Early Days
Crumbs has now been selling bread for over two months and my job title is now officially BAKER (+delivery boy, bike mechanic, marketing/sales exec)! I have loved how many people have been willing to get involved and order some bread and pastries from a solo guy on a bike, and it really has been a pleasure to be able to deliver directly to people at their front doors. It’s how food should be: delicious, direct and open.
Before starting this venture, I had worked for a large international food company for the last 5 years in their Dairies business, in both Supply Chain and Sales. My family on my mother’s side are Dairy farmers in the West Country, so I grew up around food and its production, and had little choice but to help out when at my grandparents’, both with livestock and in their kitchen garden. I am fortunate, in a way, to have seen both ends of our industrial food system. However, in some ways ignorance is bliss. The more time that I spent at Danone, and the more I reflected on growing up around agriculture, the greater the chasm grew between the actual food production I was raised with, and the product that I was tasked with selling to retailers. The business of selling food in this country and many other industrialised nations has practically nothing to do with the actual product involved, and everything to do with spreadsheets, and over-engineered powerpoint slides. Buyers and sellers, through no fault of their own, fight over profit margins in a hermetically sealed financial chamber, where the ‘story’ of a product will always trump its substance. On some pitches, I admit, the buyer might actually taste the product, but this exercise was of little importance in comparison to how much cash we were offering. I have nothing against the fundamentals of business. However, the particular race to the bottom we are talking about concerns Food, which millions of people use to sustain themselves daily and is marketed to consumers in a way that suggests everyone’s best interests are at the centre of the discussion. It is not.
The discussion about the damage our food system does to people’s health and the environment has now become more mainstream The voices of farmers and food producers are growing louder, which is fantastic, but also long overdue. Time to bang the drum. I would encourage everyone to read James Rebanks’ ‘English Pastoral’, if you would like to take a good hard look in the mirror and consider holistically how the food you eat is produced. If you’ve only got a couple of hours to spare …. Clarkson’s Farm does a pretty good job of exploring agricultural themes that were discussed only by a narrow section of society until very recentlY: how cheap should food be? Also listen to Famerama or Farming Today each week. These are the people that feed us and they need more air time in my opinion.
So, considering all of this, I decided that I wanted to remove myself from the comfy position of apathy, which I had occupied within the industrialised food system, and start creating food for people myself, that I could justify; explain the origins of, and that tasted way better than anything that can sit on a supermarket shelf for a week. I picked bread for 2 reasons. Like many people, I have baked a lot over the last 18 months, for a fairly obvious reason, and my lord properly made sourdough with a bit of salted butter is to my mind one of life’s simplest pleasures. Secondly, Bread is where farming and the society that we live in really began. Grains from grasses of all different types enabled peoples to come together in the first permanent settlements and build civilisations. Still now the UN estimates that 20% of the world’s calories come from wheat alone. Bread is such a central pillar of life on this planet.
Yet, bread and wheat has been overlooked and vilified within mainstream western culture for a long time. Gluten is seen primarily as something that causes problems for our body and digestion, as opposed to an incredible source of protein and nutrition. These are not problems caused by bread or wheat, but the way in which we have twisted its production increase speed and cheapness. These things come at a cost, we are only just starting to reckon. An enormous amount has been written on the problem of industrially produced bread and the Chorleywood process by the likes of Richard Bourdon, who pioneered the benefits of an older more traditional way of making bread, through natural cultures. I won’t lecture on that, but if you want to see what the alternative industrial process looks like, google ‘Inside the Factory’ and watch the bread episode, where they churn out pappy white loaves from flour to bag in 1hr & 25mins. Consider how long it might take you to make a loaf of bread at home, and how many corners have been cut to enable this kind of speed. It’s bread that’s so underdeveloped, if you squidge it up, it essentially returns to being dough. So, no wonder it sits so heavy in the stomach.
As you can probably tell if you’ve got this far, I am very passionate about how food is made and where it comes from. That’s why I want to make the production of my baked goods and other products as open as possible. I want customers to literally come and see it being done if they wish, and not hide it away on some massive industrial estate in Hendon, like a certain well known bakery that begins with ‘G’ and sounds a bit like sails. I don’t care about developing the story of the Crumbs Brand, because it should write itself.
The dream is to soon get a space, where I, and perhaps even some other enthusiastic people god forbid, provide bakes and other provisions: chutneys, pies, cheeses, cured meats, fruit and veg etc (suggestions welcome!), while also having the odd supper club or pop up in to keep things fresh and generate ideas and conversation. But before then, I need all the support and orders that I can get, so if you like what I am doing, please tell your friends and family about my little bread delivery service. I’ll be back after this summer break, ready to push on. Thanks for the support, Harry.
P.S. I shall try and do a blog post every month or so with updates on how things are going. If anyone reads them… super! If not it’s a good way for me to get some thoughts down on the direction of Crumbs.
