From Braddon Garage to $2M Turnover: The Canberra Baker Rewriting the Rules for Small Food Business

Three years ago, Margot Ellison was baking 40 loaves a week out of a rented garage behind a Braddon terrace. Today, her business — Ellison & Grain — turns over roughly $2 million annually, employs 11 full-time staff, and supplies 34 Canberra cafes and restaurants, including several along Marcus Clarke Street in the city and the Kingston Foreshore precinct. She has not taken a cent of venture capital.

The timing of her story matters. Nationally, first home buyers are hesitating as property prices cool unevenly, Melbourne investors have pulled back sharply following state budget changes, and economists are warning that AI data centres competing for industrial land could squeeze out the small manufacturers and food producers who need affordable workshop space to grow. In the ACT, commercial lease rates in inner-north suburbs like Braddon and Dickson have climbed between 8 and 12 percent over the past 18 months, according to figures published by the ACT Property Council in May 2026. For a baker buying butter, eggs, and specialty flour in bulk, those pressures compound fast.

Ellison's response was methodical rather than dramatic. In early 2025, she relocated from her original Braddon site to a 420-square-metre production facility on Wollongong Street in Fyshwick — the industrial suburb that quietly powers much of Canberra's food scene. The move cut her per-square-metre occupancy cost by roughly 30 percent. She then applied for, and received, a $75,000 grant under the ACT Government's Small Business Sustainability Fund, administered through the Canberra Business Chamber, which she used to install a second deck oven and upgrade her cold-room refrigeration.

Building Local Supply Chains, Deliberately

The distinguishing feature of Ellison & Grain is not the sourdough itself — Canberra has no shortage of artisan bread — but the deliberate sourcing architecture Ellison has built around it. Around 60 percent of her grain comes from a single regenerative farm near Boorowa, about 140 kilometres north-west of Canberra, under a two-year fixed-price contract she negotiated directly with the grower. That contract, signed in January 2025 at $480 per tonne for heritage wheat varieties, insulated her from the commodity price spikes that hit conventional bakers hard through the second half of last year.

She sells through her own Saturday stall at the Capital Region Farmers Market at EPIC — the Exhibition Park in Canberra — where retail loaves go for $14 to $18 depending on the variety. Wholesale accounts average $9.50 a loaf. Neither figure has moved in 12 months, a point of pride she mentions to prospective wholesale clients as a stability signal. Her margins have held because the Boorowa contract and the Fyshwick overheads reduction absorbed most of the inflationary pressure that might otherwise have forced a price rise.

She is also running a pilot mentorship program with the University of Canberra's Bruce campus, pairing her operations manager with second-year business students for a semester-long practical placement. The arrangement costs Ellison & Grain almost nothing and gives her access to fresh analysis of her logistics and marketing data. Two placement students this year produced a pricing model she says she will adopt for the 2027 financial year.

What Other Small Operators Can Learn

The ACT has around 23,500 registered small businesses, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics June 2026 release, and hospitality and food production account for a disproportionate share of closures in any given year. Ellison's trajectory suggests a few practical anchors: fixed-price supplier contracts that cover at least 12 months of key inputs, an early move away from expensive inner-city real estate toward Fyshwick or Hume, and active use of the ACT Government grant programs that many owners never apply for because they find the paperwork daunting.

The ACT Small Business Commissioner's office runs free grant-writing workshops monthly at the Canberra Business Chamber offices on Torrens Street in Braddon — sessions that Ellison attended in mid-2024 before submitting her successful application. Her next milestone is an export inquiry from a specialty grocer in Singapore, which she expects to respond to formally before September. Whether that becomes a contract will depend on freight logistics she is still working through — but the demand, at least, has found her without a single dollar spent on international marketing.