Luke Farrell loves being a baker. I find it intoxicating to talk to people who are so passionate about what they do. Luke is the Product Development and Bakery Support Manager at Bakers Delight. My favourite bread ever (apart from a baguette bought from a boulangerie IN France) is the Cape seed loaf from Bakers Delight. It actually is. So I was thrilled to get to talk to the guy behind the new version of this, the prebiotic Cape seed loaf. It's delicious AND good for me. I love that. Luke said at one point in his current role, he knows that when he develops a product, millions of people will eat it. That is incredible. And did you know, because I did not, that Bakers Delight started in Hawthorn in Melbourne in 1980 and has now grown to 700 bakeries across Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA? I think that is pretty inspiring. You can listen to the podcast here.
Hi Luke. I have just been reading about Bakers Delight and I did not know that there were over 700 bakeries across Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. That is massive.
That is massive, yeah, and it all started from Hawthorn in Melbourne.
That's right. 42 years ago. And how long have you been with Bakers Delight?
Nine years.
Great. I am interested to know what your part is in the puzzle of these 700 locations and the big company. What's your role?
I am the Product Development and Bakery Support Manager, so I look after the end-to-end product development from concept all the way through to trialling and the launch. That covers all products in Australia and New Zealand. My department also does lots of training with bakers. My team are all bakers, we run group training with bakers, we also do shoulder to shoulder training around the country and there are lots of online tools. My guys will go out to bakery openings and work with the new owners and the bakers to make sure they are making good bread. We do all of that.
I was interested to know how you can assure the consistency of the product across all those different locations. That is quite a big job.
It is a big job and we do it in a number of ways. We make sure our recipes are right to start with. We have a test bakery where we develop all the products, then most of our trials are in 50 bakeries and we make sure we are nailing the recipes we are about to launch and that they will work in the real world. So having confidence that our recipes work to start with gives us confidence that when we roll it nationally or internationally that it is going to work.
And I imagine you would have to be using the same flour and the same source of ingredients as well?
Yes definitely. All the bakeries in Australia have the same flour and ingredients and New Zealand have theirs and Canada and the US have theirs as well. The specs are all very similar but every loaf of bread in Australia is made our of Australian wheat milled in New South Wales.
I'm a French teacher as well as a writer and I think French bread in France is really different to here and it must be the flour and maybe the water as well?
A lot of it is the flour. A couple of years ago I was lucky enough with work to go over to Germany and France and to Belgium and do some baking and I took our flour with me. I was in a room in Germany in a big bakery and we were mixing a normal white dough and one of the master bakers from one of the International suppliers we use called all the other master bakers over to show them the dough because he was amazed at what our flour could do. It is very strong and very different to other flour around the world.
I'm glad you told that story because I have often wondered.
A while ago we had a French Head of Innovation guy work for us and he said the croissants in Australia are never the same as the croissants in France and I said, oh ok, but then I went there and I understood that its the flour. You just cant get them the same. They are very good but they are not the same.
Absolutely. And I see you have a new mango and passion tart. That made me wonder how often you have to come up with new products.
We do maybe twelve new products a year, which may sound easy but it is not. We range from playing with a variation on something, which is quite easy up to launching a new product as we did this year, which is our health range prebiotic Cape seed. The small and easy and fun variations are easy to do, the other stuff takes a lot of time and is hard work. A new tart isnt that hard but a new health loaf of bread is hard.
I'm a big fan of the Cape seed loaf and in my Bakers Delight, they werent doing the small loaf for a while, but I am very happy to see that they have brought that back. So good job on that. It is my favourite bread. I think it is so delicious.
It is one of those loaves of bread which tastes delicious and has so many health benefits to it.
I love it. But where did it all start for you? Have you always been a baker?
