(from British Baker, first published July 2000)

Here’s a terrifying thought for many of you. Imagine a future where bakers worked together with restaurant owners and chefs, with publicans, with delicatessen managers, or with greengrocers, creating hybrid “bakery &” businesses. Just the thought creates the same fervour as an England vs. Germany match. What would happen to our individuality, our guild pride and our past? Well, you know, a marriage like that might help us protect our traditions, create a future for young bakers, and make for a dynamic relationship that could inspire both us and our customers.

These bakery adaptations already exist. But if I was to predict the future of the high street, given the increasing rents, difficulty to find prime sites, and the cost of labour, I feel that we will see many more varied and inspiring bakery partnerships. It’s not driven by desire to be all things, but rather that if two businesses have common needs, are already associated in the customers mind, and offer the potential to stimulate sales through their union, then surely their partnership is a good thing. Enjoyable for the consumer. The possibility of creating a vibrant and innovative place to purchase and to eat.

I have worked in such bakeries for many years, and I know the problems that occur. The risk you face of creating little spaces of tension, where bakers fight with chefs, chefs fight with shop assistants, partners fight with partners. But would I do it again. Of course. Because beyond the difficulties there is a real chance to create a level of excellence that is rare. And if I’m going to manage a difficult situation I, at very least, want the end result to be rewarding for my customers.

My first choice every time is a bakery as part of a restaurant/café, or wine bar/brewery. Wonderful fragrant bread baked on the premises, with counter sales and limited wholesale supplied delivered simply by a man and a van. A central area with simple wooden chairs and table service. Serving food with bread, or wine with bread, or beer with bread. As the bread is the draw for the public, the food/wine/beer becomes the ‘lubricant’ for consumption. And, naturally, sales. This is the most common enquiry I receive from chefs, restaurateurs, publicans and brewers.

The other is simply a stylised version of an indoor market. In New York, for example, shops such as Dean and DeLuca, Eli Zabar’s, & Balduccis have for years offered combined bakery/deli operations. It’s hardly new, nor should it be precisely imitated, as these stores’ dependence on the finest ingredients (and highest cost) would be hard to maintain in the UK.

However a simpler version which offered locally grown ingredients, foods crafted by local producers, alongside the very best bread we can bake, is sustainable. Yes, it will need in areas of relative affluence, but as it supports both the small regional producer and farmer, I believe these bakery stores are both a good thing and profitable. They don’t work everywhere, they are very dependent on the visibility and accessible positioning of the site. But delicatessens of this sort are continually opening and would be enhanced from the association with a baker on site. Get the phone book out and call them, meet and talk. You might be surprised.

(from British Baker, first published July 2000)

It must have been a few months ago. I was half asleep, listening to that familiar background murmur for many a baker, the BBC World Service. This time the programme was about the excavations in Pompeii. The archaeologists, acting as moral guardians, had suggested to the Italian officials that one room be kept from the public. Locked. For the private ‘research’ of the scholars and academics

As you might probably guess, this room was rather well decorated with various scenes of Roman pleasure. As this was radio a rather detailed description was given, but I’ll leave this up to your imagination. But given the graphic detail on the walls, the archaeologists presumed this must have been some sort of house of pleasure. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? So for many decades this room had been roped off limits.

It now seems they were wrong. After much ‘gruelling’ study, it turns out that the room was a bakery. A lavishly, seductively decorated bakery, and the images of pre and post coital life are now seen as an attempt by the bakers to create a passionate atmosphere within the shop. Perhaps the purchase of a loaf was an adult affair. More likely, though, the Romans identified the simple baked loaf with such physical pleasure, rather than a simple staple, that it was natural to continue the association with other forms of pleasure. So they were keen to create a seductive environment to work in, and to purchase from.

From our price-obsessed corner in the market, I feel we sometimes lose sight of other ways to stimulate customers. Like the window that displays our work to the public. We know of that numbness that takes hold in the supermarket when customers trolley through the bread aisle. Awash with beige and white, with nondescript packaging and ugly design. Is the high street amble any different? Should a customer instinctively know that within one shop lies excellence, flavour, very special things to eat. We must communicate visually, we must explain what lies within the high street bakery.

Looking back over old issues of this journal, and the ‘Confectioner & Baker’, it is clear that prior to the 1970’s, the bakery window was a source of pride for every Baker. If you go further back, pre-1940, the high street bakery was an immensely beautiful encounter, often ornately decorated, lavish and elegant. What has happened to our business sense if we believe that the best economy is to make the process of buying a loaf as plain and mechanical as possible?

I know I bang on about this again and again, but you can stimulate sales through making the purchasing act as pleasurable as possible. Pack that window full of taste. With colour, flowers, fruit in season. Simple tarts full of rich fresh fruit, dredged with sugar and glazed in the oven. Rich overly chocolate cakes, displaying less mechanical technique and more dripping indulgence.

Within the bakery shop, take a tin of coloured paint and give the walls a bit of life. Buy inexpensive coloured fabrics, folded to cover the surfaces of the display. It can be spotlessly clean and colourful. Empower your staff to feel that the look of the shop is their responsibility. Encourage them to get decorating books from the library, watch home improvement programmes on the television, and steal these ideas to revitalise the bakery. Though the work of the high street baker is hard enough, you cannot ever let a depressed look to the shop reflect this.