The Community Supported Bakery a year on

It’s been just over a year since I began baking purely for subscribers here in the Newcastle region of NSW. Before that, I focused on local markets as my retail, but after six years of doing this, I found that in our region market operators have become very risk averse. They increasingly would cancel the market at the first hint of rain or wind. Not great for the local baker who has a day to sell their bread.

It’s my second attempt at creating a Community Supported Bakery - my first was a few years back when we set up the bakery out the back of Wesley Mission in Newcastle West. We were delivering bread every Saturday all over Newcastle, and while it worked quite well, the retail business and Cafe we built on the Wesley site took over.

I learned from our experience in supplying people directly that the subscription baking model needed a few tweaks for it to work long term. This time around, after building the model around Pick Up Points (PUPs) rather than home delivery, I believe we’ve got it close to right. I’ve approached a number of strategically located businesses, whether they are retailers or cafe operators, and offered them the opportunity to become part of our Community Supported Bakery network as Pick Up Points for our subscribers. This provides the subscriber, the PUP and the bakery with positive benefits. The bakery gets a retail location for bread. The subscriber gets a convenient place to pick up their bread, and the PUP gets added foot traffic to their shop or cafe.

The baby oven I used to bake my way across Oz became the CSB’s first baking tool.

When I began baking for subscribers again a bit over a year ago, I was using the Bush Bakery MkII for the task of baking maybe a dozen loaves every Friday night here at the farm. My proper bakery, here in the old dairy shed, wasn’t built, so I was living in my caravan, trying to keep things afloat. The Bush Bakery MkII would have to do while I was waiting. It was less than perfect, and the bread I was baking from it was also less than perfect. But I pushed on anyway. Thankfully, my customers were patient.

I was hankering to bake great bread again in Luna, my main flame. She was still in pieces out the back shed as Craig Miller was refurbishing her in his spare time. I had to play the long game if I wanted to have her baking again.

Not easy for me. I always want things finished asap so I can get on with other stuff. Everything seemed to be in permanent slomo. I was going crazy. My weekly bake in my little baking trailer kept me sane.

The dough box takes shape.

At first, I was doing the whole thing completely by hand, using my ‘dough box’, which I’d recently completed, making it out of used plywood transit boards. Transit boards are what we call the plywood boards used to rest finished and shaped dough on before baking. I had plenty which were old and needed to be replaced, so I cut them up and created my dough box from them.

I had just returned from my trip across the country in the above mentioned trailer bakery, and I’d been using standard dough tubs to mix my dough by hand for the trip. The idea was to make the dough box before I left, but I ran out of time. As soon as I got back, I set to work on it, and it was finally finished. I made it waterproof and super smooth, and began making dough in it. I found that it worked pretty well for 10kg of dough - in fact, it was surprisingly efficient.

The Community Supported Bakery (CSB)

A Community Supported Bakery can take many different forms. In some places, bakeries are set up to meet community demands - and thus are entirely funded by these communities. Bakery entrepreneurs have used crowd funding to get their dreams up and running for many years. I remember meeting a baker from Berlin who had done this some 20 years ago, simply by putting handbills on the walls of cafes to gather support from the community. In other places, customers and staff are members of a cooperative. I attempted this idea a decade ago in Newcastle and failed miserably. I have seen it working though, and while the environment for a cooperatively run bakery might not be here in Australia (with a raft of incorporation laws which make forming a coop very expensive to do, and then also expensive to run when it’s finally set up) , the idea has a lot of merit and could work in places where there aren’t such onerous laws. I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who HAS managed to get a cooperatively run bakery up and going here in Australia though!

There are lots of other ways for a bakery to be supported by the community. Turns out, communities like to have bakeries which are run by people rather than corporations.

There are CSBs which simply have a membership system, with members helping to finance the bakery’s operations each year by their membership fees. In return, members get first dibs at the bakery product, often for a discounted price. Other CSBs go for a share system, where the investors receive a dividend when the bakery becomes profitable. Still others tag on the back of established buying groups, enabling them to bake directly for buying group customers.

