Joseph Brot

Josef Weghaupt started his career inside an industrial bakery in Vienna in 2002, learning the mechanics of mass-scale bread production as a food technologist. That experience became the counterpoint to what he built next: in 2009 he founded Joseph Brot with the explicit aim of baking bread of the highest possible quality, using long, slow fermentation instead of the shortcuts he'd studied.

When Weghaupt opened his first shop on Naglergasse in Vienna's inner district in 2011, some passersby reportedly mistook the design-forward space for a fashion boutique rather than a bakery. The bread itself, though, stayed traditional: fermented for at least a day and a night, sometimes a full week, using organic raw materials sourced entirely from Austrian farmers and shaped by hand in the company's Waldviertel workshop.

In 2019, Weghaupt joined 24 small-scale farming families to found Ur-Gut, an initiative reviving rare heritage grain varieties in their home regions to preserve agricultural biodiversity, tying the bakery's sourdough directly back to the fields it comes from. That work was recognized in 2025, when Joseph Brot became the first bakery to receive the EU Organic Award, a marker of how far the project had traveled from Weghaupt's start inside an industrial bakery two decades earlier.