A Pretoria bakery is converting the bread-is-evil brigade
Every day, the guys at the Pretoria bakery Fullinatural mill wheat and rye from the family farm in the Swartland for the next day’s bread. And their “revolutionary” products are slowly making the bread-is-evil brigade – and 99% of gluten intolerants – eat
The name of the actual instigator, says Barend, the instigator’s son, is Ben Coetzer, a system specialist (electronic engineer) of Moreleta Park, Pretoria.
And Ben loves playing around with stuff, says his wife, Este. And experimenting. And reading. Especially reading.
A number of years ago, she tells us, Ben decided to bake some sourdough bread on a whim. Not with commercial yeast – with a wild yeast starter. His first attempt – a pain au levain (a basic sourdough bread) – turned out significantly better than those the Coetzers used to buy at the supermarket back then. And, just like that, the shop lost a loyal bread buyer. Ben continued devouring books and carried on baking like nobody’s business in-between.
In 2009, the Coetzers paid a visit to Este’s sister Carine Bester and her husband, Pien, on their farm Uitkyk in the Moorreesburg district in the Swartland, where they farm, among others, wheat and rye. Here they encountered “real flour with which you could bake real bread that tasted like real wheat,” says Este.
During this time Ben started getting curious about why bread and wheat were being denounced as evil from so many quarters. The sourdough bread they would have rising slowly at home, after all, didn’t cause any of the nasty symptoms with which gluten-intolerant people usually struggle: no bloating, no heartburn, no stomach cramps…
Back home in Pretoria they perfected the baking process and Ben decided
“We realised we’d have to teach people what makes our bread different, why it’s better and why it costs more.”
to send their bread for scientific tests. The results exceeded their wildest expectations: where normal commercial wheat and rye bread contain about 80 000 gluten parts per million, their bread – because of the long, slow rising process with natural yeast – was almost gluten-free, with less than 80 parts per million (that is, about 0,08g per kg).
In 2013 – the same year Tim Noakes’ The Real Meal Revolution appeared and bread, the head boy of carbohydrates, was declared ciabatta non grata – the instigator asked his wife and son: “Why don’t we open a bakery?”
FULLINATURAL OPENED ITS DOORS in August 2013 in a former karate studio at the Moreleta Ridge Lifestyle Centre with three kinds of sourdough bread: wholewheat, rye and seed bread. Barend resigned as tax consultant at Deloitte and took over the financial reins while Este managed recipe development and the kitchen. (The instigator decided to stick to electronic engineering.) >
“We invited all our family and friends to spread the word about the bakery: we tried various markets; we approached restaurants and guesthouses; we started making sandwiches and delivering to businesses in the area… We realised we’d have to teach people what makes our bread different, why it’s better and why it costs more,” says Este.
The Coetzers’ plan was not to compete with the large bread companies or supermarkets, but to create a culture of community bakeries in South Africa, like in France where every corner bakery bakes 200 baguettes daily that are snapped up by the people who live in the two or three blocks around it. (The baker rarely gets filthy rich but operates a sustainable business.)
“It’s actually shocking how many South Africans, especially those living in informal settlements, don’t have access to good, healthy, affordable food that is grown or made within that community and creates jobs within that community. From the start, we’d send some of that day’s bread to Mamelodi with our kitchen staff and got very good feedback, but it’s a big challenge to sell this bakery concept – and bread that’s healthier and more filling but also more expensive – as an attractive business proposal to young entrepreneurs who know only too well how many people are under financial pressure,” says Ben.
“We pretty quickly realised it would be an uphill battle here in Moreleta Park, too,” says Ben. They started delivering bread to the Freshways Fruit & Veg (on the much busier Rubinstein Drive) where their sales started rising steadily almost weekly.
“Our biggest headache was probably we’d miscalculated how conveniencedriven South African society is. We have a supermarket mentality; we want to go to one place where we can get everything, even though we know it’s not necessarily the best food or the best meat or the best vegetables and fruit. When I look back now to when we started, I realise there probably were not enough people passionate enough about creativity and quality as well as willing to pay for it, but that situation is gradually changing, at least.”
As the news about Fullinatural’s bread spread, more and more potential customers started to drop in: the health-conscious, diabetics, people with allergies and intolerances… But every third one had a special request (“Oh, won’t you make this or that for me?”) and soon there were 60 products on their list – from bread, rolls and rusks to muffins, biscuits, crackers and frozen cookie dough you can bake at home.
“Today, we ask right upfront what someone’s issue is. It’s one thing to be really allergic to wheat, because then we won’t be able to help you, but for the gluten intolerants we often give a slice of bread with butter or a free daily bread and ask them to let us know if they had any aftereffects. Not a single one has come to complain,” says Este.
BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, Fullinatural won’t be in the same shape as when Platteland photographed it towards the end of 2016. The shop in the Moreleta Ridge Lifestyle Centre has shut its doors and they’ve opened a larger factory in the N4 Gateway where everything is still done strictly by hand and according to the Revobake method.
“We came to the uncomfortable realisation that we simply didn’t have enough feet through the doors there and were having better results at the busy Freshways where there is a good butchery next door,” Barend says. “We’ve adjusted our business model and have just opened our own small counters at the Midstream Superspar in Midrand and the Silver Oaks Superspar in Pretoria East, which have up to 4 000 people going through them in a day and where we deliver products the in-house bakeries don’t.”
Like Este said towards the end of 2016: “With bread there’s never a dull moment, because yeast is a living thing with a mind of its own.”
As is a business.