Earlier this year, USA TODAY’s 10 Best 2025 Readers’ Choice Awards confirmed something neighbors likely already know — Unrefined Bakery, founded by Anne Hoyt and her daughter Taylor Nicholson, has top-notch gluten-free treats.
Photography by Justin Schwartz
Unrefined, which has a location in Medallion Center, was nominated by an expert panel for best gluten-free bakery along with 17 others from across the country. It had never been nominated in this contest before and was the only nominee from Texas.
And yet, it still claimed the No. 1 spot.
Unrefined Bakery, formerly named Wholesome Foods Bakery in its early days, started up in Lake Highlands back in 2010, but Hoyt and Nicholson aren’t native Texans. They hail from northern Oklahoma, and Nicholson came to Dallas for work after finishing school at the University of Oklahoma. Her sister then came to our state to study at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, and their mother eventually followed. Now, Nicholson lives in Lakewood while her mother is in Old Lake Highlands.
Photography by Justin Schwartz
As a child, Nicholson recalled that her mother had always been a champion of healthy foods. When she and her mother discovered they couldn’t have gluten anymore because of celiac disease — an ailment in which consumption negatively affects a person’s small intestine — recipes had to change. Unrefined Bakery was born out of this necessity.
“In 2010, the marketplace was so different than it is today,” Nicholson says. “I mean, people hadn’t even heard of gluten in 2010, a lot of people. If you said ‘gluten-free’ at a restaurant, they’d be like, ‘What?’ They had no idea. It’s so, so, so different, and now, you have all the snack bars and things that are available.”
Case in point, Nicholson remembers one of the options at the time being packaged bread with a one-year shelf life.
“We were just sick and tired of not finding what we needed and wanted, and we weren’t going to eat the very few things you could find,” she says. “So we created our own food that we knew we needed, and so certainly other people did, too.”
Photography by Justin Schwartz
Unrefined has always been gluten-free, but the bakery evolved to eliminate soy as well after listening to what their customers needed. Products also don’t include genetically modified organisms or food dyes, and there are vegan, keto and paleo options available. Unrefined Bakery’s food is for all — adults and children who may have allergies but still want to eat birthday cake as well as people without allergies who think that gluten-free food is gross and get proven wrong.
“We’re trying to change people’s minds,” Nicholson says.
The journey to finding successful recipes wasn’t easy, though, especially since gluten helps bind ingredients in the baking process.
“I had loved to bake, and when I realized I could no longer have gluten, I sort of went into mourning,” Hoyt said in a previous Lake Highlands Advocate article. Meanwhile, Nicholson was less upset and doesn’t truly consider herself a baker, so she didn’t mourn like her mother did. Still, she says gluten-free baking is such a big challenge because it’s antithetical to typical methods.
Photography by Justin Schwartz
“You kind of have to forget what you know about traditional baking,” Nicholson says. “A lot of the principles don’t really carry over. It performs so very differently that you kind of have to start from scratch.”
Nicholson was 25 years old, and Hoyt was 52 when they started their bakery, first as a pop-up shop that was open about six days a month at Walnut Hill Lane and Audelia Road in Lake Highlands. After a few months there, they moved into their first permanent space at North Buckner Boulevard and Northcliff Drive in Old Lake Highlands.
Since then, Hoyt and Nicholson stopped operating in Old Lake Highlands years ago and have grown to five locations, including Medallion Center on Northwest Highway in 2017, Frisco in 2012, Preston Center in 2015, Fort Worth in 2016 and Richardson in 2022. In addition, Unrefined Bakery provides goods (buns, pizza crusts, bakery items, etc.) to restaurants, cafes and farmers markets for wholesale or retail.
“We just don’t have any quit in us,” she says. “We have had many, many, many very hard years, and our growth has been hard. And I think people think, ‘Oh, you have all these locations. You’re so successful.’ And, yes, but at a cost. It’s incredibly challenging to grow, especially as a small business, when we don’t have any outside investment. It’s just my mom and I. And that’s really unique in the area we’re in.”
Not everyone could work with their family members, but Nicholson says she and Hoyt complement each other well. Hoyt oversees production and operations, plus she develops recipes. Nicholson runs the business side of Unrefined while also coming up with experimental flavor profiles, cake of the month and cupcake of the week, the latter of which she is especially proud of.
“I think it was like three, three and a half years in, I said to my mom, ‘I want to do something called a cupcake of the week, and I want to make sure that every week we do a new cupcake flavor,’” she says. “And she looked at me, and she’s like, ‘You’re literally crazy. How would we ever do that?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I think it’s going to be really good and exciting for business. Customers want something new, and I will have fun with that.’ And she’s like, ‘This would never work.’”
Now, cupcake of the week (which tends to include seasonal flavors) is a mainstay of Unrefined’s business and attracts the attention of customers on social media when the new ones are announced, Nicholson says.
“Bakeries are fun,” she says. “It is a joyful experience to be in my stores and help customers and see them be excited about having to pick up cookies or a cupcake or sandwich bread so their kids can have a typical, normal sandwich. It’s truly a privilege to be able to help our customers enjoy food again, especially when you’ve been in a situation where you’ve had to go without.”
Unrefined Bakery, 6464 E. Northwest Highway, 214.414.2414, unrefinedbakery.com
