Lockdown’s Unexpected Stars: The Bread Influencers

America is trapped at home and can’t stop making bread—turning a batch of amateur bakers into celebrities.


Kristen Dennis is ready to display her latest masterpiece, a 10-inch, stone-shaped loaf cooked to golden perfection in her Chicago kitchen. She bakes both for taste—her sourdough a little sweeter, less tangy than others—and looks. For this second reason, she has ensured that the bread bears a large, fin-like ridge, a feature called an “ear” created by a special curved blade. It’s a major turn-on for her 179,000 Instagram followers, as is her ability to create her a wildly pockmarked interior texture for her sourdough.

With the bread halved width-wise, she presses a portion into her face as someone might scream into a pillow. “Smells good,” Dennis says. While it may be impossible for her Instagram followers to draw this conclusion from behind their screens, they definitely like what they see. Now more so than ever. Dennis’ following has increased by nearly 30% in the last month as she approaches the territory where influencers make $100,000 to $200,000 a year. She is also regularly receiving 200 or more direct messages from fans daily, a four-fold increase. In the past, she did her best to reply to everyone, but more recently, she has been monetizing her account, charging $70 an hour for private online lessons in bread making.

“One thing about this last couple of weeks: People have got a lot of time on their hands, and they want to focus on something, to use their brains. They don’t want to go crazy with boredom,” says Dennis, 36, who posts at @FullProofBaking and has a day job as an intestinal cancer researcher at Northwestern University. “So they’re diving into this. People are looking for things to distract themselves.”

Along with video games, Netflix and booze, bread making has become one of homebound America’s favorite pastimes. The laborious process rewards patience and precision, qualities that don’t characterize normal life for most people. But there is nothing normal about life currently. During a recent 36-hour window, the #bread hashtag on Instagram was used 30,000 times, a pace of roughly 833 times every 60 minutes.

Another motivating factor? A reduced opportunity to acquire bread the old-fashioned way: purchasing it premade, prepackaged and presliced at grocery stores. Many Americans are avoiding supermarkets altogether or enduring long lines and donning face masks to enter.

But this growing interest in at-home bread has led to a ripple effect. Yeast and flour are increasingly scare at both brick-and-mortar and online shops. “Right now, it’s a challenge to find any yeast,” admits Thomas Benner, CEO of the parent company that produces Red Star brand yeast. Nielsen data shows a 6.5-times increase in sales of Red Star and competitors last month to more than $100 million. Flour sales surged, too—by 150%, to an estimated $2.4 billion. “This sudden demand is unprecedented. I don’t think anyone of us has seen anything like this in our lifetime,” Benner says. “We are operating around the clock to fill orders.”

The mere mention of bread on Twitter has more than doubled in volume since mid-March to more than 80,000 per day, according to data gathered through Sprinklr, software that analyzes social media conversations. In one day, on March 30, there were 180,000 mentions.



“The home baker is typically a 55- to 60-year-old woman,” explains Wes Fehsenfeld, 34, the fourth generation to run the Uhlmann Company, a Kansas City-based flour manufacturer. These days “my Instagram is not filled with 55- to 60-year-old women. I see a lot of home-baking going on from millennials and other folks that you wouldn’t normally see.” By his estimate, demand for his family’s flour—two cult-favorite brands, Heckers and Ceresota—has doubled in six weeks, and they still have a two-week backlog of orders. “Our customers have been understanding,” says Fehesenfeld. “Typically, if you were caught with your pants down and couldn’t fulfill an order for a week and a half, it would be a nightmare.” 

With this boom has come the charmed rise of a new type of social media star: the bread influencers. Gourmet restaurants and luxury bakeries have long been popular on social media sites like Instagram. These influencers are a different batch. They are either part-time bakers, like Dennis in Chicago, or own small, local establishments. That’s the case for Martin Fjeld, who has built up 41,000 followers for @IlleBrod and co-owns the four-person Ille Brød bakery in Oslo, Norway. “It’s crazy,” he says of the recent hunger for bread content. “It shows that this is something that people have always wanted to do.”

Fjeld has already put his Instagram account to good use, largely making it an advertising tool for Ille Brød (“Every now and then, you get a tourist in who says this was their first thing they wanted to do in Oslo.”) and his HarperCollins-published cook book, Artisan Sourdough (2019). He has been exceptionally skilled at this, and all told, he pulled in around $350,000 last year.

