Handover and first bake
Six weeks of fit-out, most of it drainage. The first commercial bake was forty loaves on a Tuesday; we sold thirty-one and ate the rest ourselves.
Year one · Ffion's
We opened with one oven, a bank loan, and no idea how much flour a street eats.
The unit had been a phone repair shop, and before that a bookmaker’s. Everything below is from the first twelve months, including the two we would rather not have had.
The oven fails
The deck oven lost its bottom element on a Friday. We baked out of a domestic oven for nine days at a quarter of the volume, and opened every one of them.
Wholesale, carefully
Three cafés on the same street took a standing order. We capped it at a hundred and twenty loaves a week so the counter would not run out by ten, which had been the complaint all summer.
Second oven, second baker
The loan covered a second deck and Marta joined on nights. Waste fell from eleven per cent to four in the first month, because we could finally bake twice in a day.
Loaves baked per month17,570 in the first year
MarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDecJanFeb
Peak month 2,340 · DecemberJune 540, the nine days on a domestic oven
Prices went up twice in the year, both times the week after the flour price did, and both times we wrote why on the board by the door.