Tom the baker uses his loaf to encourage community baking

• Jan. 12 by Emma Williams (0)

For all budding foodies out there, the latest way to stay healthy and help the community is here.

Offering a slice of the revolution, Birmingham’s first community bakery will open this month in Cotteridge, South Birmingham.

Loaf Community Bakery offers local people the chance to purchase the freshest organic bread around, and will make Birmingham the first large city to boast it’s own community bakery.

The community bakery is the latest in a number of initiatives from LOAF Social Enterprise Limited, a local non-profit organisation aiming to promote real food and healthy living in Birmingham.

The company, run by nutritionist Tom Baker, was set up in August last year and has swiftly gained a keen following, with a local bakery and cookery school encouraging Brummie foodies to get back to basics, teaching traditional kitchen skills including bread making, dairy skills and butchery.

Leader of the Loaf initiative Tom Baker left his full time job as a nutritionist in December 2009, to run the bakery and cookery school. He said: “I’m setting out to bake a better loaf for Birmingham. The vast majority of us settle for sliced, wrapped, additive-laden loaves made in industrial factories, but I want to change that for Loaf’s subscribers, who will get a loaf of real bread, which I’m proud to say I made right here in Cotteridge.”

The new community bakery offers people a chance to cut down their ‘food miles’, Tom explained to me; “Most of the bread we buy these days is baked out of town in large automated factories and transported to cities. Buying bread from a small craft bakery, like Loaf Community Bakery, means that just the flour is transported into the city and the baker is more likely to use local growers and millers. This can potentially massively reduce the ‘food miles’ of the loaf, which in a small way contributes to people reducing their carbon footprint.”

Subscribers to Loaf’s “Bread Club” will pay £11 a month in in exchange for a loaf of freshly baked organic bread every week. They can chose from Revolution Rye or Cotteridge Sourdough bread, both baked from UK-grown organic flour.