So Tyler Brulee, the London FT newspaper’s style colossus and globetrotting “bun lover”, listed this Melbourne bakery next to New York’s Dean & Deluca and England’s ethically aware Waitrose supermarkets in a round-up for the New York Times in 2005. British chef Sally Clarke described its founder to me as “like a British rose in Melbourne, though of course very much Australian. She’s deeply passionate about her food and you know, we all miss her here”.
Both are talking about Phillippa’s, the Melbourne bakery and foodstore that rubs its customers up the right way, and other bakers raw with envy, founded by Phillippa Grogan and celebrating over a dozen years in business. I spoke with Phillippa and her partner Andrew O’Hara in Melbourne about steering a bakery business through the stages from a small idea to a smooth running sustainable business….
Dan: I was just thinking how good the shop looks. How does it feel, after all these years?
Phillippa: Well, it’s a bit of a shock that it’s passed so quickly, but it sort of feels good though. But it’s going along well. And the response from the customers who have been coming along from day one, though nobody is counting years, but they’re pretty excited. And it took a while to get the shop really buzzing. Perhaps you really have to have a knack to get retail working. We reduced a lot of our 3rd party lines, and sell hardly anything bought in. It’s mainly just what we make here and we’ve expanded our range. And that just works.
Dan: What stops you getting jaded, a dozen years is a fair chunk out of your life?
Phillippa: Well, I did feel very jaded for a while, several years ago, very disillusioned. The business had grown and, inevitably when you reach a certain point, you think you still have to be in complete control. So I wasn’t doing the creative stuff, the product development, the marketing and all that. I was pretending to run the business with 40 or 50 staff, two premises, with Andrew working 6 nights a week. He kept telling me to stop, and I kept saying to him “How do I stop”? I really didn’t know how to do it, that isn’t my skill. My skill is on the creative side.
Dan: So what was the point where you held up the white flag? When you say you were pretending, what was the point when you realized that had to change?
Phillippa: When I had Sophie, when I was trying to do it all [compressed into] 3 days a week, that’s when I thought “this is b***, I can’t do this”. I just felt things were slipping because I wasn’t paying attention to the things I should have been paying attention to because I was trying to do the things I wasn’t very good at anyway. My Dad is involved in the business, and he’s more of a businessperson, and for a long time he used to say, “well, we’ll just get somebody in to run the business”. And we used to do a lot of talking about that. Then finally, one day, we had a serious talk about it, and Dad went off and found somebody in 3 weeks who just turned out to be fantastic. He used to run a shoe manufacturing company and understands the intricacies of family businesses. And I just said, “I want to see serious profitability because I know this business can do much more than it is”. I didn’t even talk about sales. I just said, “I want to totally reduce the staff turnover, I want happy staff, and I don’t want Andrew to work nights”. So he comes along and the sales line goes up, Andrew is banned from nights and staff are much happier.
Dan: Was it a bit scary? Here, you had given someone else control…
Phillippa: Well, we’d tried other things to educate ourselves, had consultants in. Consultants don’t take responsibility for the company, they’ll just “chop, chop” here and there…
Dan: It can cause morale problems as well…
Andrew: The thing with consultants is that they have to show a result. And it was pretty easy to show a good financial result simply by cutting into the staff costs….
Phillippa: Straight away I knew that this guy that Dad had found was going to be good. He’s older; he’d been a CEO… And when he came in here he saw that the brand was very strong, but we were surrounded by all of this “simple-to-fix” stuff. And for him it was work he could do with his eyes shut, but he got a lot of pleasure out of it. He scored points every day, and he could really drive it, and we were quite easy to work with.
Dan: So tell me, what has been the most difficult thing about taking the bakery into this stronger position. When you travel up and down the coast I see Phillippa’s bread everywhere. At Piedmonte’s [a local supermarket] in North Fitzroy you see lots of Phillippa’s bread there. Getting it to this point, into the “comfort zone” perhaps, how difficult has that been?
Andrew: It has been incredibly difficult at times and probably the biggest obstacle has been Phillippa. But then the biggest champion has been Phillippa as well. In the early days at the high street shop, when you’re standing there in the middle of the night staring at the wall, and the wall is talking back to you, and you’re really wondering if you should give up but you keep on going. Phillippa’s has really grown because of Phillippa and myself. I brought the ability to make the product to the table but Phillippa was the one with the bigger vision. And she stepped back from the business after about a year. She worked in the shop initially. And then she stepped back and worked on the business. And there were a lot of things she did that I probably got frustrated with, that I didn’t really understand. And a lot of things you probably could say could have been done a lot better.
But it’s Phillippa’s vision, and what Phillippa was working on. But she’s got the palate and when she develops a product she knows where she wants it to go – she knows the market for it. And what I learned early on was, with most bakers they’ll say “what you want doesn’t matter” and they’ll continue to do it their way. With Phillippa what I learned was I’d say what you want doesn’t matter, and I’d do it my way, and the sales would drop away and there wasn’t much interest. And she’d badger me saying, “just try it, just try it”. So I’d give in and start doing it, and the sales would start to come, and the interest would come as well. She has the palate, she knew the market that she was aiming at, and I responded to that and I’ve learned to do things the way she imagined they should be. It took a bit of work to get to, but once we’d established that in the relationship, that’s when Phillippa’s just naturally started to move along.
