💛 A Note — May 2026 Forest & Flour’s cafe is closing its doors after this weekend. Today (Friday, May 8th) and tomorrow (Saturday, May 9th), 10 am–2 pm, are the last days to walk in. The good news: Sway and her team aren’t going anywhere. Baked goods continue online at forestandflour.com, and you’ll still find them at farmers’ markets across the Bay Area.

If you’ve ever sat in that cafe, eaten one of those muffins, or just felt better knowing a place like this existed — this weekend is your chance to say thank you in person.

– Leigh & The Healthy Anywhere Team 💚

Forest & Flour in Fremont, California is a 100% gluten-free, allergen-free bakery, but founder Sway Soturi’s story goes way deeper than a free-from label. In this episode, we talk about healing through land and food, what it actually means to run a mission-driven business inside capitalism, and a word Sway uses that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since. Fair warning: you’ll never look at a muffin the same way.

A kitchen, a garden, and a full-circle moment

I’ll be honest: when I first discovered Forest & Flour for the Healthy Anywhere app, I added it because the credentials were legit: 100% gluten-free, dairy-free, peanut-free, soy-free, corn-free, nightshade-free, refined-sugar-free. Sweeteners are raw honey, maple syrup, and coconut sugar. Sourcing all local from sustainable small purveyors. It’s the kind of place health enthusiasts – and those with food allergies and sensitivities – crave.

But when I sat down with founder Sway Soturi, I realized the allergen-free commitment wasn’t the story. It was just where the story landed.

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A Kitchen as Playground, and Survival

Sway grew up moving a lot. An absent father, an unstable home environment, food insecurity… and the early realization that if she wanted to eat, she’d have to figure it out herself. So she did.

“I’ve always called the kitchen my playground,” she told me. And she means it literally. Even as a kid cooking out of necessity, she was experimenting, combining ingredients in unexpected ways, finding joy in the improvisation. The kitchen was the one place she had creative control.

Fast forward through years of chronic depression, eating disorders, and a period of hard drug use she speaks about with unflinching honesty… and then, at 25, everything shifted. Her son was born. She was living in Hawaii. And she started growing food.

Healing Through Land

In Hawaii, Sway and her family grew approximately 75 to 80 percent of their own food. They surfed. They were outside constantly. The land became medicine.

“We can’t have food without the nourishment of the land,” she said. It’s a line that sounds simple until you sit with it. She’s not talking about a farm-to-table marketing strategy. She’s talking about a lived relationship with soil, the same relationship she’d had with her kitchen as a child, now extended outward to the earth itself.

That full-circle moment is baked into everything Forest & Flour does. Before opening the bakery in 2019, Sway had also spent years working as a functional nutrition and wellness coach. She saw firsthand how individually calibrated nourishment really is: an athlete and someone in a sedentary desk job have entirely different nutritional needs, and pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone. That nuance shapes how she thinks about food.

Her curiosity also led her toward herbal medicine and foraging, learning which plants most people write off as weeds are actually quietly delivering serious nutrition. I lit up at this, because it’s one of the most overlooked corners of the food system. We’re spraying things that could be healing us. Sway just knows this intuitively.

What "Local" Actually Means

Forest & Flour works with local farmers whenever possible, many of them known personally through farmers markets across the Bay Area, from San Francisco to Oakland, Los Gatos, and Mountain View. Sway’s explanation for why local sourcing matters isn’t the usual talking point.

“If we eat locally and seasonally, the soil knows what our bodies need.”

The moment a plant is harvested, it starts losing nutritional value… and it’s not a gradual linear decline. It’s steep. Produce trucked or flown thousands of miles arrives depleted. What grows nearby, harvested close to when it reaches you, is a fundamentally different nutritional experience. Proximity isn’t just a feel-good value here. It’s the whole point.

Remember — and Re-Member

There’s a word Sway kept coming back to: remember.

