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Hinba Bakery Hyndland – Expansion Plans

Dough rolls in as Hinba Bakery’s Rachel Palmer satisfies the West End’s insatiable appetite for sourdough and croissants

 Award-winning Hyndland specialist plans expansion to
supply restaurants, hotels and other bakeries

Bread is the king of the table

“Bread is the king of the table,” said the American writer-turned-farmer Louis Bromfield, “and all else is merely the court that surrounds the king.”

It’s a sentiment that would be wholeheartedly shared by the bakery professional and passionate sourdough advocate Rachel Palmer, who runs the wildly successful Hinba Bakery in Glasgow’s West End.

Rachel Palmer

Competing at the Scottish Bread Championships in February 2026 against some of the country’s most skilled artisan bakers, Hinba Bakery secured six awards across four major categories which recognise both the bakery’s technical mastery and its commitment to Real Bread principles.

Thirty-five year-old mother of two, Rachel, has not only realised her own personal dream with the Hyndland operation, but has bren working on ambitious expansion plans which will secure the bakery’s future and maintain the croissant supplies so crucial to West Enders.

“It used to be that you couldn’t throw a scone in the West End without hitting a bakery,” said Glasgow-born Rachel on a rare day off to look after her son and daughter, “but Covid and continually rising costs have created a lot of casualties.”

“There are a lot fewer artisan outlets left now, and those which have survived are feeding into an ever-more voracious market as people care more about what they are eating and where it has come from.“

“The people of Hyndland love our bread and the weekend numbers that we are doing are massive. We have usually sold everything we’ve made by mid-afternoon. Sourdough may be a fashion, but people want real bread and I think this demand will last a long time.”

About Rachel

Rachel, who comes from the north-east of the city, started baking at the age of 16, making “creative cakes”. She wanted to go to Art School, but took a part-time job which morphed into full-time, and then trained in bread-making.

She became a bakery manager and helped open new stores with a small chain before teaming up with Mhairi Taylor at Ziques in Partick, which was recently taken on by Fergus McCoss of the Hinba hospitality group.

Hinba – named after a mysterious and semi-mythical Scottish island – also owns coffee shops in Glasgow and Oban and the Bakery, and has just launched Tusco restaurant, formerly Eighty-Eight, on Glasgow’s Dumbarton Road.

Rachel now supplies the restaurants, working with chefs Robbie Smith and Alex Brown and coming up with innovations such as Discard Crackers, using what would previously have been a discarded part of the sourdough process.

She said: “There is a great chef-baker dynamic under Fergus and we are all keen to see what we can help each other with. It’s so good for us to be encouraged to try something different.”

The Team

Rachel’s team of five at the Hinba Bakery – including a Californian bread specialist and a vegan pastry chef – are all women, though that is coincidental. Their expansion plans envisage selling to hotels, restaurants and other bakeries. The current volume of trade has made the business “financially safe”.

Where possible, they source from Scottish suppliers – flour from Mungoswells Milling in East Lothian and nature-friendly Wildfarmed – but fall back on salted butter from France, “because it’s simply the best for pastry”.

She is aware that, while she and her team are riding high at the moment, continued success is conditional on the ability to adapt to unexpected events and the fickle nature of food fashion.

She said it was “horrific” that the much-loved Parisian bakery Poilâne, known as the “Louis Vuitton of boulangeries” had gone into receivership recently as Gen Z, influenced by Tik Tok and Instagram, favour experimental flavours and stylised, glamorous food.

She said: “Of course, I work with millennials and Gen Z, but I also have massive respect for the traditional products and the skills that underpin them. I think it’s important to keep the classics alive. They are classics for a reason.“

“Having said that, if people want dragon fruit or yuzu on their croissants, we can try that too. There is a case for keeping it simple, but we must remain open to other things as well.”

The moment the oven door opens

In the meantime, she said, there is nothing to beat the moment that the oven door opens and the daily bread is ready.

“We start the sourdough going in the morning, get the ovens on, bake off the pastry, make the bread, send the deliveries out, start the yeasted bread, laminate the pastries, do the cakes for that day or next, fill the pre-orders and stock the cabinets.”

“But there’s nothing better than the last stretch – the bake-off, we call it – when we pull out a dozen perfect loaves. The smell, the crunch, the crinkle. That’s what it’s all about.”

For further information, please contact Hinba Bakery, 79 Lauderdale Gardens, Glasgow G12 9QU. T: 0141 339 6824.

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