Denison Street - a year on

I thought it was high time I reported on how our little venture was traveling along in the wilds of Newcastle West - it's been about a year since I was smuggled in the back door and allowed a bit of kitchen space at Wesley Mission's then unused facility.

 Time flies. It's good to have a look at where we were and where we are now.- when you are in the midst of it, things seem to stay fairly still, but when you step back a bit you can see where things have moved and where they haven't.

Back in November 2011 I was given access to a kitchen which at that time had no retail facility. You may remember that through this blog and attached social media I put out the idea of a bakery which was run on a subscription basis - in other words, a bakery better connected to its customers.

By effectively pre paying for bread, our customers became stakeholders in the new enterprise. At the time, I had chosen to close our Hunter Street premises due to a perfect storm of unfavourable events. Greg Colby, who was the GM here at Wesley Mission, saw that our community based enterprise was the perfect fit for the abovementioned vacant Wesley Mission space. He held out a lifeline for us, and gave me the kitchen to re establish while the rest of the Wesley site was being renovated to incorporate the entire Newcastle Wesley Mission and it's multifarious operations. I moved in, did a few modifications to Wal, their oven, and set to work on the kitchen space to make it suitable for baking.

The Virtual Village Bakery idea was quickly established, and before I knew it I had 20 or so pre paid sourdough lovers whom I could bake fresh bread for each week. Through their support, I could keep myself afloat while I got the new premises running.

A year later, the number of subscribers to our Virtual Village Bakery has doubled, and continues its steady growth. We also have one commercial subscriber who receives deliveries of huge 2kg loaves of sourdough bread each day for their bustling city cafe.

Our subscribers get their fresh bread every Saturday morning delivered to their door, and receive a regular bakery newsletter telling them of goings on around the cafe, and also the inside word on what is being baked for Saturday morning as well. Once people get their bread this way, they tend to continue, so we have not lost too many over the year. And our bakery manages to get a better idea of  how much bread to bake on the busiest day of the week. Our wastage level is definitely lower than normal retail bakeries as a result.

During this first year, we have managed to get lots of other things off the ground too. As mentioned in previous posts, we've renovated and re opened the cafe. Sourdough Cafe, as it has become known, has become a part of the Newcastle cafe landscape - and while it appears possibly a bit too left of center for some tastes, for many others it is a comfortable and welcoming place, a second lounge room, meeting venue or even office space, which the community in general have embraced. It definitely feels good to be here, and to be part of our vibrant and fascinating cultural mix in this post industrial city of Newcastle.

The lane from the street has been a work in progress too - Pete, our Urban Farmer, has lovingly transformed it into a kind of community garden, which provides us with salad greens and native berries, among other things. It is also a very comfy space to hang out and munch on lunch - there is sunshine and shade in equal measure.

We've called our lane Baker's Lane. For obvious reasons - and others which may become obvious as this blog continues...

Meanwhile, Joe, our erstwhile barista cum event coordinator, has started the Baker's Lane Market, which has begun to raise funds for Wesley Mission through regular Saturday morning market stalls. Our stallholders are selling homegrown food, hand made art, vintage wares and performance art (otherwise known as buskers). The stalls are free, and are attracting people to Newcastle West each week in growing numbers. We are really interested in re energising the precinct, as Denison Street is really a beautiful part of the urban landscape which up until now has been neglected and overlooked by a city as it abandons its industrial heritage for the suburban dream.

We have set up our second hand bookstore, which has actually become more of a library these days. Despite the fact that we sell books cheaply to raise money for Wesley Mission, we seem to be getting more books than we can sell from people who donate them to us.

The Cafe is also regularly used as a live alcohol free venue in the evenings, as well as for numerous community groups, including church and bible groups, meditation gatherings, storytelling evenings and even weddings! We have catered for lots of seminars and workshop events, and hold breadmaking workshops once a month.

In future posts, I'll be talking about some of the other things going on around the SourdoughBaker community enterprise, so subscribe to this very occasional blog to stay in the loop.

