The Village Bakery on Wrexham Industrial Estate is continuously growing since the Jones family purchased the business in 1964.

The bakery has also faced some hard times, particularly in recent years when a fire ripped through the bakery in 2019, which has amazingly since bounced back.

I went behind the scenes at the Village Bakery in Wrexham, where I got to see exactly how their bread is made, writes Emily Ash.

I was taken on a tour of the bakery by CEO and Master Baker Robin Jones, who showed me the processes behind the bread that is made.

Walking into the main part of the bakery, which is kept at a cool 19 °C, you can smell the fresh sourdough as it goes through the production.

To make the sourdough, they do not use bakers’ yeast, but instead, a natural method whereby the mixture is left for 36 hours.

Sourdough brews by being fermented for up to 36 hours but the Village Bakery uses a perpetual sourdough that is alive for a long time.

This means they always keep a bit back and then add flour and water which creates their natural yeast and makes the bread rise.

Once it has been fermented it gets taken to the line and is stored until it's baked to give it the texture.

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The bakery makes about nine tonnes of sourdough every day due to the number of products that are later made out of it.

Robin said that contrary to popular belief, bread shouldn’t make you bloated if it is processed naturally, which again is a reason why bakers' yeast is not used in sourdough.

To get the ingredients to where they need to be, they are pumped around the factory through a series of pipes and into the mixer. This includes flour and salt and means that staff are not spending time moving ingredients from one place to another.

The company uses specific ingredients, as the bakery is passionate about its ingredients as well as its process, which Robin says, is why it's award-winning.

They have struggled in the last year with certain ingredients such as sunflower due to the war in Ukraine, which has prevented them from using their normal sources and means that supply chains for some items have been broken.

Robin explained: “In 35 years in baking, I have never known ingredient inflations like we have today, and no matter what we do to try to buy better, we’re in a global market now and it is a problem.”

The Village Bakery does, however, use local sources, from local farmers for example, where possible, particularly for the products made in the Coedpoeth bakery, which does cut supply chains and costs.

The oven was by far the warmest part of the bakery, with 35 metres of oven producing 36,000 rolls an hour. They bake by travelling through the oven and then coming out the other side and into a cooler, before being wrapped and dispatched.

The Village Bakery has its own brand, but also produces products for top supermarkets across the UK, including Sainsbury’s, the Co-Op, M&S, and products for Costa.

The bakery has lots of room to expand and may be capable of doubling the capacity to 72,000 rolls produced an hour.

The plans to expand are ongoing, and the company wants to expand organically with its existing customers rather than buying more bakeries.

The bakery will be gaining a new pancake line, which will be introduced in January with the installation of a new machine.

The company also focuses on growing its employees, with Robin explaining that managers at the bakery are all local and started off as apprentices, working their way up the ranks.

He said: “I have a big thing about growing my own people. Because there are not many bakers left in Wrexham so unless we train our own staff we’ve got no future and that’s what we do.”

It was fascinating to walk around and see the behind-the-scenes action, as well as their plans for the future. It was amazing to see local products made by local people being circulated for everyone to enjoy.