Kuluntu Bakery prepares to open first brick-and-mortar

Country Sourdough. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Leichtle-Chalklen.

The nonprofit Kuluntu Bakery is opening its first brick-and-mortar in early May.

Founded in 2018, Kuluntu Bakery was formed after couple, Stephanie Leichtle-Chalklen and her husband, Warren, moved to his home of South Africa. The two previously lived in New York City together, where Stephanie worked in the food industry, but she stepped away from the typical path to forge her own.

“Shortly after moving there, I had this idea about Kuluntu for a while and was not wanting to go back into a kitchen environment because it was a pretty not great experience,” she said. “I decided to start Kuluntu at that point, and we really built it around this idea of building community through baking and breaking bread.”

After six months living in Cape Town, they returned to the United States and moved to Stephanie’s home state of Texas in July 2018. Their North Oak Cliff home is where their cottage bakery grew, from Stephanie teaching baking classes to the couple hosting their South African supper club, the Ubuntu Supper Club.

Ubuntu is an African philosophy meaning “I am because you are,” while Kuluntu means “community” in the South African language of isiXhosa, she said, adding that everything they do is always connecting back to their roots in South Africa.

One of the Ubuntu Supper Club dinners hosted out of their home. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Leichtle-Chalklen.

In Texas, they worked to further develop the mission and board for the nonprofit. 

“We were also doing listening surveys with women in the food industry. So we kind of narrowed our focus into working with women,” Leichtle-Chalklen said. “We felt really passionate about how do we transform this system into being a place that’s a nurturing place to work, and something that really provides stability for people because the food industry is often not that.”

Kuluntu Bakery really took off during the pandemic because of sourdough, she said. They hosted online baking classes and continued their baked good pickups through a new basket-drop system during stay-at-home orders, eventually opening back up to in-person gatherings and later earning a 2023 James Beard Award nomination for Outstanding Bakery.

“We’ve just been building away all with this goal of opening a brick-and-mortar, where we can really be a community hub and have this programming that will be focused on system change in the food system by way of focusing on women,” Leichtle-Chalklen said.

Like their community-based cottage bakery model, they are also involving the community in how to set up their new space in East Dock, the former ice house renovation coming together near the Dallas Zoo. The location will include a baking studio where they can bake 12 loaves at a time, a kids’ area at the center of the space and a wellness room for families where women can feed their children and pump, along with having the room serve as a space for staff to take breaks.

“We take our lived experiences with us when we create something, and I’ve certainly taken my lived experiences from working in kitchens into the space,” Leichtle-Chalklen said.

All of these details to shape the “community hub” will also be designed through community input, which started with last summer’s session of around 25 people who came into the new space to share ideas on how the design can be inclusive. 

The new space that will soon house Kuluntu Bakery. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Leichtle-Chalklen.

Upon opening, the brick-and-mortar will have a full baked goods menu for bread and pastries along with coffee, working closely with the roaster to use beans from women-owned farms, she said.

“Food and drink options will be expanding a lot, but also, we’ll be able to really go full throttle on the programming,” she said. “We’ll be doing monthly meetups for women food workers, all revolved around different dimensions of wellness … and we’ll also have more community education events as well that are focused around food system, education, social justice issues, all that sort of thing.”

Kuluntu Bakery is hosting a mahjong event and raffle on Saturday, March 28, from 5-9 p.m. to help raise a goal of $5,000 in funds for the nonprofit’s final touches to the new space. Tickets to play are available now, starting at $117.51. 

Additionally, there will be one final “community bake” hosted in the backyard of their home on Saturday, April 4, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Attendees will have the opportunity to contribute to a community art project, participate in the brick and mortar’s listening session to design the kids’ area and sponsor bakery equipment for the nonprofit.