Burleigh Heads Baker Turns Sourdough Side Hustle Into a Six-Day-a-Week Operation

Maya Thornton launched Coastal Crumb Bakehouse out of a rented bench in a shared commercial kitchen on Kortum Drive, Burleigh Heads, in March 2024. Two years later, she is supplying seventeen cafes across the Gold Coast, employing four full-time staff, and turning over roughly $480,000 annually, figures she confirmed directly when approached for this story. She is 31 years old.

Thornton's timing matters. Australia's property market is softening and consumer confidence has been uneven heading into the second half of 2026, yet food-led small businesses with a loyal local customer base are holding ground in ways that broader retail is not. Discretionary spending on premium grocery items, quality bread, specialty coffee, local produce, has proven stickier than economists expected when interest rates started biting two years ago. For an operator like Thornton, who kept overheads low by staying out of bricks-and-mortar retail until she had the cash flow to justify it, that resilience is not an accident.

From Kortum Drive to the Northern End

Coastal Crumb now operates from a dedicated 180-square-metre leased space in the Burleigh industrial precinct, off Ern Harley Drive, where the ovens run from 2 a.m. six days a week. Thornton secured the lease in January 2026 at a reported rate of $42,000 per year, competitive by Gold Coast light-industrial standards, she said, though she noted rents in that corridor have moved up around 12 percent since she started looking in mid-2025. The fit-out, which she partially self-funded and partially financed through a Queensland Small Business loan, cost just over $95,000.

Her wholesale accounts stretch from Ethos Eat Drink in Broadbeach to a cluster of independent operators along James Street in Burleigh Heads itself, and up the coast to two venues in Mermaid Beach. She said she deliberately avoided the tourist-heavy Surfers Paradise strip in the early stages, preferring the repeat-customer rhythm of the residential southern suburbs. That decision has shaped the business's character more than anything else.

Coastal Crumb also runs a Saturday morning pickup subscription through its website, which Thornton said generates about 140 regular weekly orders. Subscribers pay $18 per loaf on a rolling four-week cycle. It is not a huge revenue line on its own, but it functions as a forecasting tool, she knows her minimum bake volume for the weekend by Wednesday each week.

What the Numbers Actually Say

The Gold Coast's food and hospitality sector employed approximately 38,000 people as of the most recent Queensland Government regional labour market snapshot, published in April 2026. Small food-manufacturing businesses, the category Coastal Crumb sits in, make up a growing slice of that, partly because the city's population has expanded faster than its wholesale food supply chain has kept pace. Thornton is not the only operator to have identified that gap, but she got there early enough to lock in cafe relationships before the market became crowded.

She is also not relying on goodwill alone. Each of her wholesale accounts operates on a written supply agreement, something she said she learned to insist on after a cafe in Palm Beach dropped its order with 48 hours' notice in her first year. That single experience pushed her to formalise every commercial relationship she has had since.

Her next move is a retail counter attached to the Ern Harley Drive production space, a modest 20-seat setup she is targeting for a late-September 2026 opening, subject to Gold Coast City Council development approval. If that lands on schedule, it will add a direct-to-consumer channel for the first time and, she hopes, bring the operation closer to $650,000 in annual revenue by the end of the financial year.

For other Gold Coast food entrepreneurs watching Coastal Crumb's growth, the practical lesson is straightforward: wholesale relationships built on reliability and paper contracts outlast those built on personal goodwill, and keeping your fixed costs below your variable income in the first eighteen months is not optional. Thornton did both, and that discipline is why she is still standing when a number of her 2024 contemporaries are not.

This article is general information only and is not personal financial or investment advice. Consider your own circumstances and seek licensed professional advice before making financial decisions.