Lewis Maclean

President, Scottish Bakers

In the day-to-day running of my own business, the one element I always keep at the forefront is freshness. As a baker this is one of our biggest selling points and makes us unique to our customers. The smell of any product drifting through your premises is a fantastic way of drawing in customers.

There are significant obstacles put in the way of delivering freshness for our customers. Needing bread cooled for slicing, impatient van men wanting to beat the traffic, a lack of trained staff wanting to work unsocial hours the list is endless. I see it as key to my role to go round and congratulate people on a job well done, but at the same time see how we can look at ways of improving the freshness as it is not always a perfect match.

I also see this as my role as president of Scottish Bakers, where we have a young ambitious board and a great team of staff. I would like to bring freshness to our association and its members. We want our organisation to be a must-join outfit and we can only do this by being both value for money and delivering great business benefits.

Our focus will be on assisting our members to save on operating costs and to further develop their businesses. We will do this by providing access to business development services and assisting to raise the profile of the sector as a whole in what are challenging times. We are also the leading organisation when it comes to work-based bakery training and we have recently strengthened our training team both in England and Scotland. We are currently revising all of our learning materials and methods of delivery and have ambitious plans to build on this across the UK and Ireland.