Mara Hendricks launched Hearthstone Bakehouse on Sturt Street in March with a $47,000 fit-out, three staff, and a waiting list of wholesale accounts before the doors opened. Seven months earlier she was baking sourdough loaves in a Wendouree rental kitchen at 4 a.m. and selling out of a fold-up table at the Ballarat Farmers' Market on Doveton Street North. The jump from market stall to bricks-and-mortar was faster than most people inside the local small business community expected.
The timing is not accidental. Nationally, property investors are retreating from the market following recent state budget changes, particularly in Melbourne, while first-home buyers remain cautious. That dynamic is reshaping which commercial leases are available and at what price. Hendricks secured a 120-square-metre tenancy on Sturt Street at a rent she describes as materially below what the same space fetched in 2024. Meanwhile, the pivot of more Australians toward locally made, traceable food products, a trend accelerated by supply chain disruptions between 2022 and 2025, has handed specialty food producers an unusually clear window.
From Farmers' Market to Sturt Street
Hearthstone Bakehouse occupies a 1890s-era shopfront two doors down from the Art Gallery of Ballarat. Hendricks spent $12,000 of her fit-out budget on a Molteni deck oven imported from Lyon, France, and sourced her flour exclusively through Laucke Flour Mills, which operates a distribution relationship with several Central Victorian bakers. The menu runs to eleven varieties of sourdough, four pastry lines, and a rotating seasonal offering that changes every four weeks. A standard 800-gram sourdough loaf retails at $14, with wholesale accounts at venues including the café inside the Mining Exchange on Lydiard Street charged at $9.50 per unit.
She applied for and received a $15,000 grant through Business Victoria's Small Business Specialist Advice Pathways program in late 2025, which covered a portion of her commercial kitchen equipment. The Ballarat Business Centre on Armstrong Street North provided six weeks of mentoring through its Start-Up Connect program before the Sturt Street lease was signed. "The mentoring sorted out the cash-flow modelling," she told The Daily Ballarat. "I had the product. I didn't have the spreadsheet."
Foot traffic data from the City of Ballarat's 2025 Central City Activation Strategy shows the Sturt Street retail strip between Dana Street and Lydiard Street recorded an average of 4,200 pedestrian movements per day in the March-May 2026 quarter, up eleven percent on the same period in 2024. Specialty food retailers in the same corridor reported average weekly revenues of between $8,000 and $22,000 depending on floor size and product mix, according to an industry survey published by the Ballarat Business Council in April 2026. Hearthstone hit $11,400 in its fourth trading week.
What Other Local Entrepreneurs Can Take From This
The Hendricks model rests on three decisions that business advisers at the Ballarat Business Centre say they now use as a case study in their July intake cohort. First, she validated wholesale demand before signing a lease, those Doveton Street North market Saturdays were effectively a 14-month market research program. Second, she kept staffing lean at launch, with herself, one full-time baker, and one part-time front-of-house worker, rather than over-hiring on the assumption of immediate scale. Third, she chose a heritage tenancy with existing three-phase power rather than a newer shell that would have required a $30,000-plus electrical upgrade.
Hendricks is now in conversation with two Ballarat hospitality venues about catering contracts and is weighing whether to open a second production site in Sebastopol, where commercial rents run roughly 30 percent below the Sturt Street average. A decision on that expansion is expected before the end of the 2026 calendar year. For anyone watching the local small business landscape, the more instructive question is how many other entrepreneurs are sitting on a fold-up table at a weekend market, one spreadsheet away from doing exactly the same thing.
