10/13/2026
An amazing baker and human that has been an inspiration to me! ☺️
"I was working in a factory when COVID hit. I’ve always baked my family’s bread, and at the time, I was about six months into a sourdough journey. I had tried sourdough several times and it never really worked, but then the world shut down and I said, 'Well, I'm just going to practice my bread baking.' I quickly realized that there was no way that my family and I could eat that much bread, but then I saw everyone panicking about having enough food. There were a lot of people in dire straits, facing their jobs being taken away and the relative uncertainty going around the world. I thought that I could give the bread I was baking away as a way to help. I started baking bread and putting it out on my front porch and gave it away.
Then people began asking, 'Can we leave a donation so you can buy more flour?' I put a donation basket out and we’d average a couple of bucks per loaf, and it helped buy flour and other ingredients. We started doing different flavors of sourdough, and we quickly ramped up to baking 100 loaves of bread and doing bagels.
I always figured I would go back to work in the factory—I machined brake rotors. But a couple friends of mine run a place in Jackson called Lean Rocket Lab, and they reached out to me and said, 'Hey, man, you really need to make a business out of this.' I said I wasn’t really a business person. I didn’t know anything about being an entrepreneur. Then they said, 'We'll help you. Just keep making bread.' We started meeting on a weekly basis, and I started selling basically on the street corner in front of Lean Rocket Lab. I was making bread three days a week, and then I would go the next day and sell it on the street corner.
About five or six months into the process, I called the factory, told them I wasn’t coming back. DoughNation Bakery was born. We started in my garage, then moved into what is currently Vito’s Espresso. Working in their commercial kitchen allowed me to distribute my bread. We rapidly outgrew that space and a year later, moved into our current location and we’ve been here now for three years.
The first eight months of the life of the company were all donation based because I didn’t know how much money people had. It was important to me that they had food to eat. But once it became an actual business, I had to set a price—I said five dollars was the base price for everything. Now, obviously, the dollar is not worth what it used to be six years ago, but we try to keep the original spirit of the business alive by keeping our costs low by focusing on efficiency. Everything from the order in which we do things, of baking and making throughout the day, to the person running the machines—it's all about efficiency.
We make about 300 loaves of our regular sourdough bread a day, about 15 to 20 loaves of focaccia, 36 of our large sourdough loaves, and 680 bagels. We have nine locations, cafes and storefronts, around the Jackson area that sell our bread. There are some locations that don’t sell our bread to customers but use it in their food, like breakfast sandwiches or bagels.
It's a rather surreal experience; one I never would have expected this to happen. I feel extremely blessed. It is a never-ending journey of learning new techniques and methods for shaping different kinds of loaves, or what flavors might go in a loaf. The things that you can do with sourdough are really endless. We've gotten in such a hurry in this culture that we've forgotten how things used to be done. This is how bread has been made for 12,000 years. We're finding out more and more that the fermented foods that used to be eaten 100 years ago are really symbiotic with how our bodies function, and because we're not getting those, we are the sickest generation. We are full of chronic disease. If we actually ate those fermented foods and made our bread using a long, slow fermentation process, we’d be healthier people. I think that it's important that people realize that food is medicine. It’s better to eat high-quality food and know the guy who made it.
Naturally leavened sourdough bread has three ingredients in it: water, flour, and salt. It has a lower glycemic index and doesn't give you inflammation like store-bought bread will. I have a customer that drives all the way up here from Kentucky, loads her van up with 50 loaves of bread, and stocks her freezer with it because she's found out that it's the only bread she can eat. Otherwise, she breaks out in some weird rashes all over her body.
How cool is that? You can really change somebody's life with bread."
—Aaron Cole, DoughNation Bakery
