Live Love Loaf

Following our Passion

We started our bakery from a Love of baking, it began in Manchester, I (Matt) was working as a bank manager and Clare (my wife) was working as a nursery nurse. We both enjoyed baking as a hobby but we wanted to do something together, neither of us had any professional experience in baking but we were sure we could make it work.

In 2013 whilst Clare was on Maternity leave we saw a post from the Totally Locally Group, it read: “A Baker, a Baker, our Kingdom for a Baker”. We took this to be our calling and answered. We started with a home bakery in our Manchester home and once a month would sell our Freshly baked bread which sold out quickly everytime

A Year of Markets

From 2013 – 2014 we ran the Market alongside our day to day jobs, we wanted to make sure that the first time we sold out wasn’t just beginners luck, and luckily for us we sold out on every market we did! We had a limitation that working out of a home kitchen, we just just couldn’t produce as much as the demand seemed to be.

Taking the Plunge

In 2014 I was offered voluntary redundancy at work, we saw this as the opportunity we needed to move back to Leek (My home town) and build the bakery. We sold our family home and entered a “Dragons Den” style competition called “The Start Up”, the judging panel loved our passion for baking and we won!

The Grand Opening

At the end of august we were open! The Mayor of Leek cut the ribbon to a queue of customers down the street ready to buy our bread.

We got stuck in!

Working in a bakery means early starts, even for our daughter who loved pitching in! We Began finding our feet.

We Became Award Winning!

We focused on product development everyday, we always wanted to make the bread to be the best we can possibly make. This led to being noticed and we picked up the Best Regional Bakery award  years running.