Revving for change in the baking industry

BREADrev, in a nutshell, builds and sells wood-fired rocket ovens, and develops spaces that enable people to learn how to create artisan bread. “I started experimenting with the ovens in my back yard,” says Jeremy. “Our first oven was made out of an Illy coffee tin. We developed prototypes, then got a local welder involved, and now the prototype is with a manufacturer to produce on a larger scale.”

Jeremy says that it was a big challenge as he had never intended to build ovens, but he found no other options that would work. “When I looked at most small micro-bakeries, most of them had high electricity and capital costs,” says Jeremy. Also, by focusing on making bread using time and manual energy rather than equipment, the bread shop set-up costs were kept to a minimum. The oven works totally off the grid, using a minimum amount of wood – one bag of wood can do four bakes, which produces 128 loaves.

“We envision thousands of micro-bakeries providing healthy bread within the community,” says Jeremy. The bread recipe used in BREADrev breadshops doesn’t contain any improvers or preservatives, only salt, yeast, water and flour, and it is priced to be competitive against commercial bread.

Through crowd-funding, enough money was raised for the company to run its first bakery school in Nkanini, Khayelitsha in 2013. “We teach people how to use the ovens, but more importantly we teach people how to bake healthy bread. We don’t hand out manuals or train theory in the traditional sense – it’s almost all practical; we put our hands in the dough,” says Jeremy. “Artisan trades are learnt by failing forwards. You have to risk and do it – the theory can be learnt quickly, but the practice takes years.”

Whilst Jeremy is always available for advice, he believes that having structures in place to offer advice prevents people from trying and failing. “People must wrestle and learn and grow. However, we do always try and partner with NGOs so that once the bakers have been trained there is an existing relationship to support the bakers. This is a great challenge when there is such a shortage of artisan bakers in South Africa.”

We envision thousands of micro-bakeries providing healthy bread within the community.

“We originally offered a BREADrev training package that included an oven, four-six weeks of baking training, basic business skills, basic equipment, opening ingredients and on-going mentorship. Our focus will now be on selling ovens and provide training videos. This will make the skill and opportunity available to more people more affordably,” he added.

The response to BREADrev has been more than the company can cope with. “We have opened 7 local community BREADshops and trained 35 bakers. We have now put our ovens into production and are expecting to have ovens ready at the end of June, so we hope to set up a lot more new bakeries going forward. It’s always going to be bigger than us – over 20 million bread items are consumed each day in this country, so there’s lots of opportunity.”

According to Barty, who also works in corporate change, the focus for the next year will be on establishing community ovens and selling artisan packs, where a person can arrive, pay a minimal fee and get to bake a loaf of bread to eat or sell.