Our Origins

In the early 1990's Gail Stephens started a company called Gail Force that served some of London’s top chefs with bread she collected every morning from bakeries all over town.

After a few years working with ideas and concepts from top chefs, she thought it would be a lot better if it all came from one craft bakery, so she put together a small team and they started making the kind of bread that chefs really wanted. It was a brave move, but she and her team of bakers were absolutely committed to making outstanding innovative craft bread for London’s most demanding palates. 

She called it The Bread Factory…as a joke, since it was anything but a ‘factory’, but she made the small mistake of putting it on a letterhead and they printed many more than she needed and she did not want to waste them. The name stuck and became the top bread choice by the top London chefs.

Today, we just don’t have the heart to change the name – it is a bit of our history that you just don’t mess with, though some think we should. Craft bakeries struggle all the time. It's a tough business. The challenge of meeting the quality demands of top chefs day in and day out is exhausting and often the best bakers get locked into unsuccessful businesses. 

New Beginnings

In 2004, Ran Avidan and Tom Molnar met Gail and she was telling them her story. She had built The Bread Factory into one of the most respected craft bakeries in London and put everything she had into making it work, but it was struggling and she was working on running her Baker & Spice business. 

Ran and Tom didn’t know much about baking, but they loved bread, were impressed by the craft bakers they met and what they did and decided to make a go of it. What was immediately obvious was that world-class bread should have world-class service and infrastructure, so they decided to make the kind of investment in people, facilities and equipment that lived up to the quality of the bread and the craftsmanship that was going into the product. Soon, there was a modern IT system, improved service levels, BRC accreditation for food safety and eventually a new bakery that was built to be a magnet for (scarce) baking talent and a place that respected modern food safety and HS&E requirements.

Where Are We Now?

Today we have a craft bakery that looks very different from the others – we have a full time Food Safety Technical Manager and a team to support him, an onsite engineer, bakers that are also outstanding managers, a Customer Service team that is available 7 days per week and 24 hours per day and our own 23-driver strong logistics team delivering bread hot out of the oven 365 days a year.