The Village Bakery (Coedpoeth) has invested £2m in a crumpet production line to produce what it calls the UK’s first sourdough crumpets.
The new line can produce 15,000 products an hour, and is installed at the business’ Wrexham bakery.
By spring next year, the bakery said it wants to ramp up the production, so the new line is running 24/7, making more than 12 million crumpets a year. The line will be manned in three shifts a day.
The bakery has also created 36 new jobs off the back of the crumpet line installation, taking the total workforce to more than 350 staff.
Managing director Robin Jones said: “The new crumpets sum up our approach. When we develop a new recipe, we’re looking at the past for our future and we’re just taking those old methods and producing them in high volume, using traditional methods allied to the best modern technology.
“Sourdough is a mixture of flour and water and it’s fermented over a period of time. Over that period of time it produces lactic acid, which gives it a certain flavour and it doesn’t taste sour, it just tastes lovely and bready and how a crumpet should be and how crumpets tasted 80 years ago.”
A successful year
Jones continued: “This is the Rolls Royce of crumpet machines, and all credit to our engineering team for installing the production line in record time. They’ve moved mountains and I’m over the moon with what they’ve done.
“We’ve had a fantastic year, some great, great highlights and it’s always nice to squeeze one extra thing in before the year ends and this is the rabbit out of the hat which we’ve turned around in record time.”
The Village Bakery won British Baker’s Baking Industry Award this year for Bakery Manufacturer of the Year.
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