Motherdough started during the pandemic when Lance Littlefield saw something online that bothered him — “people learning to bake sourdough from influencers who didn’t know what they were doing”.
They were taught to chase the wrong things: dramatic crust, large holes, and sharp “ears” on the loaf. He started teaching online, and then he started selling. Enter Alfonsina, a sourdough starter pack that is, allegedly, 106 years old.
Alfonsina is a pasta madre, the Italian mother of everything that rises — a living microbial community of flour, water and wild yeast. Hailing from a bakery in Clusone, a small town in Italy, Littlefield knew the descendants of the founder and became one of the people who received a small piece of what was created in 1919 — Alfonsina.
“She” has crossed oceans and survived pandemics, outlasted businesses and relationships, and is essentially a living culture of wild yeast and bacteria — and in a meaningful sense, is the heart of Motherdough.
What Littlefield sold in the beginning was not bread. It was Alfonsina’s descendants — portions of the same living culture, shipped around the country in a partially hydrated state that kept the bacteria alive without refrigeration.
The trick, he realised, was patience, and people are generally impatient. So, he divided each shipment into two packets — brown and green — and gave customers a two-stage process, mixing one, then the other 24 hours later and gradually building anticipation across two days. The result was functionally the same as mixing both at once and waiting 48 hours, but the psychological experience was different. “I created a bridge for patience,” he says. “And it meant that after 48 hours, people could bake their first loaf at R200. That builds an incredible level of immediate trust.”
Littlefield put Alfonsina online and distributed about 7,000 pieces of hers during the level five lockdown. Thousands of bread makers learnt how to fold, feed and understand their dough at home. By June 2020, what had begun as Littlefield alone at a laptop had to be registered as a business within the space of a few months. By the end of that year, Motherdough was turning more than R2.5m in profits, despite being locked inside in a country in lockdown. Still, customers wanted courses, then tools, then ingredients.
When lockdown ended, he changed the model and started baking about 100 loaves a week from his garage. Today Motherdough has blossomed into three brick-and-mortar stores — in Stellenbosch, Jonkershoek and Franschhoek, around the corner from their bakery.
Littlefield’s personal story is just as impressive. He has worked in consulting and tourism and ran a restaurant in Joburg. He spent some time in Italy, chasing family connections on his mother’s Piedmontese side, and lived in India while working in the diplomatic service. Today, Littlefield is part brand strategist (he worked for the ANC in Shell House during the country’s first democratic election), part fermentation scientist, part activist and part cook.
In early 2021, he was joined by Willem van Schalkwyk, his neighbour and an entrepreneur with a similarly diverse background.
As of 2026, the business employs 41 staff members and is on track to turn over R16.5m this year alone. Van Schalkwyk is front-of-house, and Littlefield is, by his own admission, best kept behind the scenes. “If somebody walks into the shop with a loaf of bread from a retailer,” he says with a cheeky grin, “I’m going to ask them what the hell they’re doing in my shop with fake bread.”
“Fake bread,” or faux bread, is a phrase that comes up often. The artisanal bread market is worth about R14bn a year, with sourdough or artisanal bread dominating approximately 80% of the products sold. The general bread market, on the other hand, stands at about R40bn a year — where loaves contain yeast, preservatives, flour improvers and starter cultures that have been effectively neutralised by the speed and scale of industrial baking.
In Littlefield’s view, only a handful of facilities in the country bake real sourdough: 100% naturally fermented, no added yeast, no refined fats, no GMOs. “We shy away from the words ‘artisan’ and ‘sourdough’. They’ve been hijacked and don’t reflect what we make,” he notes.
A properly fermented sourdough — one allowed to develop over many hours at a controlled temperature and humidity — breaks down the antinutrients in flour that prevent the body from absorbing minerals. It reduces the gluten allergen load and is low GI. The bread most people eat, Littlefield explains, is engineered to behave well on a shelf. “Modern bread is only designed to look and smell and feel like bread. Properly fermented bread is a whole food.”
Yet one can’t escape the fact that healthy food is often more expensive, especially in the artisanal space. A loaf of Motherdough’s classic white sourdough (their best-seller) costs R85. It’s four to six times more than what most artisan establishments charge, but Littlefield highlights that much of the margin comes from infrastructure: seven figures a year on electricity alone, mostly for climate control to manage fermentation with precision.
Whatever is not sold each day is donated — to soup kitchens or old age homes. It is the organising principle of the business made physical: what we bake today, we sell today, and what remains feeds someone who needs it.
Hop on to Motherdough’s website and you’ll see that they don’t hold back, explaining that most sourdough bread you buy from large bakeries and supermarkets is fake. Aptly coined "sourfaux", these breads contain added yeast and other ingredients “that simply don’t belong in real bread, naturally fermented bread”.
“To fit into the demands of supplying bread on scale, as quickly as possible, to consumers, these establishments cheat.”
Motherdough, however, presents an alternative. The business uses the original Italian method of natural fermentation to make bread and other products, including cornetto (like the French croissants, but softer and less crispy), brioche, cordials, and a variety of biscotti. And of course, the bomboloni — traditional Italian doughnuts deep-fried until golden in granulated sugar and filled with pastry cream, jam or chocolate.
The bakery runs nearly 24 hours a day while the sourdough courses continue, teaching eight people at a time, once or twice a month. They offer 14 different breads and boast about 10,000 customers a month. Last year they baked almost 30,000 loaves of bread, 20,000 cornetti, and 20,000 bomboloni.
The team uses AI to plan systems and fees, feeding the models 12 months of sales data and rolling averages while factoring in weather and busy times to reduce waste. It’s the epitome of traditional craft merging with modern infrastructure.
And on a recent Saturday morning visit to the Franschhoek store, Motherdough is abuzz. Cornetto and brownies, made with 100% fermented flour, are selling out, while the panini and grilled cheese toasties remain a firm favourite. “Faux bread,” it seems, is on its way out.
