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From the founder of Truth Coffee and Origin comes a bakery built on discipline – and a loaf that has already made its way onto some of Cape Town’s best tables.
David Donde has a habit of turning commodities into obsessions. First, it was coffee: he founded Origin, then Truth Coffee Roasting, the steampunk cathedral on Buitenkant Street often named the world’s best coffee shop. Now it’s bread.
Flour Market, his newest venture, could not look less like Truth if it tried – where Truth is theatre, exposed steel, a room built to be photographed, Flour Market feels closer to sitting inside a working bakery. No theatre here: just bare walls, hard surfaces, and the blue-collar rhythm of a bakery that means business.
“We wanted the real ingredients inside slow bread and pastry to speak for themselves.” – David Donde
What hasn’t changed is the obsession with quality. Flour Market already supplies bread to some of Cape Town’s best restaurants and cafés, chasing the kind of consistency, loaf after loaf, that gets a bakery quietly written into other people’s menus. Donde is particular to the point of stubbornness about what goes into it: imported and local flour weighed batch by batch, a long relationship with butter, an ongoing preoccupation with biowheat and its producers. Day to day, that consistency sits with Senior Chef Laurence Smith, who joined via Rapt’s opening team in 2024 and now oversees sweet and savoury product development across the group, and Executive Chef and Head Baker Marcus Fundi, whose focus on fermentation and sourdough shapes much of what comes out of the ovens each morning. David, Marcus, Laurence and the wider team keep it that way, loaf after loaf.
“A sourdough is four ingredients: flour, water, salt and time. If a kitchen can smell a soft sourness in the crumb, if the loaf resists a knife instead of collapsing under it, they know what they’re buying. It’s alive, like wine. These are ancient rules – we chose to respect them.” – David Donde
The white-collar dining rooms of the city – the ones with the linen and the wine lists – are quietly running on Flour Market’s blue-collar graft: hands in dough before dawn, ovens indifferent to what time your dinner reservation is. Flour Market doesn’t dress that labour up. It delivers consistently, and lets the kitchens that plate it take the credit for the polish.
For the rest of us, the entry point is simpler: breakfast, served daily, and a loaf to take home afterwards that keeps making its case for days. “Break it open, smell it,” Donde says. “A good sourdough gets more interesting the longer you have it – save a piece for day six and you’ll taste what I mean.” Flour Market sits, fittingly, in a pocket of the city mid-transformation, filling back in one specific business at a time – a minimalist inner city winery, Neighbourgood, Chips Coworking by Neil Bekker – Flour Market one more name quietly doing its bit to resurrect the block.
“You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. I’ve been lucky enough to build things that put the right thing in people’s mouths. That’s what drives me.” – David Donde
Flour Market is open for breakfast daily in Cape Town, and open to wholesale orders.
https://www.whatfoodgroup.com/flour-market-cape-town
https://www.instagram.com/flourmarketct
Flour Market
105 Hope street
Gardens, Cape Town 8001
Hours
Monday – Sunday, 7am – 4pm
Email
baked@flourmarketct.com
Phone
+27 (0) 21 201-7000
Whatsapp
+27 61 544 2643