During this week’s Real Bread Week, those at a pioneering Scottish bakery explain why the best bread should be available to everyone
Tom Kirby, development manager at Granton Community Gardeners in Edinburgh, speaks to Positive News about why they decided to launch a pay-as-you-can-afford scheme – and what they’ve learned so far.
Positive News: When and how did the bakery begin?
Tom Kirby: In 2019. Before this we had a baking group called Bread Club, which formed when we produced our first sack of flour from Scottish heritage wheat that we’d grown on local street corner community gardens. Scotland The Bread’s Soil to Slice programme had supplied us with the grain to sow, as well as helping us thresh, clean and mill the resulting harvest. The bakery grew out of regular conversations at Bread Club, and realising there was a high demand for our bread after we took orders for a batch we were baking one week.
Why did you decide to launch a pay-as-you-can-afford scheme?
Our bakery is part of Granton Community Gardeners, a local community charity in a less affluent area of Edinburgh. This is a grassroots community organisation that provides opportunities and support for local people to grow, cook and eat food together. We provide regular weekly community meals, free of charge, but where everyone is invited to do something to contribute, from growing the food to collecting dishes.
We’re very aware that many people within our community are under financial stress, including high levels of food insecurity. It was obvious that if we were to provide bread to our local community, we couldn’t charge the prices of similar products in other parts of town. We also needed to pay our baker a fair wage, and were committed to sourcing ingredients as locally as possible.
No loafing about: members of the Granton team gathering sheaves of wheat
What response has it had?
It’s popular, as people who wouldn’t otherwise have access are able to get high quality bread for very little money. Some customers find it a bit awkward to choose what they pay, so we’ve started suggesting donation prices. Some people choose to pay a bit more, which helps to balance it out.
At present, the bakery could be in profit if we were using cheap, industrially produced flour, rather than from local farmers and millers. This is a challenge, but our commitment to supporting a local food economy from farm to loaf, means that we’re currently choosing to provide some subsidy from other social enterprise work of the charity. At our scale, this works well, and the benefits of the bakery to our community far outweigh this support.
What’s your ultimate aim?
To develop a hyper-local production system, where we can supply tens of thousands of loaves to our community, from grain we grow and mill within 2.5 miles. The wider environmental picture is also very important, and we’re currently working with Edinburgh University on a project exploring the potential of producing zero-carbon bread. The best bread should be for everyone. And our food supply shouldn’t be dependent on depleting soils, producing pollution, unhealthy additives, or exploiting workers.
Photography: Anneleen Lindsay
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