In the meantime, make sure you drop in to the cafe and make yourself known! We are a pretty happy mob here and are always interested to know what people are doing, so don't be shy!

SourdoughBaker Cafe heads further west

It's been five months since we've set up our bakery in the kitchen of Wesley Mission here in Newcastle West, and about six weeks since we opened our cafe doors once again.

It's Easter Monday today. It's been a crazy few weeks. I'm resting while the crew are keeping the easter punters fed and caffeined. It will be a busy day, with all our regulars finally having found us again after a few months in the wilderness without their favourite bakery.

The cafe is pretty much set up now, after spending the past five months slowly renovating, fitting out and decorating the space. Everybody seems pretty happy with the outcome - it's quite a bit bigger than our old digs on Hunter street, and we've had the luxury of space for the first time in years. We've created a lounge area and a front cafe kitchen, with large tables and lots of books on the walls - a biproduct of our fledgeling relationship as a social enterprise with Wesley Mission, our landlord and enterprise partner here in the wilds of the West End.

There has been a steady stream of great press about us since we've opened, with numerous blog posts, online magazine articles, and lately a couple of feature articles in the Newcastle Herald. The bread has been coming out very fine indeed, with Wal the oven almost achieving match fitness at last, after lots and lots of tweaking. Craig Miller, our erstwhile woodfired oven genius, has been sending me detailed designs of Bertha 2, and I'm currently raising some capital to have her built. She will fit nicely out the back under the awning, and will triple our baking capacity instantly. She should also give the bread a thinner, more colourful crust, due to her massive 'turbocharged' firebox (something Craig and I have been working on for over a year now). 
My offsider and baking buddy Ridley are counting the weeks till she appears with excitement, though it seems that she is taking longer to materialise than we would have thought. A bit frustrating, but these things always take longer than we wish, in my experience. Nonetheless, Bertha 2 will be more than a prototype, as her predecessor Bertha 1 was. And Wal, bless his old heart, will get to return to light duties once again.

Meanwhile, there is lots to do here in building and energising our community cafe. The blessing of working with Wesley Mission is that we have less pressure as a commercial imperative now - our brief is to set this enterprise up along the lines of a sustainable community and social enterprise - so while 'bums on seats' is the first priority, our big picture priorities can actually be allowed to progress at the same time. 
We have an awesome laneway here, which was once a parking lot for staff cars. We are working with a number of community groups to energise the space, so there will be outdoor seating, surrounded with edible gardens for the cafe, street art on the walls, and energy efficiency design additions, making shade and better use of available light. The great thing is there are people who have a passion already working on the project, and they will hopefully make a valuable addition to the whole through their efforts.

That's the nature of what we are trying to do here - and while we began it in Hunter street, it couldn't be achieved without a supportive partner with strong ties with the community to help it along. Wesley Mission has these ties, and they are very keen to see this project become a feature of the Newcastle landscape.

Every day is filled with possibility for everyone associated with SourdoughBaker Cafe, and that's exactly the way it should be.

Living with Wal

Call it my personal foible - I like to name pieces of equipment. I find that it humanises them, and reduces frustration with them when they don't work properly. Over time, they develop a personality too - via repeated experience with these inanimate objects, a certain character of operation becomes evident. So a name has to fit if it's going to stick.




Meet Wal, our new oven.

Bertha, while inelegant, was certainly big and powerful. And you didn't argue with her or she would burn you badly. Wal, on the other hand, is a reduction of his brand name, Waldorf. 

Wal was born in July 1981, somewhere in Sydney, I believe. This information is on Wal's nameplate. I like that. He declares where he's from and how old he is right from the getgo. Wal's an upfront kinda guy, that we know.


He's a large caterer's oven, with two baking chambers. No 'fan force' in Wal - and that's perfect for Wal's new role as a baker's oven. Wal is powered by gas, not wood like Bertha was - so he doesn't have the grunt Bertha had either.

I've had to tune him to bake bread by creating stone decks inside his belly, as well as layers of bricks to varying thicknesses above, to the sides, and below. I've had to adjust the distance of the racks from the base too, which is where the heat from the gas flame comes from. Now he retains heat better, and cooks top and bottom evenly. I'm also getting good orange colours on the crust. 



