Closure of cult Edinburgh bakery recently named among ‘Britain's 50 best bakeries’

An Edinburgh bakery has announced it is closing for good this weekend – just months after being named among the 50 best bakeries in Britain.

Hobz Bakery, on Leith Walk, will serve its last customers on Saturday, May 31, with plans to open a new venue in the East Neuk of Fife next year.

Sharing the news of the closure on its website, owner Matthew Mallia wrote: “This has been a long time coming, and while we’re sad to leave our Leith community, we have greater things planned. There are many reasons for our move, and I’ll try explain as best as I can here.

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“Hobz has been too successful, too fast. When I started baking from my flat in 2021, Hobz was only a weekly side project. It quickly grew into the bakery it is today. In all honesty, I never imagined Hobz would be where it is now. We’ve been listed in many publications as one of the best bakeries in the UK, among other bakeries that I look up to and admire, even though I have trouble accepting anything we make is any good.

“About a year ago I realised that we needed to expand, and began to look for a larger unit in Edinburgh. Inevitably, this made us question our long term goals. We were looking at entering another 10 year lease, and at getting a loan for a million pounds to fund a new bakery - yes, bakeries are incredibly expensive to build. Most crucially, we were looking at committing to staying in Edinburgh for the remainder of our working life. Julianna and I realised this was not what we wanted.

“I’ve always been adamant that I never wanted Hobz to be a multi site bakery. However, I realised that this was the model we’d inevitably need to adopt if we stayed in Edinburgh. It’s difficult to explain to anyone who doesn’t run every aspect of a small, independent artisan bakery in a city like this. The pressure to grow is real, and I don’t want that. I don’t want to spend my days in an office in an ever growing business. I want to bake, and I’ve been doing less and less of that as Hobz grew. Besides, Edinburgh really doesn’t need more bakeries.

“We fell in love with the East Neuk a while ago, and we’ve found our perfect home there. We realised we wanted to live rurally, with open spaces and nature on one end, and a vast ocean on the other. While this is not the place to air my troubles, I will only say that I’ve sacrificed too much of both my physical and mental health owning Hobz, and a part of that is because of living in a constantly busy city that never slows down. This is not to say we don’t love Edinburgh, because we truly do. We could be content living in Leith for many more decades, and we love the community we’ve been in. But I want to chase happiness, and that means slowing down.

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“We’ve also found our perfect bakery space. Julianna and I will be opening a new bakery in the East Neuk at some point in 2026. It has the potential to be an incredible space that will allow us to be the best bakery we can be, and enable us to be more creative than we have ever been at Hobz. We can’t wait to tell you more about this when the time is right.”

As reported in the Evening News, back in March Hobz was included in the Good Food Guide's prestigious 50 Best Bakeries 2025 list.

The foodie bible praised their “passion for creating exceptional wholegrain bread”, but says “there's a lot more to love than their excellent loaves”.

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