Flour to the People
Partnering with community food hubs across Scotland to host baking workshops, sharing breadmaking skills and knowledge with local people.
These events create opportunities for everyone to become part of the Real Bread movement and have access to delicious bread made with nutritious organic flour. They aim to open up a future for participants that offers an alternative to the usual low-value, mass-produced and ultra-processed supermarket offerings.
Workshops are delivered by a professional baker, working alongside the community to ensure that each session is tailored to diverse community interests and needs.
Watch our then-Flour to the People Project Coordinator Lyndsay Cochrane introduces our Innovate UK-funded project in this short video made by UKRI, while our Miller-Manager at the time Connie Hunter explains the difference between our traditional wheat varieties and conventional bread wheats.
About the project
Loaves disappeared first. Then flour. Empty shelves became a stark motif of the Covid-19 crisis. Overnight, lockdown caused a quadrupling of demand for local flour. Like other specialist mills and food businesses, our online shop was overwhelmed.
Flour to the People was our response to this increased demand for quality flour and our strategy for strengthening communities’ resilience when just-in-time supply chains are disrupted.
The project launched in July 2020 with funding from Innovate UK. We worked with existing community bakeries to increase the impact of localised supply chains and support healthier eating, personal wellbeing and food resilience into the future. The experiences of these skilled and passionate bakers fed into a number of resources, developed to inspire and support other communities to bake with and for their neighbours.
We have since partnered with a dozen communities across Scotland to deliver baking events, strengthening confidence and skills to bake with Scotland The Bread’s special flour.
“What worked well for us was just having the kit provided, it was all round a good offering so that people felt they were being given the tools they needed and then also a point of contact if they needed any help along the way” community project manager
“I quite enjoyed it, I found it quite easy actually. The video makes a difference … tells you all the wee tricks of the trade” participant
In 2021 Flour to the People won the ‘Food Innovation’ category of the BBC Radio 4 Food & Farming Awards, with judge Dan Saladino commending the project’s exciting potential to be easily replicated and create substantial impact within many communities. You can listen to his interview here and to the awards ceremony here, where we were honoured to stand alongside so many inspiring people making positive changes in the food and farming system.
In 2021 Scotland The Bread partnered with Summerhill Community Centre to bring Flour to the People of Dumfries. Due to social distancing measures in place at the time, we provided baking kits and a demonstration video for local people to try bread-making at home. Community Chef Pat joined forces with local Doughlicious Bread Club baker Liz to create a programme of bakes leading up to the wholemeal sourdough recipes provided in the packs, gradually introducing new techniques and increasing the amount of wholemeal flour used as bakers increased in confidence.
A small number of volunteers then joined Pat for a socially-distanced baking session in the centre’s kitchen to create the sourdough recipes demonstrated by our baking partner Rosie Gray, founder and baker of Reviving Food. While the loaves were rising, the group joined an online Q&A session with Rosie and Scotland The Bread chairman Andrew Whitley to ask questions and share stories about flour, bread-making and their ideas to keep supporting their community to bake and eat more nutritious bread.
For some time, community baker Liz had funding for a bread oven but nowhere to host it. Thanks to this partnership it has now found a home in the Summerhill Community Centre, where it is being used to bake fresh, nutritious loaves for the centre’s food pantry and community meals.
“It’s a gift from heaven for everybody … The foundation of a nutritious loaf of bread is good flour and I feel it is imperative we continue to use the Scotland the Bread flour. Thank you to all the ‘Flour to the People’ team for this wonderful opportunity.” Liz
Get involved
- Donate today so that more people can discover the joys of baking together and ensure that everyone can access Real Bread in their communities
- Check out our resource page for ideas, tips and recipes to share nutritious and delicious bread with your community:
