Business Is on the Rise for Home Kneads

September 11, 2026

By April Pearson

What began as a one-woman in-home bakery overlooking a red barn in Madrid has become a full-fledged wholesale breadmaking business, complete with a new storefront in Slater, regular breadmaking classes and a partnership with Fareway. 

Starting With Sourdough

Nina Harris, owner of Home Kneads in central Iowa, is a first-generation American from Chicago who started as a biomedical engineer. “A lot of people from my home country of Serbia go into engineering,” she says. “My father was an engineer, so I definitely wanted to do that, and I wanted to help people and heal the body.” That’s why, after graduating from the University of Iowa in biomedical engineering, she began working in the medical device industry. 
 
“It was great, but healthcare has changed a lot in the past 12 years,” she says. “I started feeling like I wasn't helping people the way I wanted to.” Harris realized that a lot of the devices she was working on were just putting band-aids on the problems. “You're making a surgeon’s life easier in the operating room, but you’re not getting to the root cause of the conditions that require these surgeries.” Health, in Harris’ opinion, begins with food.
 
Her professional foray into food began three years ago when a neighbor gifted her a sourdough starter. Harris and her husband Mike had just moved to Madrid after having lived in Denver, Phoenix and Dallas for the previous decade. “Honestly, small-town Iowa is wonderful,” she says. “It’s super safe, the schools are fantastic, and you know everyone in the community. It's a great place to raise kids.” The sourdough starter stirred up a passion in Harris for breadmaking, and she began baking in her home kitchen using only wholesome, local ingredients. 

Shaping the Business

When Harris started selling her delicious and nutritious bread at farmer’s markets, she had to sell her healthy-living philosophy, too. “No one wanted to pay $10 for a loaf of bread,” says Harris. “But when I explained the benefits of choosing bread made with zero sugar — only simple, high-quality ingredients from farmers I knew personally — they started to understand that $10 bread was an investment in their health.” 
 
Harris also began teaching breadmaking classes, an endeavor that quickly proved successful. “They book out immediately because they’re just so fun,” she says. “We do corporate events and birthday parties, but most of the people who come just want to learn and get healthier.” 
 
Harris had discovered the perfect way to combine her passions: helping people and baking with intention. She’s taught almost a thousand students across Iowa, and she’s found that they become more aware of the food they put in their bodies once they learn what goes into their bread. “It plants a seed for healthier living, which can help mitigate health issues down the road and prevent the surgeries I was creating medical devices for.” 
 
With business on the rise, Mike quit his sales job to go all in on Home Kneads. “My husband joined me over a year ago and really helped to grow the business,” she says. “He’s the sales guy, the customer-facing guy. He’s the one who got us into Fareway.” Producing 1,300 loaves of bread per week, Home Kneads supplies 17 Fareway locations with fresh bread and plans to expand into the Des Moines/Ames market by the end of the year.
 
To keep up with demand, Harris recently opened a bakery on Slater’s Main Street to expand her offerings and scale up production. “I had been running the business out of my home, which was crazy,” she says. She and Mike spent the whole first half of this year turning a dilapidated 150-year-old commercial building into a beautiful, functional storefront. It wasn’t easy. “My husband and I bootstrapped all this,” says Harris, who was still working as a biomedical engineer up until two months ago. “Nights, weekends, early mornings — we just did our best to make it happen. We had to get creative with funding and grants.” 

Rolling in Dough

Slater offered Home Kneads a program through the Ames Alliance that provided a $100,000 grant for renovations on the historic building. “Everything needed to be updated,” says Harris, “so we spent almost all of that on new plumbing, electrical, HVAC, windows, walls, ceilings, doors — everything. Ames Alliance was a really big help.” 
 
Home Kneads also received a $25,000 grant from Choose Iowa. “They work with the Department of Agriculture, and they chose us because our ingredients, product and labor are all Iowa-made,” says Harris. “We’re partnering with farmers, serving our community and creating jobs. So we kind of checked all the boxes for that grant, which helped us get all the equipment.” 
 
Story County granted Home Kneads $2,000 to update the building's façade — a project that ultimately cost $10,000. And DMACC provided a grant for new employee onboarding. “It's not like you can just hire someone and throw them into this,” says Harris. “It requires a lot of knowledge and two to three months of training.”
 
Mike designed and helped build out the open-concept space, which features a large window into the production side of the bakery so customers can see their bread being made. “It's so cool to see Slater busy now on the weekends,” says Harris. “There's no other sourdough bakery in Iowa doing what we're doing, so it really is a unique destination that’s drawing people to our small town.”

Harnessing the Power of Flour

Visitors from all over come to Home Kneads for sourdough bread, ciabatta, focaccia and baguettes made with stone-milled organic flour from Early Morning Harvest in Panora. Specialty flavors rotate weekly and feature local ingredients — like Cinnamon Swirl with honey from Holton Homestead in Elkhart, Pumpkin French Toast with maple syrup from Great River Maple in Garnavillo, and Maple Pecan Latte with cold brew from 412 Public House. “Part of our work is to create more and use as many local ingredients as possible,” says Harris. “Anything that's in season, anything that's local, we will be taking.”
 
Harris grew Home Kneads from an in-home bakery to a wholesale breadmaking business — all while working as a biomedical engineer, seeking out grants, renovating an old storefront and raising two boys. What’s next for her? “I’m planning to go to France next year to learn how to make croissants,” she says. “That's always been a dream of mine. We have the space for it here, and it’s something special we could bring to the storefront. And who doesn't love a great croissant?”

Photos courtesy of Home Kneads.