What if choosing a loaf could help shape the future of food?
For years, as bakers, when we wanted to understand what good looked like, we looked around us. We learnt from farmers, millers, organic agriculture, regenerative farming and traditional baking. Those ideas shaped how we bought grain, chose flour and made bread.
Then, about five years ago, we realised this approach could no longer answer all our questions. Organic told us something useful, but not everything we needed to know. Regenerative farming was opening important conversations, but the term was becoming broad and increasingly used as a marketing claim. We knew some brilliant small farms working closely with nature that did not have the means to become certified. And we found some certified flour was not necessarily the flour we wanted to bake with.
So we started asking a different question: what if we stopped beginning with the bread we wanted and started with the health of the land instead?
Because just a few centimetres of fertile topsoil helps feed more than eight billion people. Healthy, functioning soil provides the physical structure, water, nutrients and biological activity that plants need to grow. We need to protect it. Without soil, we cannot survive.
Yet most food systems work backwards. The customer expects something. The baker specifies it. The miller produces it. The farmer grows enough of it – and often, the soil pays the price.
Instead, we’re supporting farming where the soil goes first – producing a type of wheat which we call Soil Positive™. We start by asking what can grow well while improving the health and resilience of that particular piece of land. We then take what the harvest gives us. Our millers turn it into flour which we learn to bake with and build recipes around.
Soil Positive has been years in the making, and it isn’t finished. More farms are joining, more flour is moving into the standard and more products will follow. Today, many of our products are made with Soil Positive flour, but not all of them.
We’re at a point where we want to buy more Soil Positive wheat. But first, more needs to be grown. Farmers can't change overnight. Different rotations, crops and farming practices require time, investment and critically, confidence that somebody will buy what they grow.
So we need help. We need our customers to help create demand for a different kind of wheat by choosing a different kind of loaf. For a soil-first food system to scale, more farmers, food businesses and customers need to be part of it.
Joining us is as simple as choosing our rich and malty Brown Sourdough, our almost-white and creamy San Francisco, or our classic, golden-brown Baguette. If you are already choosing our loaves, you’ve been helping the soil go first without even realising it.
Please keep doing so, and we’ll keep you posted on our progress. Already, 20 of our products beyond bread are Soil Positive, including our fruity Blackberry & Apple Crumble Cake for autumn. More of our cakes, biscuits and pastries will be updated this year.
For now, you can find all our Soil Positive loaves here. Help us make that list longer.