Izola Bakery is quietly working on a second storefront along San Diego’s North County coast as the downtown bake shop gears up for a serious growth spurt. The move comes as the team finishes out a larger East Village flagship and readies a dedicated City Heights dough factory meant to feed future shops. Negotiations are still in progress, and no lease has been publicly announced.
According to What Now, Izola is in talks for a “coastal North County” location, with a potential mid-2026 timing for a new storefront. The outlet reports the negotiation is the next step in the bakery’s broader scaling plan following last year’s East Village expansion.
Izola reopened a larger shop in East Village at 1429 Island Avenue, led by co-founders Jeffrey Brown and Jenny Chen, who launched Izola as a home bakery in 2020. The bakery’s official site describes the East Village location as a hot-from-the-oven cafe built to handle heavier daily demand. That footprint has pushed the owners to pursue a dedicated production hub to keep up with customer interest and wholesale opportunities.
City Heights Dough Factory Will Power Expansion
Architect Heleo’s project page for the Izola Main Dough Factory & Eatery lays out a multi-level, low-waste production facility at Fairmount Avenue and Thorn Street, complete with public dining and training space intended to support future cafes. The design is listed as net-zero, and the architect projects a spring 2026 delivery to back wholesale, training and retail operations.
More Croissants, More Shops
According to Axios San Diego, Izola currently turns out roughly 1,000 croissants a day at its East Village shop. The City Heights hub could scale output to about 20,000 croissants daily, a volume that would supply multiple new locations across Southern California. That production lift is central to the bakery’s stated plan to expand into more neighborhoods and explore wholesale or direct-to-consumer channels.
Menu, Service And Local Demand
As What Now notes, Izola’s dine-in model emphasizes oversized, shareable spreads served on wooden cutting boards, and the shop keeps its croissant lineup rotating every six to eight weeks. The outlet also flagged a ramen croissant as an upcoming innovation. Those rotating offerings, paired with frequent morning sellouts, help explain why the owners are pairing retail growth with a centralized production hub.
What This Could Mean For North County
San Diego Magazine reports the founders have said they have “eyes on” La Jolla and North County as potential next stops, which makes a coastal outpost a logical target for the brand. If Izola lands a North County site, it would join a wave of chef-driven independents moving into the coastal corridor in 2026 and widen access to specialty pastries outside the central city…