STORY: INTERVIEW: Flour Pot Bakery

A wise man once said, “Enthusiasm is infectious if you’ve got something to say.” And if it’s enthusiasm you’re after then Oli Hyde has it by the bucket load, or by The Flour Pot, I should say. Incidentally, Hyde is also our wise man in this instance.

He definitely has something to say about his burgeoning bakery business in Brighton, which is redefining what it means to be a baker. In fact, he barely stopped for air while he recounted his past endeavours – from a Glastonbury food stall to breathing new life into night clubs – indicating that the future of the bakery industry can flourish if it embraces diversification.

“In a way, I was calling myself a bakery before I baked a loaf of bread,” Hyde says. “We were cutting our teeth and learning the craft of bread production on our own chef credentials – we weren’t career bakers. Most successful bakeries in the UK are headed up by the baker, so I decided we could re-write the rule books and that a chef-run business could do just as well.”

With a new bakery production site functioning well for just over a year, six shops (the first opening on Brighton’s Sydney Street back in 2014) and two more venues in the pipeline – Hyde is enjoying watching his business bloom. But every bakery story, no matter how enthusiastic, needs a strong foundation and Hyde came to be a baker with a host of credentials behind him.

Pause for a moment, take a sip of your brew and get ready for the abridged version of his career: Originally from New Zealand, he moved to Hong Kong in 1990, spending two and a half years in hospitality working towards his ambition of opening his own restaurant. In 1993, he moved to the UK, exploring the late-night sector with cocktail bars, then ventured down to Brighton, continuing to cover everything front-of-house before training as a classical chef with veggie restaurant Terre a Terre.

Between now and then, he worked in the restaurant while running a Glastonbury food stall for over 20 years, setting up his Juniper Catering business, managing nightclubs and even creating his own cleaning company. To say he thrives on entrepreneurism would be an understatement.

“That’s the mentality I have,” he explains. “It’s a clever way to do business, because you force yourself into areas where you could easily be giving the margin to someone else and otherwise couldn’t challenge ourselves as a team. I slowly but surely shed all the other businesses that were either taking up too much time or not being profitable enough and focused on the one thing that I really loved, which was production.”

Like a flower losing its petals in order to conserve energy, Hyde too focused on retailing food. But how did he become a baker?

Sowing the seed

About 10 years ago, Hyde teamed up with Brad Jacobsen, then of Small Batch Coffee, who was operating in the unit next to Juniper Catering at a converted school. Jacobsen sought a food offering for his coffee shops, so Hyde developed an economical solution. But Hyde’s newfound interest in food retailing and love for food production meant he wanted to explore his own venture in Brighton. The pair originally agreed not to set up shop too near each other – an agreement that has since ended following Small Batch Coffee’s sale in 2015, meaning Hyde could have a bigger reach across the city.

“By 2015-2016 [The Flour Pot Bakery] had gone from one site to four,” he remembers, “with a fifth and sixth in the pipeline, and by the end of 2016 we had five sites. We spent the early part of 2017 building the bespoke bakery in Fishersgate just outside Hove on the coast and managed to turn a former warehouse into a 5,500 sq ft bespoke production kitchen, artisan bakery and training room. It was the hardest work I’ve ever done.”

This site is now the beating heart of the business, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week with over 100 employees over the entire estate.

“We have 42 on the production team,” Hyde continues. “As well as seven bakers who work throughout the night, and a viennoiserie team of two producing 7,000 pieces a week by hand – a small but delicate range – and all laminated doughs are made daily, baking fresh, which is a really important part of what we do. The ambition is always to produce as close as we can to delivery time.”

Hyde wanted to develop a bakery retail business that delivered twice a day – the breakfast and mid-morning range first thing, followed by lunch and afternoon tea later.

“The danger with that was within the geographical radius, you couldn’t economically do this with a site that was more than half an hour away,” he says. “So, we realised we were coming close to reaching our geographical radius for bakery deliveries. Now we’re looking at a new model, and we’ve explored that with our new site on the seafront with an on-site kitchen.”

People pedigree

Powering this Flour Pot is a team of quality chefs, including Matty Bowling, who was at Terre a Terre for five years and Ottolenghi for three – among others. These are the hands that create the products at the central bakery, which are then distributed among the sites.