She uses it two ways. First: remembering the land. This land has cared for us. We have a responsibility to steward it, not just extract from it. Second — and this is the one that stopped me — she hyphenates it: re-member. To rejoin as members of our community. To come back together as active participants rather than passive consumers.

Forest & Flour is built on that second meaning as much as the first. When I asked about community connection, Sway described a moment when an older woman came in during a stormy winter and made an offhand comment dismissing climate change. Rather than either agreeing or shutting the conversation down, Sway gently explained the shift from “global warming” to “climate change” and what that language actually means. The woman left knowing something she hadn’t before.

“How can we be in community,” Sway asked, “not pointing the finger and saying you’re doing something bad and I’m doing something good… but actually taking up membership?”

They’re doing that literally at Forest & Flour now. The 2026 pivot is leaning heavily into events: pop-up dinners featuring high-quality local organic produce, open mic nights, movie trivia nights, storytelling evenings, special brunches. The cafe is becoming a gathering place. (Check their Instagram for what’s coming up. It moves fast.)

The Hard Math

I always ask about the challenges. Sway didn’t hesitate: hiring, and the brutal economics of essential work.

The people who feed us… farmers, bakers, cooks… are among the most physically-demanded and chronically underpaid workers in our economy. Sway is on her feet 8 hours on a weekday, 13 hours on weekends. Her team is too. And yet this is the work that keeps people nourished and communities alive.

Forest & Flour’s pricing reflects honest costs: fair wages, local sourcing, real ingredients. It’s not accessible to everyone, and Sway is clear-eyed about that. But the people who do show up understand what they’re paying for.

She filters every business decision through two questions: Is it good for the environment? Is it good for the team? Sometimes the answer creates hard tradeoffs. But the framework doesn’t waver.

“When times are hard, that’s when integrity matters most,” she said. And she’s been tested on that. Forest & Flour has navigated real financial strain, temporary closures, and the grinding challenge of surviving as a small food business in Silicon Valley. They’re still here. Still standing.

The Team Behind the Food

Near the end of our conversation, Sway started talking about her team, and you could feel her light up. One team member, prepping muffin batters in the background during our interview, is passionate about environmental sustainability. Then there’s Zoe, who just loves to bake. A crew of people working tirelessly behind the scenes, each bringing their own why to the work.

She landed on something that I ended up saying back to her, and she ran with it:

Don’t take the good food people for granted.

Behind every loaf of bread, every carrot muffin, every granola bar is an ecosystem of care. Seeds planted. Crops harvested before dawn. Long drives to farmers markets in the dark. A team showing up every single day to put something real on the table. That invisible labor is worth noticing. Worth supporting.

Worth the Visit

Forest & Flour is at 43244 Mission Blvd, Fremont, CA, in the Mission San Jose neighborhood. You can also find them at farmers markets throughout the Bay Area. Check forestandflour.com or their Instagram @forestandflour for current hours, market locations, and upcoming events. The community calendar is active. You won’t want to miss what they’re planning.

Looking for more places like this? Open the Healthy Anywhere app and use the Gluten-Free filter to find allergen-friendly restaurants we’ve personally vetted. Or search sweet treat for the best artisan bakeries in the app.

Discover More Allergen-Friendly Restaurants & Bakeries That Don't Compromise

Most gluten-free and allergen-friendly menus are an afterthought — swaps and substitutions built around preservatives, fillers, and industrial ingredients. Forest & Flour is proof that it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Healthy Anywhere app is curated specifically to surface places like this: independently owned, real-ingredient, allergen-conscious restaurants where the food is actually nourishing — not just technically free-from.

Use the Gluten-Free filter in the app to find personally vetted allergen-friendly spots wherever you’re traveling. Or search sweet treat for the best artisan bakeries in the app.

Explore, discover, and eat well — wherever you go.

Looking for more spots serving high-quality, thoughtfully prepared meals? The Healthy Anywhere App helps you find top-tier, independently owned eateries committed to fresh, sustainable, and nourishing food—wherever you are.

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