So Wal has adapted to his new, semi retired role very well. He gets used extensively on weekends for our bread run, and through the week for some cakes and catering duties. We've done a bit of work to his gas lines so he burns better. He's pretty snazzy with baking tinned breads and cakes - actually holds more than Bertha did - but his sole baking skills are not in the same league as Bertha by any stretch of the imagination. Wal is slow at baking sole breads, so we end up with a thicker crust. Thus, I call him a crusty old bugger.

Bertha 2 on butcher's paper

Bertha 2 is being planned for out the back here in Denison Street. Bertha 2 will be 2.5 metres wide, by 1.5 metres deep. She will have 2 decks, with a good 25 cm height in each. This means we will have about 6 metres of baking space in Bertha 2. To give you an idea, we currently have about 1.5 metres, so this will be a massive step forward in terms of capacity.

But for now, I have Wal. I fire him up well in advance of any baking I need to do so his stones get good and hot. I make sure I keep plenty of water up to him for steam, and I keep his doors closed for fifteen minutes at a time during every load so that he holds his temperature. I keep an eye on the pilot lights, in case they get snuffed out by a bit of cross draft in the kitchen. If they blow out, we lose temperature without knowing it, so then we lose bread.

We've come to a workable arrangement - Wal can handle about a hundred loaves in a baking session, which takes him about twelve hours to bake. He can set about eight to twelve loaves at a time. Bertha could do the same thing in about six to eight hours - so Wal drags the chain a bit. But hey, he's over thirty years old now. I reckon ovens age at about twice the rate of a human, so Wal's an old fella. Taken in context, Wal does alright.

I'm just wondering how Wal will react to Bertha 2 when she sets up shop just outside his door...

The little bakery that thought it could...

Well, it's been four delivery runs now, and our little experiment in alternative retail seems to be gaining a bit of traction. We have between thirty and fifty deliveries of fresh sourdough bread heading out to the suburbs of Newcastle every Saturday morning - and by all accounts from our customers, we seem to have hit the nail on the head. People tell us they are enjoying receiving their bread at home on Saturdays, and don't mind the idea of a subscription system to make it all happen. Each week we pick up about ten new customers - our goal of 100 subscribers seems very achievable.


The really interesting thing, though, is the connections we are making in the process. People tell us, without our asking, what they think. They refer us directly to friends, and ask us which particular breads might suit them for particular occasions or menus. They are incredibly accommodating as we develop our business, and it's obvious that they want it to keep going.


There is no particular demographic using the service - we have all ages, all stratas of society, all types of customers. I can say, though, that the majority of the ordering is done by women. I guess this reflects the nature of household management more than anything - women still run households. Having said that, there are plenty of men accessing our service - possibly because they might have been delegated to do the pickup run for breakfast on Saturday morning, or maybe because they just like good bread. Still, it seems the language is quality, and our customers have common ground in wanting access to it. I guess that's why people came from all over to visit our shop in Hunter street too.


I'm curious as to whether people choose our product due to our business structure though. My feeling is they don't - or if they do, it's secondary in their thinking. I'm guessing there is a 'feelgood factor' at work here,  a kind of human thing that wants the local baker to do well. Whether this feelgood factor extends to the ideas I've been putting out through this blog remains to be seen. The conventional wisdom is convenience and taste are the real selling points - but I'd be interested to hear whether the idea of a community based enterprise comes into your head when you're buying a loaf of SourdoughBaker bread, ahead of a loaf from the local bakery.


When I started this thing, it was all about community enterprise - the idea that a 'community of need' exists (scuse the pun) which wasn't (and couldn't be) satisfied by the corporate business model. I guess I really wanted to find out if one actually existed, and if it did, would it put its money where its needs were, so to speak, and thereby allow it to happen? The answer came back over the past year and a half. It does, and it will.


