From a Newtown Kitchen to a Six-Figure Export Deal: How One Sydney Baker is Rewriting the Small Business Playbook

Leila Khouri turned over $620,000 last financial year selling fermented grain products from a rented commercial kitchen behind a laundromat on King Street, Newtown. She employs seven people, holds a supply contract with Harris Farm Markets across four Sydney locations, and signed her first export agreement with a Singapore distributor in March. She is 31 years old.

Her company, Kultured Crumb, is the kind of story Sydney's small business sector badly needs right now. Consumer spending is tightening, Melbourne's property woes are rattling investor confidence nationally, and the cost of industrial land across Greater Sydney is being squeezed by competing demand for AI data centre development. Against that backdrop, founders who have built lean, cash-flow-positive operations without taking on significant debt are drawing serious attention from mentors, lenders and procurement managers alike.

The Numbers Behind the Rise

Kultured Crumb started in 2022 with a $14,000 fit-out loan from the NSW Government's small business loan guarantee scheme and a second-hand deck oven sourced from a closed café in Marrickville. Khouri spent the first 18 months selling exclusively at the Eveleigh Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, building a repeat customer base before approaching any retail partner. The Harris Farm deal, struck in late 2024, was worth $180,000 in its first full year.

Australian Bureau of Statistics data released in May showed that food and beverage manufacturing remained one of the few small business categories to record positive employment growth in the 12 months to March 2026, with the sector adding roughly 4,200 net jobs nationally. In New South Wales, hospitality and artisan food businesses account for about 14 percent of all small business registrations, according to Service NSW figures from the 2025–26 state budget papers.

The export deal came through the Australian Trade and Investment Commission's go8 Emerging Exporters program, a federally funded initiative that pairs first-time exporters with in-market advisers. Khouri attended a three-day workshop at the ATEC offices on Clarence Street in the Sydney CBD last October. By February she had a term sheet. The Singapore contract covers 200 kilograms of frozen sourdough starter product per month, with a review clause at 12 months.

What Other Founders Can Take From Her Model

Three things stand out in how Kultured Crumb was built. First, Khouri kept her fixed costs minimal by leasing kitchen time from the Addison Road Community Centre in Marrickville for the first year before moving to a dedicated space — a strategy that kept her weekly overhead under $800 during the most fragile startup phase. Second, she avoided marketplaces like Uber Eats entirely, preferring direct-to-consumer sales that preserved margin. Third, she used the Inner West Council's free Business Concierge service, based in the Ashfield Service Centre on Brown Street, to navigate food safety licensing and council approvals — a process that typically costs founders weeks of unproductive admin time.

The Kultured Crumb model won't work for every category, and scaling a physical food product comes with supply chain headaches that software founders don't face. But the underlying logic — validate at markets before committing to retail, keep fixed costs low, use government programs that already exist and are free — applies broadly.

Khouri is currently looking for a second production site somewhere between Alexandria and St Peters to handle the volume growth the Singapore contract requires. She has been in conversation with the South Sydney Business Chamber about identifying suitable industrial tenancies. Industrial rents in that corridor were averaging around $280 per square metre annually as of the most recent CBRE data from the first quarter of this year — expensive, but still accessible for an operation generating the revenue Kultured Crumb now is.

The next Eveleigh Farmers Market runs on Saturday, July 11. If you want to see where the business started, that's still the place to find her, behind a fold-out table stacked with loaves, before the wholesale orders take over the whole operation entirely.