“There, you’ve got slightly less skilled – though no less capable – team members assembling the food to order on site and then reheating, and man, it’s worked,” Hyde notes. “It’s a terrific formula.”

Hyde originally developed the bread range with Vincent Talleu, a bakery “internet sensation”. And though Talleu has moved on to pursue other dreams (paragliding in the Alps, no less) his legacy has remained.

“We’ve maintained a really high standard of bread,” Hyde adds. “The door is always open to people as we continue to grow. We have a new head baker called Ben Rogers, who worked at Bread Ahead and St Johns. He’s a good pedigree – young, enthusiastic, high energy, capable and knows where we are pitching ourselves in the market.”

Despite having these champions on board already, recruitment remains a struggle.

“There isn’t a huge pool of bakers to choose from on the south coast,” Hyde explains. “It’s the same for the viennoiserie team. It demands such skill and it’s difficult to recruit for, so we’ve decided to protect ourselves and futureproof the business by bringing as many people into those disciplines as we can.

"We are trying to encourage everybody to work all the different elements of the bakery and thankfully it’s starting to pay off. It means we’re starting from grass roots, which we found is better suited for a business like ours that’s a bit more modern in its approach to baking.”

Managing Flour Pot alongside Hyde is operations director Dariush Tamadon-Nejad and head of finance Alan Beattie (“He makes sure the numbers make sense and we’re driving margins, not chasing them”).

This frees up Hyde’s time to focus on production knowing standards and hospitality levels are met front-of-house – which must be difficult for someone who is used to spreading himself across multiple business projects.

“I’m far more focused and driven now than I’ve ever been,” he states. “In a positive way, I’m not chasing things anymore, I’m letting opportunities come to us. Once there’s traction, landlords, agents, everyone wants to talk to you, ‘How about this site, that site?’ A day wouldn’t go by without two or three opportunities coming my way. But you have to stand back and ask ‘What’s right for us? What’s going to keep staff happy and elevate the business?’”

Taking stock of what he’s learned so far as baker, as his business reaches a pivotal moment in its growth, Hyde chuckles.

“I surround myself with far smarter people than me, with respect,” he says. “But the best thing about it is that it’s not my job to be the smart one in the room. I want to help everybody be better at what they do. Essentially, we all have a real love of food. We’re all foodies as much as we are chefs and just as much as we are interested in running a food business.”

Vertical integration may have been the key to Flour Pot’s success so far, but it’s Hyde’s relentless zeal for the work his team is undertaking to remain at the forefront of bakery diversification that will keep this Brighton business in bloom throughout the coast’s seasonal peaks and troughs.

On his financing...

“One of the things I’m always thinking about is growth, and obviously crowdfunding is one of those areas in which some businesses have been hugely successful, Grind is a good example. But one of the reasons these guys are prepared to give away equity is because their valuations are really high.

"At the moment, what we’re trying to do is find innovative ways of funding the growth without giving anything away. And, then looking at a secondary option, which is to sell a small amount of equity to raise enough capital to continue the growth. In a challenging market, the bank is never going to be your best pal, it doesn’t matter how well you perform.”

On his customers...

“Our customer is not only always right but is also a demanding beast. It needs to see creativity, consistency, to understand we care and when a problem arises we fix it. Once you put your head above the parapet and actually open a shop, you realise you really are on the front line. If it isn’t TripAdvisor, it’s that difficult customer who won’t leave and is upsetting everybody else. I use some of the skills gained having worked in the pub game and late-night sector so long.”

Defining new frontiers

When does a bakery stop being a bakery? The Flour Pot has defied shop limits by diversifying its model, venturing into casual dining with The Flour Pot Kitchen – a licensed venue now open on Brighton seafront serving bakery, sourdough pizza, hot skillets and alcohol – and a Flour Pot espresso sandwich bar. Another avenue Hyde is exploring is a community-style bakery and coffee shop, as he directs his attention to sites near “chimney pots, primary schools and train stations”.

As long as Hyde maintains his bakery’s products and ethos at the centre of these offshoots, then there will be consistency in his brand – and his customers will continue to see Flour Pot as a local, artisan business.

“We consider sourdough to be the core of our business,” he says. “That’s the thing we pride ourselves on the most, with its long fermentation, it’s absolutely central to everything we do.”