People have put their labour and their money into the SourdoughBaker enterprise, not to make a profit on their investment, but to help it to come into being. In some cases, the motivation was less than entirely altruistic, but even then there was a fair dollop of goodwill attached. And we did the best we could with what we got - which was less than required, but enough to get a groundswell going. In the end, we didn't have enough time to realise the dream in Hunter Street, as commercial reality dictates a commercial return. Shortsightedness is the bane of the capitalist idea, but this I already knew. What I didn't know was the strength of this 'community of need' - strength that pushes me on to refine and improve the business model itself.


Which lead me to social enterprise. Wikipedia defines social enterprise as 'an enterprise that applies business strategies to achieve philanthropic goals'. I see it as something which works upon those who come into contact with it in order to open their hearts and minds to the greater good. A social enterprise needs to generate a surplus only to improve its operation, so that it can do more of the good work it already does. People who work in such an enterprise need to be paid on the same basis as anyone else, of course, and people who invest in such an enterprise do not do so to make a profit, but to give something to their community. These factors set our business apart, and those who have experienced our Hunter Street cafe would have felt the difference, even if they didn't know why it felt different.


But why would I be heading this way? Surely I could make plenty of money making this amazing bread and retire from the proceeds next week! Okay, I answer. Have a look here. There are a few stories there about the early days of my obsession with sourdough bread, and they will hopefully illuminate you as to my own personal path in wanting to do things differently. 


But what if I wanted to go further than that? 


What if I wanted to see if there were more environmentally friendly ways to run a bakery? 


What if I wanted to see if the process of making sourdough could actually heal others in some way?


What if I just wanted to make sourdough bread as good as it could be, without having to worry about the limitations put upon us bakers through commercial  necessity? 


And what if I actually believed that the bakery industry had gone the wrong way and I wanted to do something about it? 


In short, it's incredibly difficult to make bread that takes three days to make - that's how long it takes to make our bread. The quality we achieve can't be done any faster - try putting that out to market at a price people can actually afford. 


It's also expensive to train people to the high standard we require, and difficult to retain them once they are trained. The TAFE system exists to train bakers to work in franchised operations. Even when we employ a TAFE qualified baker, we still have to retrain them. Artisan bakeries are a different kettle of fish, and there is little to support us in the wider industry beyond passionate suppliers and fellow craft bakers. Surely, the industry would benefit by a broader and more comprehensive training regime than simply teaching people which bread improver to put in the dough?


There is no room to innovate in the bakery business, unless you have plenty of capital to begin with. 


All of these things have influenced my gradual conversion to running my bakery as a social enterprise. A bakery that can innovate, make great healthy bread, and teach people the proper skills needed to make it. One that can galvanise a whole community, and be human centered at the same time. One that can try new things, and fail occasionally without becoming a statistic. One that can actually make a difference. 


Having looked into the different business structures I could use to do this, I found that it was almost impossible to run a cooperative as small as ours and still have time to write and to bake. So to band together with an existing philanthropic organisation such as a charity seemed like a good idea. 


I found one - or it found me anyway. What is about to occur is a community partnership that can do all of the things I've mentioned here, sustainably and for all the right reasons.


Have I got your attention yet? Stay tuned...the story continues.

1318 reasons to be concerned...

Apparently, according to New Scientist, 1318 trans national corporations effectively control sixty percent of the world's economic activity, through a series of interconnected companies. Of this, a 'super entity' of 147 super connected corporations actually control forty percent of this sixty percent.

They conclude that, using purely scientific methods, it is true that one percent of the worlds population overwhelmingly controls most of the world's wealth.

So the 'one percenters' occupying many of the world's capital cities right now are actually scientifically correct. One percent of the people control most of the wealth. The scientific American does not try to scientifically assess in the same way the world's power elite, but money and power are often interconnected - if not overtly, but I suspect the connections may still look quite similar.

New Scientist goes on to say that this is not some conspiracy theory - and that in fact this type of concentration of control occurs frequently in nature, and occurs because of this inter connectivity of networks. The image associated with the article is a good one - though basically meaningless. Nonetheless, I'll copy it here because it's quite pretty and I guess a visual representation of what is being talked about...

