Baltimore’s Ovenbird Bakery is once again expanding, this time by launching a new storefront in Hampden and increasing its opening hours at the bakery’s well-established locations in Little Italy and Highlandtown.

What originally began as a passion for home baking eventually evolved into a quickly growing business, owner Keiller Kyle told The Baltimore Sun.

“I didn’t really have aspirations to own or even start a bakery in 2016 when I started baking bread,” Kyle said.

The first Ovenbird Bakery, a brick-and-mortar storefront in Little Italy, opened in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kyle said. But with community support, the business has been able to thrive, expanding to Highlandtown in December 2023.Now, the bakery is extending its hours in both of those locations, according to a recent Instagram post from the company, which said that the storefronts will be open seven days a week starting June 23.

“We did open in the middle of COVID, but it was a long stretch of just very positive reinforcement,” Kyle said. “When strangers start telling you that they would love to support you, it starts to ring true. So we’re just kind of following along that same vein of just listening to what people are asking of us, and we’d love to respond to be able to host them at our places.”

Ovenbird fans can expect to see the bakery in Hampden later this summer, according to Kyle, who noted that although they want to open as soon possible, they are still going through the city’s permitting process.

Opening in Hampden’s Rotunda shopping center provides “a space where we could kind of stretch out and stretch our wings, pardon the pun, and kind of build capacity for the bread which we found early on in our original location,” he said, noting the high demand the bakery saw in both Little Italy and Highlandtown.

“There’ll be a lot of similarities, or at least homages, to Little Italy and to our Highlandtown location,” Kyle said, adding that many of the same baked goods will be offered in Hampden.

But the new spot will also launch a unique Turkish-style coffee concept, bringing in a unique drink menu to differentiate itself from other nearby businesses, Kyle said.

In addition to the new expansion, the bakery is also celebrating its five-year anniversary this week, Kyle said.

“We’re not doing this because we we need to,” he said of the new expansion. “We are so happy being able to respond to all the excitement and attention that our bakery has gotten over the last five years.”

“I’m very thankful and for all of the support that the city’s given us and all of the positive thumbs up that they’ve provided us to say, just keep going. And that’s kind of the idea, is (that) we’ll just keep trying to offer our stuff (to) more and more and more of the city’s population, of the region’s population, as we grow.”

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