Hi! We are Toff and Cara West…

…and we own Home Grain Bakery!

Our story begins in 2007, when we met at Flinders Uni – Cara was only here from the States for one semester, which just happened to be Toff’s first semester at Uni too.

After deciding to begin our life together, we traveled the world looking for a place to call “home.”

We kept notes about cafes we liked around the world in our “coffee journal” with the intention of “maybe, one day” owning a coffee shop of our own.

That dream became a reality a whole heck of a lot sooner than we anticipated, when in 2011 we saw that 13 Old Coach Road, Aldinga was for sale!

“What a gorgeous old building,” we thought. “Someone needs to do something there!” And despite never owning a business before, or ever having worked in a bakery for that matter, or that we were 4 months away from becoming parents for the first time – we still couldn’t think of one reason good enough for us NOT to open a bakery in Aldinga.

We hired a baker and a few people to help us with our dream, and we talked our amazingly generous family and friends into helping us renovate this gorgeous old building. We opened our doors for the first time in December 2011, and we’ve been happily humming along ever since!

Owning a business together has been a challenge, but one we take on gratefully. Oh, and we also decided to have two more babies, and open three more bakeries somewhere along the way, too! We’ve come a long way from just “one baby, one bakery” but every new addition to either our personal family, or our bakery family simply means that we get to surround ourselves with even more fantastic people.

Our aim is to create a place that we simply like to be. In all of our travels, we haven’t found anywhere in the world we would rather live and raise our family than on The Fleurieu.

Home Grain Bakery is dedicated to strong local communities, to creating a positive experience for every customer who walks through our doors, and – above all – we do what we love, and love what we do!

So thanks for visiting, and please stop by to say “hi!” anytime!

Love, Toff & Cara West

(plus Trip, Meg and Charlie)