Bread has been a staple in human lives for over 9,000 years.
While today it is sometimes demonised as an unhealthy carb, when done right, it can be packed with nutrients and excellent for your gut health.
It’s this view of bread that the UK’s best bakery – based on the outskirts of Kendal – makes its way of life.
Creating award-winning organic sourdough is no easy feat, but it’s one that Aidan Monks, who co-owns the Lovingly Artisan bakery with his wife Catherine Connor, has achieved.
From humble beginnings creating just 20 loaves a day in a lean-to, to selling over 2,000 loaves a day at sites in Manchester and Cumbria, Lovingly Artisan has proved itself a force to be reckoned with.
But for Aidan and Catherine, the secret to their sourdough success is all in going back to basics, giving bread its nutritional value back and celebrating the businesses’ Lake District roots.
Aidan, who was born in Kendal and has been baking professionally for over 30 years, first had the idea for Lovingly Artisan 15 years ago.
He said: “When we came to start Lovingly Artisan we realised there was a small growing interest in sourdough.
“The sourdough movement started off in California and at the time we were doing frequent trips to London and you could get it there as a couple of really good bakers down there were selling it.
“We really believed in its health benefits and we felt that the market was going to change away from being French bread-led.
“That made us realise there was an opportunity to work towards creating a bakery that sold just sold organic sourdough.
“But at the time, sourdough just wasn’t on the general public’s radar yet, it was something we found while looking for a new direction and thinking about where the future of bakery would go.”
The journey to success
Aidan started Lovingly Artisan in a lean-to greenhouse on the side of his home where he could only bake four loaves an hour.
He quickly realised more space was needed and ended up renting a garage near Oxenholme Railway Station where he was able to trade.
Aidan said: “We were creating bread for wholesale, but people getting off the train could smell it and were wandering to us and asking if they could buy it.
“So we opened a little shop there and those people were London commuters, and they were willing to listen to us and give our sourdough a try.”
But when Storm Desmond hit in 2015 it forced Aidan to think of new ways to sell his bread.
He said: “Storm Desmond came along and virtually shut the Lake District overnight, everything was flooded, there was virtually no tourism, that was it.
“We lost a lot of customers, so we decided that very quickly we needed to do something about that.
“I got on my bike and went to Manchester and went around picking up business and we started thinking about running a van there.
“But at the same time someone approached us from Altringham Market and asked us to supply some of the small food businesses, which involved into a daily run down there and us having our own stall.”
Aidan then made the decision to split the business 50/50, selling in Manchester at Altringham Market and in the Lake District.
He said: “That move was one of the keys to us growing so well as the seasonality of the Lake District is tough, it’s great in the summer and hard in the winter.
“But selling in Manchester levelled it out. When we were quiet in the Lake District in winter, we were busy in Manchester and when we were quiet in the summer in Manchester, we were busy in the Lake District.
“The whole business just grew from there.”
Despite the Lake District’s retail challenges, Aidan said it had also proven an integral part of selling his bread in Manchester.
He added: “I’m a very proud Cumbrian and when you say you’re from the Lake District, people associate where we’re from with quality, and that’s really obvious when you’re trading.
“Trading in Manchester and selling the benefits of our county to people in the city has always worked well.”
Eventually Aidan outgrew the Oxenholme space and moved to its current base on Plumgarths Lakeland Food Park, where it has continued to grow at a steady space.
During the pandemic, Aidan and Catherine also branched out into selling their bread online and via a mobile bread truck that now regularly attends local farmers markets.
As their customer base continued to grow so did their list of accolades – including being crowned the UK’s best bakery three times in a row by the prestigious Bakers Dozen.
The pair are now also getting ready to open a new bakery in Burneside, close to the site of one of the mills they use for their bread.
So, what makes a sourdough award-winning?
Aidan said that it was during the very early days of running Lovingly Artisan that he made the decision to go down the path of using heritage grains and wheats in his sourdough.
He quickly partnered with Andrew Wilkinson, of Gilchester Organics, a family-run business that grows and mills organic, ancient and heritage grains.
Aidan said: “A mainstay of what makes our bread different is we use these old heritage grains.
“They’re not the traditional grains you see in a field at 12 to 15 inches high, our heritages grains that we use in our rye bread grow to nearly seven feet tall.
“These old plants are much more adaptable to the climate, and they extract more vitamins and minerals from the soil naturally.
