Find your place in the field of good food

Our goal is to connect good people with good food. We advertise sustainable food jobs and training opportunities to help jobseekers and employers find each other.

Roots to Work is a project of Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming.

Job description

We are on the look out for passionate people to join The Sidwell Street Bakehouse team.

Are you a community-minded baker, pastry chef, or even a cyclist? Get involved!

St Sidwell’s Community Centre

St Sidwell's is a diverse and vibrant community centre in the heart of Exeter. We offer volunteering and work-experience placements, run a community cafe and bakery, hire rooms to local organisations, grow veg, compost food waste, run English for Speakers of Other Languages classes - and lots more. We have a small staff team, and lots of committed volunteers. We are committed to being inclusive and our volunteering opportunities are open to all, so we have a wide range of people with different skills and life experiences working together every day in the bakery and the community centre. You can find out more about our work on our website: www.stsidwells.org.uk

The Sidwell Street Bakehouse

We make sourdough bread and sourdough sweet treats, savoury snacks and a range of cakes, all using stoneground organic flour. We are also part of the South West Grain Network and we are mainly working with locally grown and milled flour. Our busy bakery at 178/179 Sidwell Street started life as micro-bakery at the community centre to provide more volunteering placements as well as working towards a sustainable income stream for the centre. After running a crowdfunding campaign in 2020, we moved the bakery across the road into our current premises. The bakery is an integral part of Sidwell’s Community Centre. St Sidwell’s Community Centre, Charity number: 1122697 Sidwell Street, Charity company number: 06434019 Exeter, EX4 6NN Trading Company number: 11320571 Who are we looking for? We are expanding our team, following an increase in wholesale custom and getting busier every day in the bakery. We are looking for new staff members to be part of that. We want to hear from you if you love bread and people – great cooks and bakers who are happy sharing their skills and knowledge and supporting others to learn.

We are also keen to hear from any speedy (but safe) cyclists who might be interested in taking on bread delivery rides on our electric cargo bike. We are flexible as to whether you’re looking to just bake, just cycle or do a mix of both.

Community Baker Role

This is our general role description, but we are open to shaping something that works for you and the bakery. If you’re more of a pastry chef, or more into the bread side, we can tailor the role.

Responsibilities

• General sourdough bread production responsibilities: sourdough starter maintenance, mixing, bench, and oven work
• General cake production responsibilities: mixing, scaling, baking
• Flexible support of bakery functioning including deliveries, retail and market
• Management and cleaning of the bakery space - including COSHH and HACCP compliance
• Product development
• Taking and managing wholesale orders
• Supervising market stalls
• Identifying new sales opportunities
• Managing and ordering stock, taking deliveries
• Keyholder for the Bakehouse
• Supervision, mentoring and training of bakery volunteers/trainees
• Delivering bread on our electric cargo bike
• Supporting bread classes
• Contribution to team meetings and project development
• Other duties as required by St Sidwell’s Centre

The job description is not exhaustive and may change depending on the need and development of the project and organisation.

Skills, experience, qualifications etc.

We are looking for someone with as many of the following personal qualities, skills and experiences as possible. We don’t expect candidates to have all of the desirables below, but these are the things we are looking for across our whole team. If you have lots of experience and skills in one area but less in others, we would encourage you to apply or contact us for a chat.  

Food

• Café/catering experience
• Professional sourdough baking experience
• Confident and creative cook and/or baker
• Food hygiene qualification
• Passion for good food Interest in/understanding of nutrition
• Interest in sustainable and local food, and creating better food systems for the community and environment
• Experience developing new products and costing them
• Experience with food diaries for environmental health and other paperwork related to HACCP and COSSH

Volunteers and community

• Loves working with people
• Experience working with and supportingvolunteers
• Confidence communicating with people from a wide range of backgrounds
• Experience supporting individuals facing barriers to participation and with different needs
• Experience working in a community organisation/charity 
• Teaching or training experience or qualifications

Admin and other skills

• Strong numeracy skills
• Administrative skills
• Confident user of IT software at a basic level including email, word, excel and file sharing systems
• Able to ride a bicycle for our wholesale deliveries – we have an electric cargo bike

Shifts 

• The bakery opens Monday-Saturday. The successful candidate must be willing to do regular early shifts (5am start) and some weekends.
• Please state in your application your preferred number of hours/week.

Supervision

• The baker will be responsible to the Bakery Manager.
• The post will involve working with vulnerable adults and will be subject to two references and an enhanced DBS disclosure.

Contract

• Pay dependent on experience – our minimum pay is Real Living Wage
• 33 days holiday per year (including bank holidays) pro rata, with additional day added for every year of service

Application information

Please use the application form available on our website here: https://stsidwells.org.uk/work-with-us

You can submit the application via voice note or video if preferred.

Please mention Roots to Work when applying for these jobs