A COMMUNITY bakery, which opened in the capital earlier this year to promote the health benefits of organic and affordable bread is rising to the top with investment pouring in and Royal visits.
Breadshare in Edinburgh’s Portobello, is also training people from all over the world in their traditional baking techniques.
The firm’s business development manager Debra Riddell puts its success down to the help she and her husband Geoff Crowe, baker and franchise manager, received from LaunchMe. It is Scotland’s first accelerator programme for ambitious, early-stage social enterprises set up by Firstport.
Over the past six years Firstport, Scotland’s most successful social enterprise start-up agency, has helped to create two new social enterprise companies every week in Scotland. It has provided support and resources to 700 entrepreneurs with investment totalling around £3.7 million. Breadshare got £17,000 of that cash to launch their small business. It is a not-for-profit community bakery which aims to engage with all members of the community including customers, volunteers, employees and educational workshops.
Just last week the bakery had a visit from the Duchess of Cornwell, after her aides called up to ask if she could come along to watch bread being made and meet the staff.
Breadshare now employs 11 staff and volunteers come from all over the world including Canada, the Netherlands and Spain to learn from their master bakers.
The bakery has just received £30,000 from Asda Community Capital Fund – funded by the 5p carrier bag levy – and is about to get more cash from the Big Lottery Fund to match a private investment.
Riddell said the past six months had been a rollercoaster ride and they had been working their fingers to the bone.
She added: “Our bread is simply made with natural ingredients. It does not use any processing aids, artificial additives, flour ‘improvers’, preservatives or artificial anything. All we need is flour, water, yeast and salt. We add only natural things like seeds, nuts, cheese, dried fruit, olives and olive oil and butter.
“The salt content of our breads is less than 1 per cent and we use stone ground wholemeal flour.
“Our signature Border Country breads also contain a proportion of locally-grown and milled Scottish flour and by using organic ingredients, our bread is higher in nutritional value and lower in potentially harmful petrochemical residues.”
Breadshare bakery was established at Whitmuir Farm in the Borders and started baking in January 2012. Thebusiness really began to expand when they moved to Edinburgh earlier in the year with the cash help and advice from Firstport and now they have also opened a cafe on the premises.
Riddell added: “So many things have happened. The fact that we got the LaunchMe funding which helped us move to Edinburgh, that was the catalyst. We were out in the Borders on a farm but we wanted to be closer to our customers in Edinburgh.
“LaunchMe enabled that because moving is very expensive especially with all the equipment. Without that funding we would never have been able to do that.
“We opened in January after lots of hard work and it has just exploded. We thought it would be a soft opening and it would be quiet as it was in the middle of winter but the day we opened everything doubled, our production and revenue. It has been amazing.
“We hit the ground running and my husband and I worked seven days a week for about six or seven weeks until we got more staff on board. We now have 11 staff and we are open seven days a week. The people of Portobello have really embraced it and we have visitors, or volunteers, who come from all over the world to learn our bread-making techniques.”
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here