Home of Haystack Bread
Cannon Beach Bakery started in Seaside, burned in 1935, and moved down the coast. Gib Hammond baked for Dave’s Killer Bread and Bob’s Red Mill. Now the ovens are his.
Cove Tales · April 8, 2026 · 2 min read
Before Cannon Beach Bakery was a Hemlock Street morning, it was a Seaside bakery. William J. “John” McRoberts and Albert Henshaw were baking in Seaside before 1910. They survived the 1912 fire. They did not survive the 1935 fire that took most of the Gilbert Block. McRoberts moved south in 1936 and founded the shop that still has his town in the name. After a later fire the brick oven was taken apart and rebuilt on a new lot. Code took the oven in the 1960s. The bread kept the name Haystack.
Journey here
Gib Hammond started at seventeen at Nature Bake, later Dave’s Killer Bread. He was head baker at Bob’s Red Mill’s first bakery, taught classes, and once had Julia Child in the room. He milled, he went to Nature’s NW, he came back when Bob called, then spent a dozen years as bakery and pastry manager at New Seasons. Deanna spent two decades in finance in Vancouver, Washington. “I had been running other people’s businesses for years,” she told The Astorian in 2018. “We felt the need to go on our own. We had climbed the corporate ladders: Where do we go from here?” They took over in April 2018. “We didn’t want to change everything. We just enhanced what was already here.”
A normal day
Open at seven, closed Tuesday. 240 North Hemlock. Haystack Bread, almond poppy-seed muffins, apple cider doughnuts, Sailor Jacks, and the Hammond additions: fruit tarts, marionberry crumble bars, Sneakerdoodles named for the dog. Gib has said he always loved food and “didn’t want to get stuck in a kitchen.” He heard horror stories. He got stuck anyway, on purpose, in a historic one. The shop’s own about page will tell you he also plays drums and tells bad jokes.
A customer moment
The loaf is the customer moment, and it has been for fifty-plus years of formula. People still ask if it is shaped like the rock. It used to be, more or less. Now it is a crusty loaf that tastes like the argument that brought them in. The 2018 regulars wanted the old case left alone. The Hammonds left it mostly alone and put the dog’s cookie on the ticket.
What visitors should know
Closed Tuesday. Haystack Bread is the thing to buy if you are driving back over the mountain. If you want the Seaside origin, it is in the 1935 fire, not in a plaque on Hemlock. S’mores at the sandcastle bonfire have come from this bakery in some years; the loaf is the year-round reason.
I had been running other people’s businesses for years.
