Our customers are our quality control

This month one of our breads experienced problems. For a couple of days the Soda bread, a moist, wholemeal buttermilk soda, stayed soft in the centre and you would only have been able to eat the outside couple of slices. Before we noticed, about three or four batches went out which means that between 30 and 40 breads might have gone out substandard as they say or just not good enough. This can happen easily enough when you are making bread by hand. Changed rotas mean changed routines, The new harvest coming in means that flours have changed and now take less or more moisture and  recipes have to adapt and change.  Ovens might have been that little bit colder than they should have been. In rural Ireland without three phase electricity, our electric ovens sometimes challenge the net and may not be able to run at full heat – again something we may not notice on time. So, baking, while not rocket science, still demands permanent attention and focus and sometimes things can go wrong. That never means that we are trying to cut corners or don’t care what quality our bread is. It only ever means that we have missed a change and we don’t ever miss it for long. So, the point is that we are not infallible and that sometimes, thankfully very rarely, the quality is just not what it should be. If we notice, the bread does not go out, if we do not, we depend on you, our customers to tell us. 

 

As those of you who did tell us will know, we never presume you to be wrong. We will always listen, take note and always, always replace the bread for free. I actually am so grateful for quick, constructive feedback ,that I gladly throw in a few free scones or another free loaf  and always a most appreciative thank you!!  Obviously, the quicker you point this out to us, the quicker we can fix the problem which – in the case of the Soda we now have. 

However, we only had one customer who handed the bread back into one of the shops the next day. A regular customer who brought the bread back the next day, explained the problem,  took a new one and is – for this week anyway, our favourite customer. She brought the bread in  the Good Earth in Kilkenny, I don’t know her, but in the off chance that you read this, a sincere thank you very much. 

Once we noticed the problem we notified our customers and let the shops know that we had had an issue and that brought out a few customers  who said “ yes, I did not notice and didn’ t want to say…..” Why not please and how am I meant to notice if you don’t say?? We make over 15 different varieties every morning  and can’t try them  all everyday. We do try and taste and check and keep an eye but obviously things pass under the radar and we depend on you for honest feed back. 

And then of course there is the customer who notices a deterioration in quality, a problem with the bread and does nothing and avoids the bread in future. Or the customer who notices the problem, throws away the bread --- and tells all his friends to not buy with us because he bought this soft Soda bread there. This customer actually does damage and we don’t deserve this and neither does any other producer whose production process goes off kilter for a brief interlude. 

So please, if you like our bread and you like what we do, please be on our team and give us the feedback, tell us the issues and if there is something wrong, give me a ring, make us aware and help us out. You may mean to be kind by not complaining but I  would much rather you were kind while complaining. 

Trading in Herbert Park in Dublin

Well here we are – trading Sundays in Herbert Park in Dublin. Even in the wind and rain last Sunday, you get a great feeling of community with gazillions of kids on wheels of some sort, with the soccer academy kids in stark blue and the hockey girls in green, with busy tennis courts and a bodgia or boules match in progress – competitors  dressed in white - calm and concentrated. Through the park cuts a tarmac path with stalls on either side. With about 15 stalls, most of which serve street food, we are enjoying ourselves and compensating for the early morning with an awful lot of food. Beside us is “Take the Cake” and we most certainly do. Later on in the day, pizza is called for and sausages, and dumplings and ice cream and organic fruit and a lovely bunch of flowers to take home.  The two student members of Speltbakers  are planning to take on this market and I’ll be glad to get my Sunday  back but for now – I am enjoying writing this blog in “Lolly and Cooks”,  the Park’s coffee shop and trying to get a feel for who lives here, who shops here and what bread they might like to buy. To make this trip worthwhile we  need to sell well and  the jury is still out as to whether we will in this so very different community to Kilkenny or Carlow.

An hour away from the stall, an hour of people watching, an hour of stopping mself from giving people unwanted advice. Like when you’re out with your kids, don’t talk business on the phone  and when your kids ask you a question, you’ve got to answer and do leave a tip on the table if you leave it completely ruined, requiring both a hoover and a wet cloth. So far, I’m restraining myself, and just enjoying listening in. My mother always prefaces unasked for advice with “somebody has to tell them” , I used to disagree but I now I am wondering sometimes.

Restraining myself, I concentrated on my own work and stopped listening all around me. I thought on  hashtags which apparently I need. Tweeting without hashtags apparently is pointless so # it is ( as it took me a while to find the #on my keyboard) I understand I have to cultivate specific # for  the business so #speltgreat will reflect the many times people think they are being original with “How do you spell that. #loveyourmarket will cover my love of local market shopping and .#greatfood will signify how much I love the shops we supply and the big array of really good food. So please  follow our blog, out tweets and our general idea and tell me what you think when you see me at a coffee shop listening in to anyone who happens to be close enough and wondering if I will ever be calm enough to dress in white and play boules and afterwards – no doubt heading home to a sorted life and drinks before dinner………

Take a holiday - get off the hamster wheel!

After the bread round is turning to before the bread round as the blog returns and the short interruption due to technical inability is over. 

As a reasonably new and definitely very tiny business in the food sector , I often get asked how I can afford to close for three weeks and take a holiday. Yes, it is expensive and we save for those three weeks all year long but it is definitely worth it. As I get off the hamster wheel once a year,  I relax for a short while, recover and recuperate and then turn and have a good long look at the wheel and the why, the who, the “Whose idea was this” and - we make changes. This year, we brought back a new recipe and we changed the sourdough process to make a better bread and a tighter work schedule. We changed a few hours and gained an extra pair of hands in son no 2, who very kindly is taking a gap year in the business. He started as second baker in third year in school and is now training up as first baker - moving his start time from 4.15am to 2am and moving me to the office.  

Once a week, he takes an early morning and once a week, I take an office night. I start at 2am also – theoretically to be there as back up, in practise to tackle the VAT returns ( last week) and the social media and the blog this week. VAT returns are easy compared to twitter and instagram and blogger. 5 hours later as the rest of the house rises for breakfast and the amazing peace of the night house is broken, I have reconnected with my twitter account, decided to abandon instagram and have actually managed to put a follow button on my blog!!! You may laugh, but that counts as an achievement and please – if you like what I write at all, try that button and follow us on After the bread round. 

On my travels this morning, I also discovered that our website seems to be deactivated, that I had over 50 notifications on twitter, that there are lots of blogs that I’d like to follow and why didn’t I - and that a night spent in the bake house, producing steaming, wonderfully fragrant and crusty loaves, baguettes and Stromboli is massively more satisfying than a night struggling against my technical inabilities in trying to keep up with modern media. 

So, if you watch this space, you’ll see an active blog, a buzzing twitter account and a website which will hopefully be up and running again once all these helplines that I emailed this morning get back to me. Now, as the bakers outside finish off and the cars head to Waterford, Kilkenny and Carrick, we get back to important stuff  like our new Super bread or athletes bread as it is called in Germany. There the bakers association and the Olympic council got together to devise this energy boosting bread, based on rye and spelt and brimful with seeds and sprouted seeds. We got the recipe from a German baker in Mechernich and we’ve been practicing for a while. This week the bread made an outing to Inistioge on Tuesday and Kilkenny on Thursday. Tomorrow you can taste it in Carlow and then it will be part of our everyday offerings. Good things happen off the hamster wheel.