For most of the last decade, Megan Loney spent her weekdays installing commercial HVAC controls around San Diego County. Her nights and weekends, increasingly, belonged to sourdough.
That balance finally tipped this past August, when Loney walked away from her 12-year HVAC career to run Gemini Twins Bakery, the home-based bread business she started in her childhood house in La Mesa, full time.
The bakery’s roots go back to 2019, when Loney, a former stay-at-home mom, began experimenting with sourdough to feed her family better food. It did not go smoothly at first. She killed her starter more than a dozen times before finally pulling her first successful loaf out of the oven in early 2020. By late 2023, with encouragement from her wife, Crystal Palmer, she started selling to Palmer’s mother’s coworkers at Amazon, who ordered four or five loaves a week. She formalized the business in 2024, naming it for the couple’s twins, Akira and Ezekial.
Today, Gemini Twins Bakery turns out naturally fermented sourdough bread, bagels, cinnamon rolls, scones, and seasonal specialties, including a blueberry-lemon-basil loaf and a savory “Dilly Jack” made with dill and Monterey Jack. The best seller is a roasted jalapeño cheddar loaf Loney almost skipped making, worried it was too common, until she found that roasting the peppers first set hers apart. Each batch goes through four to eight hours of bulk fermentation and up to 48 hours of cold fermentation, using flour from Central Milling and self-ground whole wheat.
Loney sells through neighborhood driveway pop-ups twice a month, farmers markets in Lakeside, Cardiff, and San Carlos, a standing table at SHARP Grossmont Hospital, and wholesale deliveries to Come Back Coffee Co. in La Mesa. She holds a cottage food permit and a temporary food facility permit through San Diego County, along with business licenses in La Mesa and National City.
This year marked the bakery’s first profitable one, with the family reinvesting about 75 percent of earnings back into the business. Loney and Palmer are raising four children, including a baby born earlier this year, on a small urban homestead with chickens and rabbits. There is no storefront in the works yet, though the couple hopes to eventually buy land and build one. For now, Loney’s advice to other home bakers mirrors what got her here: keep the menu small, keep it focused, and let word of mouth do the rest.
Source: Times of San Diego
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