Ismail Salhi and Johanna Hartzheim, Wildgrain

A good loaf of bread is hard to find.

I moved from San Francisco to Concord, NH in 2021 to join Walden. In SF, there were people making drool-inducing baked goods on nearly every corner. In hindsight, I realize I’d become desensitized to that privilege; I thought beautiful loaves of bread grew on trees. When I arrived in New Hampshire, I was rudely awakened to a new reality – despite the fact that nearly everyone in my life had taken up bread baking as a pandemic hobby, I found myself in (what seemed to me to be) a bread desert.

‍Enter Wildgrain. ‍

Like all those other people in my life, founders Ismail and Johanna had a Covid-era bread baking hobby – but they turned their side hustle into a delivery service with a nationwide footprint.

Ismail (who’s Algerian) and Johanna (who’s German) met in Paris, where they were frequenters of neighborhood boulangeries. Upon arrival in Somerville, Massachusetts in 2015, two realizations drove them to entrepreneurial action. First, while there’s certainly good bread in the U.S., it was harder to find than the bakery-on-every-corner arrangement they had become accustomed to in France. Second, the influence of the industrial baking industry meant many of American bread’s inputs had been scrubbed of their natural nutritional value. Bleached flours and chemical additives had pushed out the naturally occurring vitamins and brans present in “clean” bread – so that efficiency and convenience could be prioritized.  And most importantly, the use of natural yeasts (sourdough) had long disappeared from grocery store shelves.

Wildgrain addresses both those issues. It’s a delivery service that makes clean and high-quality carbs accessible to everyone in the contiguous United States – even those of us in Concord, New Hampshire. Subscribers choose breads, pastas, pastries, and treats for their delivery, and then select a delivery date. Baked goods arrive frozen and ready to throw in the oven – done in 25 minutes or less.

Wildgrain is based in our backyard in Boston, and their working capital line of credit is helping fuel their continued growth. According to Ismail, “Partnering with Walden Mutual was an obvious decision. We both share the same values for promoting healthy nutrition and supporting artisanal and sustainable food production. They were able to quickly grasp our unique needs as a modern food company, understand our business model and provided us with the necessary funding to expand and scale.”