      

These connections, represented by different coloured dots, came about for business reasons, independently and without a grand scheme in mind - just that each of the 1318 companies had controlling connections to two or more other entities, and that these entities in turn had interests in, on average, 20 other entities.  So the economic web takes shape, till eventually well over half of the businesses we interact with are ultimately controlled by these 1318 trans global companies.

Is this bad? Well, New Scientists doesn't seem to think so. In fact, they go on to say that the concentration of power in such interconnected systems often leads to the stability and therefore success of the entire population interacting with it. Again, New Scientist sites similar natural studies of highly evolved and successful ecosystems to point this out.

Unless, they add, with wily understatement,  one or more of the 'super entities' falls on hard times. Then this can actually cause the entire system to have to radically evolve, or cease to exist. Suddenly.

It appears to me that we are witnessing this exact phenomena occurring, as already some of the bigger players in this network have either completely unravelled (say a Lehmann Bros from a few years back) or are beginning to unravel (say the growing contagion of debt default occurring in Europe at the moment, and the consequences that is likely to have on the private sectors in the affected countries).

Once you add into this mix a number of smaller, powerful networks, based not on business but on the ability to rapidly communicate, and you can see we are in for interesting times. I'm not necessarily talking about human or business networks here either - think about the growing number of entirely mechanical share trades occurring every microsecond of every day in every country. These share trades occur, not based on business logic as such, but on a series of algorithms designed to automatically detect the fastest way to make profit. So every day, thousands upon thousands of share trades occur between computers, without a human being even overseeing things. A number of mini share trade meltdowns have already occurred - and these meltdowns eventually effect REAL businesses - and no one seems to have any idea how to stop them from happening again.

Another factor in the turgid miasma of existence we've got to include is the internet itself - which has in fact enabled the power of the abovementioned microtrade technology to grow - not to mention the surge of social media, and the overturning of traditional media in the process. Now just about everybody has their own audience, and everybody has their own tailored information stream too. The keepers of the old media don't want it, and are doing their best to understand it - so they can work out how to control it - but as yet, they have either failed dismally, or have found a good way to spend money without actually making as much as they used to.

A third factor, which is equally influential but too vast a subject to touch on here, is the interchanges, both political and economic, between the superpowers of China, India, the US and members of the struggling Eurozone. These will become more important as their people start to loudly wonder when they stopped being citizens and started to become consumers...

It seems as though we could be headed for a system reboot. Watch out for the blue screen - you thought it was a thing of the past - I predict it will return with a vengeance.

The birth of a social enterprise

Before SourdoughBaker Cafe came into being, I had been working with a few foodie friends to establish a food producers cooperative here in Newcastle. The idea was that people with food skills and passion for food production would cooperatively establish an enterprise to cost effectively produce and market our goodies. This idea took hold once we decided that a bakery was the ideal vehicle for this to occur.

My background in bakeries taught me one thing though - bakeries, like farms, are twenty four seven operations. You can't just hang a sign on the door one day and say 'Gone Fishin'. They are really a continuous process, involving people all around the clock. If one bit stops, the whole thing slows right down. If one thing fails, it's likely to effect everything else. And above all, it taught me that bakeries are a lot of work.

That was my hesitation from the getgo. Someone tends to have to carry the whole thing physically and mentally, and that someone, I was determined, was not going to be me. I have already lost a marriage, a house and quite a few good years to bakeries. On the lighter side, I'm probably ideally suited to do it, because the risk of losing these things doesn't exist if you have already lost them!

Adding a cafe to the equation seemed to be a good idea - we had skills within our group to do this, firstly, and secondly, it meant that the focus wouldn't be on the bakehouse alone. This, I thought, would mean a kind of 'lifestyle' business - a bit of baking, small volumes and high quality bread, lots of great coffee and food baked in the oven. Perfect.

I could have time to run workshops, play with woodfired ovens of my own design, and get some perfect sourdough happening.