This incarnation of my CSB is supported by a subscription system. It’s a way of supplying customers over the long term with affordable, nutritious bread. Users of the system get discount bread by committing to a number of loaves which they can have delivered, one at a time if they like, over an endless time frame. The more loaves they commit to, the better the price per loaf. Bulk buying without the bulk, if you like.

It’s like a phone card - they just top up their credit when they need to, and receive supply whenever they want. Better prices are also available when a customer orders a number of loaves at the same time. This means that a reseller can be part of the system too. Bread can then be purchased by anyone at a standard retail price without actually having to subscribe by simply popping in to one of the resellers and buying it over the counter.

The subscription system can be tweaked to be time based, which encourages regular use. Ours isn’t done that way here, because in Newcastle, at least, people want maximum flexibility. It’s a tough market! Nonetheless, our subscriber base has steadily grown over the year, and we seem to be holding on to our customers.

Our CSB so far

So a dozen loaves, paid for in advance by members of the community, was the start of it. Now we are baking about 85 loaves each time I fire up Luna the oven. We have an ‘apprentice’ who is learning the trade from the ground up, and students regularly attend our bake day workshops so they can learn how it all fits together.

Over the coming couple of months, we’ll produce a hundred loaves per bake. At that time, I’ll consider firing Luna up a second day each week - once I’ve found someone who can distribute them more widely. Eventually she’ll get fired up more days, one day at a time. The whole idea is resource management - so when the oven’s five or six tonnes of thermal mass gets fully soaked with heat, she becomes much more efficient. I just have to find homes for all the bread!

Do you know someone who would like to distribute the bread more widely, so that we can fire up Luna more often? Leave a comment after the article and I’ll be in touch!

In the meantime, our bakery is settled into a steady rhythm. We have students visiting throughout the week to learn or revise what they have learnt. Tuesdays we make sponges for dough. Wednesdays we make the dough. Thursdays we de-gas the dough we’ve made for the first time, and prepare firewood for the bake. It’s a 72 hour process from start to finish, and it makes the bread really digestible and full flavoured.

Here on the farm there is a pretty good supply of wood, but there’s always the process of trimming the wood we have to fit Luna’s firebox. This happens on Thursdays. It’s also a good day for weeding our small garden, produce from which eventually becomes jars of pickles and pastes for our family, friends and subscribers. It’s also the day I do oven maintenance - Luna gets a deck and firebox clean, as well as a blow out to clear her flue system of all soot.

Friday is bake day, and we start by cutting and shaping all our dough, ready for the final proof. Luna is fired up in the morning, and we keep her going until baking time begins in the late afternoon and early evening. By this time Luna is steady at about 220C. When we have good fuel, it’s a matter of holding her down to temp; when it’s not good, it’s a matter of cranking the firebox along until the decks get hot enough to bake. Baking currently takes between 2 and 4 hours. Then we let the bread cool on racks, and pack it for delivery Saturday morning.

Saturday is delivery day, and I head off to our 5 Pick Up Points to deliver the bread early in the morning. Deliveries are all done by 10am. Then we rest, ready to do it again next week!

One or two Sundays each month are dedicated to teaching the general public, with 101 and 102 Workshops held. It gives people a chance to learn about proper bread as well as to have a look at what we do here.

It’s a comfortable rhythm to live with, and allows time for things like gardening, administration of our subscriber system (which takes a good few hours each week), essential maintenance of the bakery and oven, and development of the site here at the old dairy shed.

Once we start baking twice a week I can see the time becoming tighter, but there is still quite a bit of capacity time wise; the routine here somehow allows for extra stuff without too much stress.

If you would like to see how things work in our Community Supported Bakery, why not book in and learn about the process for yourself or for your group? You can bring along as many as 6 people for the one price.