Pollen Bakery is a Sourdough & Viennoiserie bakery based in a railway arch underneath Manchester’s Piccadilly Station.

It is run by us, Hannah Calvert & Chris Kelly.

Pollen was born from a love of great food, fermentation & flavour. We started baking sourdough in our home kitchen in 2011 and our obsession started from there.

So 5 years later, after much practice, reading and experience we decided to leave our bank jobs and embark on bringing great real bread to central Manchester.

At Pollen our goal is to produce the best quality bread we can and we are always striving to improve, make our bread better and learn a lot along the way.

All our bread is sourdough, made with naturally occurring yeast from our sourdough culture. We use only three ingredients in the base of our dough’s, flour, water and salt. Great bread doesn't need anything else.

"Pollen was born from a love of great food, fermentation & flavour."

We adapt a long and slow fermentation process. Our breads take a total of 28 hours to produce which allows the grain to unlock all the nutrients it has locked away, develop great flavour and also makes our bread more digestible.

We champion a darker crust which is simply the natural sugars in the grain caramelising on the hot surface of the loaf. We believe this gives the bread much more flavour and also gives a beautiful brittle but chewy crust.

At Pollen we also specialise in Viennoiserie, making croissants, pain au chocolat etc daily. Our pastries take 4 days to make from start to finish which gives our croissants much more flavour and a super light texture.

We open in the mornings Wednesday - Saturday for pastries, sandwiches for lunch, take home loaves and some cakes.

We are tucked away and you have to go out your way to find us, but we hope you will.

See you at the bakery soon!