“As a plant they function much better than the modern grains because they don’t require herbicides or chemical shorteners, so everything about this way of farming really struck a chord with us.
“Modern grains need those chemicals as they’ve been genetically modified to be shorter for harvesting because of that need to grow more in less space.”
Aidan said that using heritage grains not only gives sourdough a distinctive taste – but also gives bread its nutritional value back.
He said: “Before the 1920s all bread was sourdough. It was the cornerstone of the family’s life, because it was something totally different back then.
“You can’t put a modern white slice load in the middle of a family table and expect that family to be happy and healthy.
“We believe that we should make bread that is fit to be at the centre of the table again, but to do that, we have to use the best organic grains so that your body can absorb those vitamins and minerals.
“Taste wise they’re very distinctive, they all have different characteristics and very different nutritional properties as well, so they’re more dense and complex than modern wheat.
“In the world that we live with climate change, some of these heritage grain benefits are coming back and they’re more adaptable to the modern climate we have.”
Aidan said the bakery works through six tonnes of flour a day and that its bestselling product is its Cumbrian Rye.
He added: “We get people who are interested in what they eat as soon as they discover fresh rye, that’s what they come for.
“Our half kilo rye loaves are exactly how bread would have looked when it was at the centre of the table.
“It’s absolutely packed with antioxidants and keeps really well and out of all the things we make where we’ve seen sales grow massively, it’s rye we sell more and more of.”
Aidan’s Cumbrian rye, formerly his Northumbrian rye, is now named so as it is grown in Cumbria.
The Taylor family, who own a 600-acre farm and run Cumbria’s only cooking oil company Eden Yard, now grow grain for Aidan, working with expert support from Gilchester Organics.
Aidan said: “Three years ago when the Ukraine war hit, all of a sudden wheat prices went through roof.
“We didn’t realise that most of the organic grain we were getting not from Gilchester Organics was coming from Ukraine.
“We thought wow this is a bit scary, the continuity of our supplier is reliant on this, so that’s when we thought maybe we could get a farmer to grow for us in Cumbria and maybe we could look at milling our own grain.
“It was an idea we had to give us that security going into the future and that’s been our big journey over the last few years.”
The power of small business
Aidan said despite Lovingly Artisan’s large loyal customer base and its ever-growing success, that big business would always be off the table.
He said: “From a business point of view, people in our position would be thinking right now, right, how many shops can we open, what more can we do, but no. We’re not doing that.
“We are deliberatively not doing that. We’re an artisan business, so it’s very important that our customers see us front and centre, we are the business, our hands are on the business and we make bread every day.
“We are actually involved, if we evolved it into a chain of shops we ran vans around the country to supply, we water down our core values and it all becomes corporate.
“Catherine and I tell the stories ourselves face to face with people. Business is about relationships.
“It almost feels a bit old fashioned now to want six shops and to sell up and want to go sit on a beach.
“I want to be doing this forever, I have no intention of retiring. We absolutely love our customers and the business and we have amazing people between here and Manchester that we’re involved with.
“The last thing I want to do is cash it all in, it would be soulless.
“But I think our size makes us stronger because what we have is real depth.”
Aidan said he credits Catherine’s social media and marketing skills for developing their relationships with customers and the trust they have built with the brand.
He added: “What we say we are, is what we are, if what we are is just a marketing strapline, then you lose real core value.
“It’s important that when people come to meet us that we are exactly what we say we are online. They then come and go away thinking wow, this place is amazing.
“We believe that a bakery in a community is one of the most important businesses to make a community feel complete.”
Aidan added that he felt more and more people are starting to turn back towards small businesses for their food, rather than looking to supermarkets.
He said: “I think as a local food producer, people come to know and trust you to produce the best quality bread for them to include as part of their diet.
“I think if you find a food you trust, be it a butcher you really like and you know all his meat is local and grass-fed, you will be loyal to that butcher much more so than going to a supermarket and not knowing where it came from.
“I do think its swinging back in that way and I think bakers like ours will become again part of the local food community that essentially supermarkets wiped out, and I don’t think it will come undone again.
“Supermarkets if there’s a crisis, the whole system falls apart and we’ve seen that from Covid, so I do think people will look to us for food security.
“But what is particularly lovely is the way our business has developed, people travel to us now, they actually make really long journeys just to come and see us, so that relationship we have with our customers is really special.”