Yeah. I am a baker and a pastry cook. At high school I really liked cooking and I wanted to be a chef. I grew up in the Dandenong Ranges and in the nineties there weren't many places to do work experience as a chef and so I did work experience at a local bakery in Year 10 and I thought it was awesome. I loved everything about baking and pastry cooking. So I started from there. I worked for an Austrian guy who had worked for the Hilton in Germany, so he was excellent and really strict, which is a great grounding to teach you. We did everything from scratch, everything the proper way. I started my apprenticeship in 1997 and I absolutely loved baking so I did my apprenticeship and continued progressing through doing extra study, but staying in the baking industry.
When you’re a baker, you get to work in the morning and there is nothing there. Its bread, so there is nothing there. You’ve got bags of flour and you’ve got water and a couple of little ingredients and when you go home, you walk out of your bakery and look back at what you, as a team, have created, it’s just fantastic. You have a whole bakery full of beautiful product. In a bakery everyone is really passionate and proud of what they have achieved. It’s a really fun place to work and you’ve made all this stuff that people can go home an eat. It might sound romanticised, but it is actually really cool. In my role now, I know that when we develop a product, millions of people will eat it. That’s a pretty cool thing to do; knowing you have developed a product that a million people will actually eat. It’s awesome. ~ Luke Farrell
I have this idea that bakers have to get up super early in the morning. Is that still a thing or is it different now there is machinery?
It's less and less. We do have bakeries that start at 2 in the morning, which is quite early but with advances in some machinery, we can start at 5 or 6 o'clock. There are retarder provers that hold the product, so we can make it today and it slowly proves over time and then we come in later in the morning and bake it off. That is something that has changed things up a bit. Bakers tend to be up and at em in the morning. We tend to think 5 o'clock is a sleep in. But for the average punter, it probably is not.
I know with pastry, you have to be particular with measurements, is it the same for bread-based products or is there a bit more leeway?
There's even less leeway. Everything we do is formulated really well. Our bakers are all really good at maths because everything is in percentages. It is very particular. If you change your recipe slightly, it can change the end product quite a lot. There's no freestyling. Everything gets weighed and recipes are followed to a T. And that is why we have consistency across the country. Everything we put in there is in there for a reason, even salt; salt is there for flavour but it also helps regulate fermentation and it helps gluten development and shelf life. It all helps us get a consistent product. No handfuls of anything.
I do like the idea of people out the back freestyling, but perhaps not. How much bread would an average bakery make on a day?
I don't know.
Oh right, that's just me wanting a fun fact, I guess.
Hundreds and hundreds of loaves.
I bet. And do you have to come up with more things these day for people with intolerances? Is that part of the research and development?
We have our low FOD MAP range which is cutting edge for people who suffer from IBS. WE can't do anything gluten free, unfortunately because we would have to make it in a different bakery. And we just make sure that our formulations are clean anyway, so we are not putting in stuff that people are allergic to. Like we would never put peanuts in our bakeries because so many kids are allergic to peanuts.
That's right. And when you first started you really loved it and you loved everything about it. What do you think has kept you in the industry for as long as you have been there?
When you're a baker, you get to work in the morning and there is nothing there. Its bread, so there is nothing there. You've got bags of flour and you've got water and a couple of little ingredients and when you go home, you walk out of your bakery and look back at what you, as a team, have created, it's just fantastic. You have a whole bakery full of beautiful product. In a bakery everyone is really passionate and proud of what they have achieved. It's a really fun place to work and you've made all this stuff that people can go home an eat. It might sound romanticised, but it is actually really cool. In my role now, I know that when we develop a product, millions of people will eat it. That's a pretty cool thing to do; knowing you have developed a product that a million people will actually eat. It's awesome.
What would your advice be to young people who were considering becoming bakers or chefs?
Have a go. Get into it. Don't be scared of the early mornings. It's a fast paced environment, but these are fun environments to work in. Ive worked as a pastry cook in a commercial kitchen and bakeries are so much more fun. No offence to chefs but there is no real hierarchy in a bakery. Everyone just gets on and does it. It's an environment where you have lots of guys and girls working together to produce stuff, so just get in there and have a go.