UK woman turns lockdown loaves into bakery success
When Britain first entered lockdown in March last year, Sophia Sutton-Jones decided to try making sourdough bread.
A year later, she is running her own popular bakery.
“I’d always thought about it, but I never had the courage to do it,” she said.
Now Sutton-Jones, 29, and her husband Jesse, 28, work alongside half a dozen staff members pulling hot loaves out of the oven, putting out flaky pastries and cutting slices of cakes topped with cream.
It all started when SuttonJones, whose father was also a baker, made a loaf of bread for a neighbour who was sheltering during the first national lockdown.
“He talked to his friends about it,” she said.
“Very quickly, we had 12 people waiting in front of our house.”
The couple, who sold kitchenware online before the pandemic, began to deliver orders by bicycle
in their north London neighbourhood.
Producing the loaves from home soon became impractical as everything got coated in flour,
Sutton-Jones recalls.
“Our dining room was the bakery and our guestroom the storage space. So you could come as a guest and sleep on flour bags.”
Fired by their initial success, the couple turned to crowdfunding to launch their business.
They were hoping for £25,000 but ended up raising £33,000.
The distinctive pink-painted bakery, Sourdough Sophia, opened in January.
Their pains au chocolat, croissants and cruffins — a cross between croissant and muffin — sell like hot cakes.
But their biggest hit is sourdough bread, which the British have embraced enthusiastically.
Home-baked bread became a major trend of lockdown, with enthusiastic amateurs posting pictures of their efforts in pursuit of the perfect golden crust.
Sourdough Sophia attracts a long line of customers as soon as it opens even though it sits a short distance from the local shopping street with many other bakeries.
“I’ve been to all of them. The bread is much better here,” a customer said, waiting outside with his small dog.