A new social-enterprise bakery firm is looking to open up to two more retail sites in the next 12 months, and target festivals as part of its future business, British Baker can reveal.

Foundation Bakery, a Christian-led organisation based on the Isle of Wight, has revealed the newsafter launching its first standalone retail premises, which opened on Pyle Street in Newport around two weeks ago.

The site consists of a 60-seater café and an open-plan kitchen producing a number of bakery goods including cakes, traybakes and cookies, with local bakery business, the Island Bakery, also supplying the outlet with a number of bread products.

Andy Hinton, managing director of Foundation Bakery, told British Baker: “Our ambition has always been to have our own site and operate town centre cafés because of the customer-facing experience we wanted to provide for our trainees.

“We now have our own hub, but we will look to open other outlets on the island, as well as mainland UK in due course, so that people can visit our bakery cafés where they can purchase products made from locally-sourced and natural ingredients. Our profits will fund our expansion, so hopefully as the business becomes profitable we can put money towards establishing the next few sites.”

Foundation Bakery, which helps to support former substance abusers, ex-prisoners and people with mental illness by offering practical work-based training and support, currently employs three full-time members of staff, as well as three trainees and a couple of volunteers.

Discussing the performance of the new bakery-café site, Hinton explained: “We are happy with progress so far. Obviously businesses like this take a while to get going, but we have had a great response from customers so far who are liking the concept, as well as the food.”

He added that Foundation Bakery is exploring other markets to target the business at, including the potential launch of a mobile unit, which will be utilised at local music events, such as the Isle of Wight festival and Bestival.

Foundation Bakery was formed two years ago following the demise of a charity and cake producer called Not Just Enterprises in 2010. It operated from a kitchen in Chessell Pottery Café up until last year, after which it moved to a new site located in Colemans Farms.

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