Report comment

When I joined the baking industry back in 1965 the number of young people entering the trade was dire. There followed a massive decrease in small craft bakeries and the further expansion of plant bakeries and large scale cake/pastry manufacturers. The early supermarket instore bakeries recruited and trained skilled bakers (Tesco used traditional peel ovens and hand-moulding and ran night-shifts, for instance) but that has largely been replaced with bake-off operations using semi-skilled labour. It is a viscous circle. Without craft bakeries there will be no future craft bakers; without craft bakers the future of craft bakeries looks dim.