Welcome to the Boatyard Bakery & Café, home to Emma’s Bread. Located in an old Victorian warehouse, alongside Exeter Cookery School, we overlook the city’s historic ship canal. Within this light open space our award-winning sourdough bread, pastries, cakes and other baked goods are prepared and sold seven days a week. Customers can watch the bakers at work from the large café serving a wide range of freshly prepared food and drink.

Our bakers pride themselves on making ‘real’ bread using traditional methods with simple ingredients: flour, water, sea salt and our own nurtured sourdough cultures or a little fresh yeast, and most important of all - time.

Though we have industrial mixers, every loaf is scaled and shaped by hand – it takes time but it’s worth it! Baking is an ancient skill dating back centuries, crossing many cultures and civilisations but in recent years the popularity of sourdough has undergone a dramatic revival – for good reason!

Long fermentation creates fantastic flavours and really improves the keeping quality without the need for additives. Many people find sourdoughs and other slow-rise bread easier to digest than industrial loaves. Sourdough bacteria break down the proteins in gluten that some people react to, making them more digestible.  You can read more about the benefits of sourdough here.   But really we just recommend eating it because it’s delicious!

Alongside our range of bread we make delicious cakes, scones, brioche burger buns, and pastries. Some of these are served daily in our cafe but we also supply other stockists and food outlets in Exeter! Please get in touch if you would like to enquire about our wholesale options.

Our Daily Bread

Small orders

We are always happy to accept pre-orders though it helps if you can order in advance. We will reserve bread for collection until 12pm unless paid for. Please call us on 01392 279208 to speak to one of the team.

Larger orders

For any larger orders and special events please call us to discuss the best way to meet your requirements. Ideally we need several days notice especially for sourdoughs.

For example:

Large bread orders

Whole cakes

Special orders of savouries (sausage rolls, quiches, etc)
10 or more pastries (including croissants and cinnamon buns)

Our lovely open café space seats plenty of people and is fully accessible to prams and wheelchairs too. Plain and simple is the order of the day and we don’t mind if you come in with muddy boots (or paws – dogs welcome) and even in a wet suit after a paddling session on the canal outside. On a nice day you can sit outside and watch the cormorants diving into the canal or just soak up the surroundings (sunny in the mornings).

Open seven days a week: weekdays 8.30am-2pm; Saturdays 8.30am -3pm; Sundays 9.30am- 3pm.  Hours vary according to holiday and daylight hours, so we usually open longer in the summer months.

FOOD & DRINK

Serving wonderful coffee from Exe Coffee Roasters we love making toast for breakfast or lunch served with a variety of toppings including Mum’s marmalade and ButterBike peanut butter. We make our own plant-based soups and quiches but also bake sausage rolls and grill bacon brioche baps with meat from happy Devon pigs. We like to keep it simple and offer a choice to keep the whole family happy.

POP-UPS & PIZZAS

Watch out for our guest chef evening pop-ups or our very special in-house pizza days. We also cater for parties in the Boatyard and hire out the space by special arrangement. Please ask us if you want to celebrate a special occasion or need a venue with ‘atmosphere’.

If you are interested in a career in baking or just part time work in our café then please come in for an informal chat and keep an eye out for future opportunities. We usually advertise in the café or on the Real Bread Campaign website.

Without your support small independent businesses like ours would simply vanish. Exeter, typically, was home to many small family-run enterprises in years gone by and we have all struggled to set up and keep going in the face of competition from major players. However, it’s not all bad news and the Boatyard Bakery & Cafe is just one example of lots of newish shops and cafes in this lovely city that flourish because people like places of character and something different. https://www.visitexeter.com

Our wholesale bread is delivered by Escargo, an electrically powered tricycle, fondly christened Matilda, which scoops up all the freshly baked bread in the morning and delivers it safely around the city centre. Clean and green. A fine example of a sustainable delivery system set up by Jenny Ryding with the help of Exeter Futures.

We get as much fresh produce as we can from Shillingford Organics, a fully certified organic farm just three miles away, supplying a wide range of really delicious seasonal vegetables and herbs. We also stock Little Bowhay jams and chutneys made in Shillingford Abbot, for you to take home and eat with our bread.

Crispin’s Apple juice is made and pasteurised on a farm at Broadclyst and we sell bottles of the stuff.

We do it because we love making real bread and believe that consumers should have a choice in this city of buying boring or real bread!

We do it because we want to employ people and train them to have skills and a career in something unique.

We do it because we love getting up early! (Really?)

We do it because people walk into the bakery and smile when they smell freshly baked loaves.

We do it because we like all the different sorts of dogs that people have as pets

We do it because we love our building and having the room to let kids play

Join us for Pizza Friday

11:00am until 2:00pm every Friday

Come and have a delicious freshly baked pizza

Large Pizza from £8

Kids Pizza from £4