Dan: The Spelt bread that you have, it seems to be incredibly popular, but I’m not seeing so much spelt bread around in Melbourne. How have you been able to get a lead on the market in this way?
Andrew: There are few bakers in Melbourne who understand flavour…. I know that lots of other bakeries make all these kinds of breads, but I seriously find few bakeries have flavour in their bread. Why? I’m not sure, I don’t really understand it. Us, we keep everything as simple as we can. The production methods, the flavours that we’re looking for, it’s all very simple; the ingredients going into the bread are simple. In the spelt bread there is just spelt, salt and water. And the rest of it is just the method that we use. And again, the method is very simple. For whatever reason those flavours just come out when you bake simply. There are a lot of people who are using spelt flour but I don’t think that they achieve the kind of result that we’re achieving.
Dan: When you are baking without improvers, without stabilizers, the appearance of the bread can sometimes change. In hot weather the loaf can turn out as flat as a pancake, and spelt flour is particularly prone to this. How do you explain to your customers that sometimes the shape of the loaf does vary?
Andrew: Um, probably unsuccessfully! Though you can manage the quality of your bread you have to accept what the parameters are, and you have to accept that when you’re working without improvers or chemicals that you have to allow slightly wider parameters. But you can still produce a reasonably consistent loaf. But there is a balance there between understanding where we’re going wrong – if there is a problem – and understanding what the parameters are. We get a lot of feedback from the customers and we watch that feedback like a hawk. And we listen to what they’re saying and we challenge ourselves all the time too, to make sure that we’re not making excuses for what might basically be our poor performance. And I work really closely and I work really hard on the bakers. And I pick them up on these points – if it’s a hot day I work on them. I make sure that the dough temperature is really cool; make sure that the fermentation time is shortened up because the dough activity is going to be greater than if it’s a cooler day when it might be very, very slow. And it’s just about getting the guys to think – if they walk in and it’s really, really hot that day, and they’re only wearing a singlet outside, then they know that their dough needs to be cool and they need to shorten the fermentation time a little bit. If it’s really cold outside and they’re putting a jumper on, and the weather just has that chill in the air – then leave the dough a little bit longer. But just getting them to think about what’s happening to the weather that day, that’s really important. The spelt is one of the earliest doughs they make in the shift, so they don’t have the comfort of the bread coming out of the oven and warming the bakery up, adding humidity to the bakery air. It’s pretty stark when they start off with the sourdoughs.
Dan: Working here in Australia you’re rather limited in the types of flour you can get, compared to London or anywhere in Europe really – where we have an enormous choice of different flours from different grains, made using different milling techniques. Have you found that difficult to adjust to, or complicated to get over?
Andrew: No, the flour in the southern hemisphere I like more than the flour in the northern hemisphere. It’s the other ingredients I have an issue with. Like butter for instance, where you don’t have regulation through the EU. Whereas over here you might get a really good price on butter, and you think “fantastic” but pretty soon you realize there is a significantly higher percentage of moisture in it. So those ingredients you put to one side and you learn that game pretty quickly. The flour – I actually quite like the movement [in the dough] the flour gives. I’m happy with the varieties I can get and we’re learned there are only one or two mills that we can deal with. And the type of flour that we use definitely affects the flavour. We tried one mill from Queensland when we did some trials, and there was such a metallic taste to the bread it made. The flour that we use from the millers in Victoria gives us a very nutty flavour on the outside of the loaf and a very moist loaf internally. And there is still quite a flavour in behind that. We tried using another type of flour from a mill in South Australia and we just lost all of the flavour. The colour was there, the texture was there – but no flavour. So we went back to the mill from Victoria.
But it was interesting to do that. The flour in Australia, from what I’ve seen, has got better characteristics as far as our bakery is concerned. It has the protein to construct the sort of loaf we’re looking to make. So because the protein is there you can give the dough a long fermentation, which gives you the flavour, texture, colour and boldness we want in the loaf. I don’t think the farmers have to work the soil as hard [in Victoria] as they do in the northern hemisphere. There are good mills cropping up regularly now. There is a new mill in Benalla, there is Wholegrain Milling (www.wholegrain.com.au) in New South Wales that produces really lovely organic flours. And they mill the grain using very slow turning stones, and they’ve got some really fantastic flours coming out of there. There’s a reasonable amount of consistency coming out of there too. I feel a lot more comfortable baking with their flour than I would have done, say, five years ago. There would have been too much inconsistency then.
Phillippa’s Armadale: 1030 High Street, Armadale 3143 VIC; Telephone (03) 9576 2020
Phillippa’s Brighton: 608 Hampton Street, Brighton 3186 VIC; Telephone (03) 9592 7340
www.phillippas.com.au
