We go to great lengths to carefully select the wheat we use to ensure we can make the best quality.
Today, we contract-grow over 150,000 tonnes of wheat in Britain each year, which is the largest amount of British quality milling wheat used by a branded food business in the UK. To meet this demand, we must maintain close working relationships with our farmers, some of which we have worked with for over 20 years.
Supporting our wheat farmers adopt sustainable farming practices
As a food business, we are intrinsically connected to the land and have both the responsibility and the opportunity to support farming systems that protect and restore nature.
Together with our farmers, we work to achieve our shared goals of increasing productivity and reducing on-farm emissions. Over the past 3 years, we have been capturing on-farm data to help us identify carbon hotspots that provide us with deeper insight into areas for us to collectively focus our efforts and continue striving towards more sustainable farming practices.
We already know that 65% of our farmers already operate using minimum-tilling practices, which minimises soil disturbance, reduces risk of erosion, and can improve soil health.
While we want to ensure that we are capturing the great work our farmers already do, we know this is an evolving field and there is always more we can do.
Blending the perfect flour
By building and maintaining long term relationships with our farmers, we are able to work in partnership to develop the specific varieties of wheat, at the optimum protein levels that we require for baking our bread, to ensure that quality is maintained.
Like most bakers, we use a blend of wheat to ensure we have the perfect flour. We therefore also source wheat from Canada which, when blended together with our British wheat, gives us the perfect combination of qualities we look for in in our bread, in terms of taste, softness and freshness.