast’s demand. Bread share has grown 60% since last year, and Wild Yeast nearly sells out of its farmers market inventory each week. (His goal is to bake exactly how much he needs.)
Volume has improved his margins — and his bread. To bake the eight or so varieties of sourdough he offers, from plain sourdough and deli-style rye to cinnamon raisin and olive-herb, Goncher picks up 1,200 pounds of bread flour at a time from a Central Pennsylvania supplier, enough to pay wholesale rates. He supplements that with whole grains (einkorn, rye, polenta, spelt) from Bucks County’s Castle Valley Mill.
At $8 or $9 a loaf, Goncher turns a profit, even if he isn’t the breadwinner. He has since day 1, he says, acknowledging that while it’s an immensely fulfilling second act, this livelihood would be very tough if he done it earlier. “You gotta sell a lot of $8 loaves to pay for a house and car,” he says.
Goncher knows there are plenty more potential Main Line sourdough subscribers out there, and he intends to convert them. But his wife — who, for the record, Goncher says has been nothing but supportive — isn’t getting the living room back anytime soon. With his kids away at college and med school and a newly installed second oven, he thinks he can double Wild Yeast’s weekly production all by himself, right from his home. (He is considering hiring a delivery driver, though.)
“What I’ve learned is that whether it’s six loaves or 200 people at the farmers market, you just have to you just figure out a way to do it,” he says. “And then you do it and you’re like, ‘OK, that wasn’t so bad.’”
To learn more about Wild Yeast Bakehouse, go to wildyeastbakehouse.com.
