Subscription-based Switch Bakery is on a mission to make great gluten-free bread.

It’s not easy being gluten-free. The morning pastry, the restaurant bread basket – so many of our dining habits revolve around wheat. Still, it’s gotten better, which is great news for the approximately 1 percent of the population that suffers from celiac disease, plus more who report nonceliac gluten sensitivity that can manifest as gastrointestinal issues, headaches or brain fog.

Visibility of both celiac and gluten sensitivity in recent years has led to increased awareness of a gluten-free diet, and the market has rushed to respond – there are gluten-free meal kits available, restaurants boast gluten-free menus, grocery stores sell gluten-free pastas.

Locally there’s Switch Bakery, a gluten-free bakery that operates a delivery bread club in both Santa Cruz and the Monterey Bay area. Switch bakes in a commercial kitchen at the Elks Lodge in Santa Cruz, then delivers bread on a weekly or monthly basis to subscribers. The bakery also has a stand at the Tuesday night farmers market in downtown Monterey and the Thursday morning market in Carmel, and sells bread and pastries to various retail partners, including Elroy’s Fine Foods in Monterey, The Power Plant in Moss Landing and more.

Switch is the brainchild of Joshua Bradley and his wife, Amanda Bradley. Both have other careers – he’s a tech startup chief technology officer, she’s in advertising and marketing – and yet both are deeply passionate about food. Their first food venture was notpie.com, a cake delivery and subscription service. The development of Switch, meanwhile, followed a transition in the way the Bradley family eats at home. About 10 years ago Joshua was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and adopted a gluten-free diet in order to manage it. Eating this way, the Bradleys began noticing what is (and, crucially, what isn’t) out there.

“When you’re gluten-free it’s very easy to find things for breakfast,” Amanda says. “But the rest of your day… a lot of our restaurant habits are around bread.”

The duo started Switch Bakery with a mission to make “really great bread” for people maintaining a gluten-free diet. The name “Switch” is a reference to mixing it up and making changes – the bakery’s menu changes regularly, ingredients change, etc. Often the changes are driven by trying to find the right gluten-free flour for the product – Switch works mainly with rice, sorghum and starch; they don’t work with corn or psyllium husk.

“It’s a constant state of experimentation,” Amanda says. And yes, they’re perfectionists – for example, Switch will not (at least not yet) make a cinnamon roll, because they haven’t yet been able to nail the texture. Many of the ideas for new products come from the Bradleys’ home kitchen – the gluten-free burrito wrap, for example, emerged when Joshua just really wanted a burrito. Increasingly, however, ideas also come from customers – subscribers or farmers market regulars – who ask, “Can you please make me a [fill-in-the-blank]?”

One of the core challenges of gluten-free baking is finding a dough consistency that holds together, but isn’t too gummy. Switch’s approach is to avoid feeling like success lies in mimicking traditional bread, and instead bake something that works on its own merits. The bakery’s popular flatbread with portobello mushroom duxelles, for example, has a stickier texture when compared to a traditional focaccia, but the decadent umami of the duxelles means you hardly care.

“We try to make something that is unique enough – but calls back to something that you remember,” Amanda says.

Operating the subscription option is “very good for business,” Amanda says, as a way to build customer loyalty without the overhead of a retail storefront. Each bread club box contains a loaf of bread (a baguette, focaccia, sandwich rolls) and something sweet, but the specifics are different every time – part of the joy, Amanda says, lies in creating a fun little surprise for customers.

Food, after all, is largely about connection, a challenge for the gluten-free experience in a world of wheat. It might not be easy being gluten-free, but Switch Bakery is here to help.

Find SWITCH BAKERY at local farmers markets and at switchbakery.com.