Brass up front!
John Foster, md, Fosters Bakery, Barnsley
Baking is in my blood. One of my earliest memories was going to visit a bakery on a school trip when I was five, and being invited to touch the bottom of the oven to see how warm it was. I remember thinking: I don't have to do this; I already know what it feels like - so I must have been in the family bakery before then. When I was a bit older I used to come in really early on a Saturday morning and light the gas oven. The health and safety people would have a fit now! I was always in the bakery, whether it was in the holidays, or as a Saturday job. This is what I am. I am a baker. I've never wanted to do anything else.
At 16, I went to Hollings bakery school in Manchester before coming back to work in the family business. I did every job going. You name it, I did it. I spent one year on a pie blocking machine making jam tarts and pies - the most wretchedly boring job I've ever done!
After that I became more involved with the commercial side of the business. I remember when we got our first computer, which housed our ERP [enterprise resource planning] system. The floppy discs had a memory of 5K!!
In 1990 I became a director, and shortly after, I became md. But I had to earn my place. The business is owned by my family, but it's not your typical 'family run' business. We have professional managers here. Put it this way, my children are not even remotely interested in running a bakery!
The trading environment has been incredibly tough recently, owing to the massive rises in raw material prices, but we mustn't lose our nerve. We've also been careful not to overstretch ourselves. You can sum up our approach in three letters: BUF (brass up front). Almost everything here is paid for and we have cash in the bank, so we're better placed than many other companies to ride a storm.
In the early 1980s, we had four delivery vans. Today, we've got 20, and that just handles 30% of the business. The bulk of our products are distributed by a third party. We've outgrown our site twice, so this is the third site. However, I don't see us moving again in the near future as there's lots more space to play with here. We could probably double capacity without having to look for a new site.
Innovate for success
When you're this size, you're never going to survive making sliced white bread; that's not what we're about. We are a niche operator massively into innovation. We are also extremely well connected. We've forged links with so many organisations it's incredible, from Sheffield Hallam and Oxford Brookes universities to CenFRA [Centre for Food Robotics and Automation] and the regional food group for Yorkshire and Humber. We do a lot of research into new product development and innovation, but we also do a lot of work on process innovation and automation.
As a business, we keep our eyes and our ears open for new ideas. I've been on research trips to Singapore and Japan, and Michael Taylor, our operations director, recently went on a trade mission to China. When he came back, he produced fantastic prototype products with ginseng and aloe vera and gingko biloba. Supermarket buyers were impressed by them but they're not biting yet, partly because everyone is still hung up about what they can and can't say about functional ingredients under the EU Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation.
The truth is that with a lot of these products, you don't actually need to make hard health claims to get your message across anyway. I firmly believe that functional foods will increasingly be sold and marketed via the gossip columns rather than the Lancet. It's the 'Granny knows best' approach to food.
However, it also takes time for people to get used to unusual combinations. We made these fantastic aloe vera muffins and the first thing the buyer said was, 'Why have you put shampoo in your buns?'
The range of bread in the UK is fantastic. The market here is so competitive. In Germany, you get great German bread; in the US, you get great American products. Here, you get great British, French, Irish, Italian, American and German products!
I'm not going to sit here and slag off the Chorleywood bread-making process, although we've never used it ourselves. Most of the people that criticise it haven't got the first clue what it is. It's actually all about the process of mixing. That's it. Once you've mixed your bread with a Chorleywood bread mixer, the rest of the process is the same. You can make lovely bread with it and lovely bread without it. Warburtons white sliced uses it, and it's very good.
Bread is a bit like wine. People can be very elitist about it. Some white sliced bread is utterly beautiful, and some has got so much water in it, it's collapsing.
The 6p loaf
One thing is for certain, the days of ultra-cheap, loss leading loaves are gone. The companies that were making them have gone out of business. The supermarkets killed them off. I remember presenting at a conference in Germany and taking an 800g loaf I'd picked up from a UK supermarket the day before. It cost me 6p! As the translations into all the other languages came through on people's earpieces, you could hear these audible gasps from the audience. It was incredible - utter lunacy!
Supermarket buyers generally fall into two categories: ones you'd gladly die for and ones you'd sooner swing for. It frustrates me that some of them know absolutely nothing about what they're buying. But others are incredibly good. I don't mind a tough deal (they are all tough these days) provided it's a straight deal.
Gluten-free production
We went into dedicated gluten-free production in a cordoned off section of the bakery about 10 years ago. If you ask me whether it's been worth it so far purely on a commercial basis, the answer is no. But ask me if I think it will be worth it, and my answer is yes.
In the short-term however, it's a big challenge. Everything is more complex and costly. It's also taken up a disproportionate amount of new product development time; we've had to think about things in a completely different way, product and process-wise.
If you just replace wheat flour with corn flour or rice flour, you get a pretty crap result. You have to do some clever things with gums and stabilisers to improve the texture. It also has a tendency to dry and go stale more quickly.
Production-wise, it's been a challenge. We've had to install dedicated kit, but as we're doing small volumes, we're not getting the efficiency. You're also at a cost disadvantage from the outset because the raw materials and packaging are far more expensive, the audit and testing regime is far more taxing and staff must be trained to a higher level of discipline.
We've also had to invest in modified atmosphere packaging because customers want the shelf-life. What frustrates me is that consumers want fresh gluten-free bread, but they've only got this long-life stuff because the supermarkets are petrified of the waste. It pains me, it really does. I've been asking the retailers to do it for 10 years. You could so easily put gluten-free bread in a normal package and send it through the same distribution system as ordinary bread.
Barnsley is quite a depressed area so we've had to be incredibly creative in our recruitment processes. We've also worked really hard to train our staff and create a culture of investing in people. One of the first things that Michael did after he joined in 2004 was instigate a knowledge transfer partnership (KTP) with Sheffield Hallam University that brought in a graduate who came and worked with us to set up a proper human resources function.
It was such a success that we've since set up another KTP to look at our IT systems. We've also established links with schools and participated in a scheme via Barnsley College which helps 16-18-year-olds find work and another one with Barnsley Development Agency to help unemployed people get back into work.
We also work with ex-offenders from Lindholme prison and offenders in Moorland open prison in Doncaster. It's a risk, but all I say to them is that I don't care what they're in prison for, as long as they don't do it in here! It's simple. If they do right by us, we'll do right by them.
INTERVIEW BY ELAINE WATSON
FACTORY FACTS
Location: Fosters Bakery, Towngate, Mapplewell, Barnsley, S75 6AS. Tel: 01226 382 877
Employees: 230 full time equivalent employees
Turnover: £10M
Customers: caterers, sandwich manufacturers, retailers and some export customers in Ireland, France and Spain
Products: 300+ SKUs. Every kind of bread, teacakes, gluten-free products, cream cakes, shortbread, buns, scones, crumpets, traybakes
PERSONAL
Name: John Foster
Age: 46
Career highlights: "Being on the front cover of your magazine ... of course. But there's no one thing. I've enjoyed the whole of my career - every minute. This is who I am."
Domestics: married to Elaine with two children: a daughter aged 17, a son aged 13
Outside work: "I'm a Methodist preacher. I only qualified this year! So that takes up Sunday morning, and then Saturday afternoon for preparation. But on Saturday nights, I watch ice hockey!"
