I know it has been very quiet in this space in the last few months. This whole Covid-19 business has frankly been overwhelming at times and with the recent drop back into level 3 for Auckland, all the plans I have been working on for the future of Bread & Butter Bakery have been put on hold again until I have a little more of an idea, of where this country is going to go.
I am proud to say that nobody in my business lost their job (so far) and once we were trading at Level 1, we were so happy and grateful to be supported by our regular customers and the local community in Grey Lynn, Ponsonby and Milford. However this throwback is hard. It’s hard for staff morale and the turnover we are able to bring in with trading just through a take-away window is so minimal it doesn’t even cover the fixed costs of the business. Of course we are grateful for the wage subsidy, without which we simply wouldn’t have survived at all, but the long-term strategy and outlook are so difficult to gauge that it makes me very nervous about planning for the immediate to mid-term future.
As I said in my earlier post about Covid, I feel that there are some real opportunities presenting themselves, lessons we can learn from the fight of the invisible enemy and it seems that more people are thinking about how things are interlinked and where the food comes from they put into their bodies. So that’s a good thing. Related to this topic there seems to be a real interest in the idea of Regenerative Agriculture and not just from the Organics sector. I have been working with a number of other Auckland organic businesses on trying to weave the strands of organics and regenerative agriculture together and show the overlaps and explain the mutual benefits that could be gained from a better understanding of the concept of regenerative. You might have also read my previous blog post on this topic.
I will publish the groups thoughts on this platform shortly.
But in the meantime, I wanted to share a conversation I had with Nick Morrison from GoWell Consulting on Monday. This was a kind of podcast or webinar. We talk about bread, its history, the microbiology of fermentation in the dough and subsequently in the gut and many other bread related things. Check it out here
breadpolitics.com 