Six Years After the Sourdough Boom: Who Stayed?
Nobody has a census of the people who started baking in 2020. One state's cottage food registry, King Arthur's flour sales and a count of rule changes suggest a boom that settled into a steady flow.
In 2020, King Arthur Baking Company sold more than 156 million pounds of flour, 58 percent more than in 2019. When co-CEO Karen Colberg discussed it in March 2021, she said baking was still running 25 to 30 percent above the year before. The obvious next question was whether it would last.
Everyone remembers the boom. Far fewer people can say who was still baking when it ended, because nobody counted. What follows is the best evidence we found, and it covers one state.
The rules moved first
The pandemic did not only change how much people baked. It changed what they were allowed to sell. When the Institute for Justice published its state-by-state grades in March 2022, it said more than a dozen states had made it much easier to start selling homemade food over the previous two years. That is an advocacy group's count, but it matches the direction of the news. More people were baking, and more states were letting them sell.
A registry that kept counting
Minnesota is useful because it requires cottage food producers to register and publishes the totals. The state's data show registrations of 4,219 in 2019, 4,860 in 2020, 6,447 in 2021 and 14,116 in 2025.
The sharper number is new registrations: 1,472 in 2019, 1,749 in 2020, 2,589 in 2021, and 6,440 in 2025, the most in the program's history. If the pandemic produced a spike, the registry does not show it fading. Every year after 2017 has brought more first-time registrants than the year before it.
Two limits apply. A registration is permission to sell, not proof of selling. And the Minnesota law covers jams, pickles and other shelf-stable foods as well as baked goods, so the count is not bakers alone.
Who comes back
The state's table also lists "recurring" registrations alongside new ones. The page does not define the term. If it means producers renewing from the year before, which seems the natural reading, the numbers say something about who stays.
Between 2017 and 2021, recurring registrations equaled roughly 74 to 84 percent of the previous year's total. From 2022 through 2025, the figure sat at about 68 to 71 percent. That is our arithmetic from the state's table, not a number the state publishes.
One reading is that the registry now contains more newcomers, and newcomers leave more often. Another is that renewals fell for reasons unrelated to the boom. The data cannot separate the two. What it does support is simpler. In recent years, about seven in ten of one year's registrants were back the next, and more new people joined than left.
The ones who grew
At the far end of staying are the people who turned a hobby into a payroll. In January the New York Times, in a story the Boston Globe carried, described Fort Mill Sourdough in South Carolina, which bakes 400 loaves a week for 11 locations and has five part-time employees. The Times said microbakeries like it are proliferating in big cities and small towns. It is a good profile. It is also a profile of a business that succeeded, which is not the same as a typical one.
What we know, and what we don't
The boom did not end. In the one place we could measure, it turned into a standing flow of new bakers, most of whom come back the next year and a meaningful minority who don't.
Whether those who stayed are the ones who started with sourdough in the spring of 2020, we cannot say. The state's table counts registrations by year. It does not follow individual bakers.