As one after another of my compatriots worked themselves out of enthusiasm for the idea, I was left to, ahh, carry the whole thing - physically, financially and mentally. This would have been an easy task if no one cared - I could just quietly tuck it away and move back to real work once the going got too tough. But I discovered every day more people who cared, some people who would actually put their time and their money into this crazy dream. And others who just got inspired by what we were doing, and who faithfully returned, often with friends and family in tow, to provide said entourage with a dose of hope for the future and some yummy bread to boot.

So I was obliged to keep going, despite the obvious flaws in our plan. And that obligation has, once again, sheared a few more years off my personal mortality timeclock, and left me just a bit worse off than when I started, financially and materially.

But mentally and emotionally I have been completely energised - by the things we achieved in a short eighteen months, and by the love I have received from all manner of people, for all manner of reasons.

I'm left with a deep sense of humanity at work. It really isn't just me. It's actually everyone doing what they can. Some did more than others, but everyone who has been involved in this thing has given generously, and with love rather than avarice. I've deeply connected with such a broad range of people doing equally interesting and innovative things, as well as people who just do their thing in their own very special way. I'm left awed and amazed by this town, it's spirit and its unmistakable attitude. Thank you, Newcastle, for taking me and my band of social misfits into your hearts.

And that's the thing. I have observed that everyone who has hung in with this 'community enterprise' as it has grown has one thing in common - we have all survived. All of us have had to overcome something big to just turn up at work each day. No one walked in with a silver spoon - or if they did, they pretty quickly took their silver spoon elsewhere to dip in someone else's sugary gravy. Not in our slow food cauldron of flavour and meaning. Our enterprise worked on us to evolve and to become stronger, not the other way around.

I thought it was to be a community enterprise. I was wrong. It's a social enterprise, which just happens to be owned by the community.

And now, that community has taken us in; really given us something to hold on to, and to build.

I can't reveal the exact nature of the evolution of the SourdoughBaker experiment that's coming, but I can say it puts meat on the bones of the idea we had going. And it will enable me to take this thing to the next level - a social enterprise for Newcastle to be proud of. Stay tuned as the story unfolds...

The delivery business - a new adventure!

Well, what a pleasant surprise! Every day, a new subscriber comes on board. Some days, we get two or more. And they keep coming.

Every Saturday morning, I head out with a wagonload of fresh sourdough bread, a laptop and a GPS unit.  The growth in customers has been reasonably well paced - thankfully, we haven't been overwhelmed with orders. This has given me some time to get systems right, and so far, everybody has been attended to in time, and without any glaring mistakes. First week, we had ten customers. Next week, twenty. This week, thirty. Very encouraging.

The interesting thing is, the more people we get in any given suburb, the easier it is to deliver. It's all about critical mass, it seems. I expect it'll take a little while to build to the point where it's truly efficient, but there seems little doubt that this way of doing things may just work!

I'm also enjoying getting out from behind the oven too...

Our new kitchen certainly makes a difference - while Wal the gasfired oven (Bertha's temporary stand in) hasn't been able to rival Bertha in terms of raw heat and baking speed, he's not a real bad oven for bread at all. (PLEASE don't tell Bertha that. She'll be cranky and probably cause me pain in some way when she gets installed in a month or so...)

The kitchen is larger and better equipped, and this just makes it a joy to work. I'm definitely seeing this new venture as a step in the right direction. No more ninety hour weeks. No more 4am alarms.

I'm in the process of training my body to sleep in. After eighteen months of early starts, this is harder to do than it sounds - the last three mornings running I have had to put myself back to sleep at 4 am. I classify this as a good problem...except that I'm also learning to stay up late again.

I've added one more subscription bread supply option to the list - for $200, you get $250 worth of sourdough bread, delivered every week to order. This one should really anchor the service, while offering genuine savings for regular customers. In only a few weeks, some of the $50 subscriptions are already heading for renewal. Time flies, particularly when you can share your subscription with friends! I suspect more customers will choose this option over time. Check it out:

Sourdough Bread Supply - Subscription No. 20

Incidentally, today I met Anna, who is doing a very similar thing (she calls it her 'baking run') with cakes. We had lots in common too - but it just goes to show how syncronicity and a bit of blogging can bring people together. More on that story next post...