To be sure, Fjeld has thought more entrepreneurially than some other bread influencers, many of whom are only now considering whether their newfound popularity can produce dough beyond the kind they bake at 475 degrees. They are crossing important economic milestones: the 50,000- and 100,000-follower marks on Instagram. An influencer with 50,000 followers (around the point that brands begin taking serious notice) normally charge a minimum of $100 per ad-sponsored Instagram post, or so-called sponcon. This rate increases to as much $500 to $1,000 per post at 100,000 followers (an even stronger marker of legitimacy and reach to brands) and grows proportionally from there. Generally, an influencer’s total followers correlates to earnings: Someone with 100,000 followers can do $100,000 annually and so on—either partially or entirely driven through sponcon. Few bread influencers have fully monetized their accounts like this. Their fame is too new, having arrived only in the last few days.

“My husband thinks you can’t make money out of it,” sighs Natalya Syanova, the creator of @natashas_baking, which has 61,700 followers and has been growing by several thousand each day. She’s out to prove her spouse wrong. Syanova, a Chicago mother of two and a part-time baker at a local grocery chain, now sells a how-to video through her website, where, for the low price of $9.99, she’ll explain why your sourdough starter won’t start, why the crumb won’t texturize—why it stubbornly will not look Instagram ready.

Her most popular Instagram post is a video of her stretching out dough, for a pastry called a panettone. It is the carby equivalent of a two-minute drill: tough to execute and usually only attempted under pressure—at holiday time when families gather and judge. She has spent the past week readying panettone—a sweat beard traditionally made with flour, eggs, leavening, raisins and other candied fruit—for Easter Sunday. (The Russian Orthodox one: Syanova, 38, emigrated from Ukraine in 2010.) Her kids “like the panettone. They like croissants, too,” she says. “But whenever we go to grocery store, they say, ‘Will you buy me muffin or cupcake?’ Like with that green or purple frosting. Which is nonsense.”

Hannah Page meanwhile, practices an artform called “breadscaping.” On @BlondieandRye (147,000 followers), she intricately intertwines focaccia loaves with vegetables such as zoodled zucchini curls, asparagus, scallions, cilantro leaves and bell peppers. “I’ve always been interested in the aesthetic side of bread—being able to make it look beautiful in different ways,” says Page, 36. “Once all this hit, it really became nice to do something that felt very good—colorful and affirming. People would comment, ‘Gosh, I can’t go outside very much, but even just looking at this picture makes me happy.’”

Despite her popularity, Page, a high school history teacher in Raleigh, North Carolina, is struggling to decide whether she will do sponcon. “I’ve been tempted by certain things in recent times, but I get a little weirded out by the idea of saying, ‘Yes, I’ll accept this thing. And then I have to post.’”

Noah Bedard of @NoahBakesBread (45,300 followers), is showing no such hesitation. Like many other bread influencers, Bedard, 30, has noticed a steady uptick in recent incoming activity. “A lot more direct messages right now. A lot of people asking questions because they’re making it home,” says Bedard, who is especially Insta-famous for his challah, an egg-based bread served most commonly in Jewish homes.

With this increased attention, he reduced his responsibilities at an artisanal bakery in Toronto, Canada two weeks ago—stepping down as manager—and plans to begin taking up the offers he’s accumulated through his following: bakery-consulting gigs. “There’s lots of people that will pay you to come and set up a bakery,” says Bedard, a sourdough laced with honey and sesame seeds resting in his kitchen. “I have a friend from Australia who does it for a living. He basically just flies to Saudi Arabia and the Middle East and opens bakeries because he does amazing croissants. They’ll fly you first class to teach them.”


Speak Your Mind

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Get in Touch

350FansLike
100FollowersFollow
281FollowersFollow
150FollowersFollow

Recommend for You

Oh hi there 👋
It’s nice to meet you.

Subscribe and receive our weekly newsletter packed with awesome articles that really matters to you!

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

You might also like

The Automat: The Most Culturally Relevant Film For Post-Pandemic...

First-time filmmaker Lisa Hurwitz to debut her documentary later this year “Nostalgia - it's...

Tom Cruise, Elon Musk And NASA Partner To Make...

The World's Most Dangerous A-Lister, Tom Cruise (Photo by...

Facebook Deleting Coronavirus Posts, Leading To Charges Of Censorship

Facebook and other tech companies are working hard to curb misinformation on their platforms...