About us

Beachwood Bakery was founded in 2020 by Julia Cotts, who moved from Los Angeles with her young family to Devon in 2016. With a background in and passion for sustainability in the world of food, she set about finding local food producers that shared this mindset, and was thrilled to find so many.

She created Beachwood Bakery both as a way to showcase the beautiful produce in Devon, and as an outlet to experiment with ingredients grown close to home.

Since its opening, Beachwood has evolved into a bustling hub of neighbourly kinship, and has built an incredible team that underpins its success. Beachwood Bakery was recently named by the Financial Times’s How To Spend It Magazine as one of the “50 Greatest Food Stores on the Planet”.

At Beachwood, we make all of our bread using flour that has been organically grown and stone-milled in the UK, most of it coming from Gilchesters Organics in Northumberland. Our sourdough loaves are made using the time-honoured tradition of a long fermentation with wild yeasts and bacteria that create deliciously flavoursome and digestible bread. However, we aren’t purists when it comes to sourdough, and use dried yeast in some of our breads and pastries where we just can’t get a light enough texture without it.

Like our flour, every ingredient used at the bakery is chosen with care. Where ingredients are available produced in the UK, and are affordable to use in a commercial setting, they are used over a foreign counterpart. In many cases, this means we don’t use certain ingredients that most bakeries use. For instance, we’ve eliminated most seeds and nuts from our breads and pastries (except for holidays and special occasions), making exceptions for those produced sustainably in Europe.

We believe that for an ingredient to be shipped half-way around the world it should be extremely special and without substitute (such as vanilla beans). In 2022 we broke ground on a new plot in the walled garden behind the bread bakery just up the road from the shop, and over the coming years hope to have an abundance of fresh herbs, flowers, and soft fruit to use in our products.