Slow Dough: Real Bread: Bakers' secrets for making amazing long-rise loaves at home - Chris Young (2016)

Beyond Your Kitchen

So, you’ve got the hang of this Real Bread making thing, friends and family are telling you “you could sell that, darl”, but where can you go from here? Well, why not start a microbakery from home, or get together with people round your way to set up a Community Supported Bakery?

Microbakery

This is perhaps the most exciting and vibrant area of the Real Bread movement. In my job at the Real Bread Campaign, it feels like I hear from people every month who have become so sick at being unable to find anything but industrial loaves in their neck of the woods, that they’ve said “sod it - I’ll be my local baker”, or words to that effect. If you have an oven, you can be your local community’s baker, even if you just bake half a dozen loaves to order, once a week, for people on your street, or 30 loaves to sell at a local farmers’ market. Ask your local authority what food safety, hygiene and other regulations you need to meet, to set up your own microbusiness.

Community Supported Baking

There is no hard and fast definition of a Community Supported Bakery (CSB). What sets a CSB apart from other bakeries, some of which might see themselves as community bakeries, is that its business model blurs the traditional “me baker/you customer” set up, in which the baker lays out his or her wares, hopes that people will come along to buy them, and then keeps any profit made. In the case of a CSB, people from the local community join the baker as what the Slow Food movement calls “co-producers” by making some sort of longer-term investment in the business and so sharing at least some of the risks and rewards.

CSB models

Here are just some ways people can join together as a community to run a Real Bread bakery.

✵ Community ownership: The CSB could be run as a worker-owned cooperative or owned by local people buying into a community share or loan scheme.

✵ Bread as bread: One form of CSB support is a “bread bonds” scheme that offers investors their dividends, interest payments or even capital repayment in bread.

✵ In-kind investments: CSBers can waive/reduce their charges for property rental, flour, grain, milling, equipment, labour for fitting out the bakery, shifts running the shop, shifts in the bakehouse, adding the bakery’s bread to their own delivery rounds, or helping with accounts, ordering or marketing.

NB: To be a true CSB, supporters should pay more than just lip service to one or more of these types of investment. For example, a bakery where subscription payments account for only a few percent of turnover isn’t a CSB.