Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Matthew Jones, Founder of Bread Ahead, the artisan bakery and baking school. Growing up in the kitchen with his mum’s enthusiasm to teach Matthew to bake, he left school aged fifteen without any qualifications but with a single focus, he was going to be a chef. Honing his craft in the Michelin world of the ‘80s and the ‘90s with some of the best chefs in the UK in what was, as Matthew says, “a raw, quite aggressive environment” – we’ll be getting into that – he opened Flour Power City Bakery in 1999, growing the successful wholesale business over twelve years before selling. Keen to expand his business concept to include retail and education, Matthew launched Bread Ahead in 2013 in the renowned Borough Market – one of my favourite places in the world – with the bakery school teaching baking and pastry skills to established bakers and a new generation of enthusiasts. With further Bread Ahead bakeries and schools across London, they’ve also expanded into the Middle East, with an international bakery and school in Jedah and Dubai and plans for many more. Hello and nice to have you here, Matthew.
Matthew Jones
Hey Elliot. Lovely to be here. Nice to meet you.
Elliot Moss
Why did you want to be a chef? What happened?
Matthew Jones
Gosh, I think I was really, I was a very industrious child and I was always, you know I loved being busy with my hands so I was always in the kitchen at home and my mum’s a good cook, always was, still is, and I think I just sort of, you know, just loved food and cooking. I mean back in the, you know the ‘70s and ‘80s when I grew up, you know the, the UK food scene was quite different than it is right now.
Elliot Moss
Barren.
Matthew Jones
Yeah. A barren landscape.
Elliot Moss
It was, yeah.
Matthew Jones
You know we had frozen mini pizzas and Pot Noodles and you know Batchelors Cup a Soup and…
Elliot Moss
Ice Magic? When you squish it on the ice cream and it froze. How can we forget Ice Magic?
Matthew Jones
Yeah, I mean it was all those, that was kind of a Saturday night thing wasn’t it, yeah, and we’ve moved on a long way.
Elliot Moss
And you leaving school, going off to find your way in the world, talk to me about the feelings of being a chef at the beginning and being in a, in kitchens, very high profile kitchens and head chefs, what was that like?
Matthew Jones
Yeah, well I was very fortunate so, I, I was looking for an apprenticeship place and I sent many letters out in London to the usual suspects, The Ritz, The Connaught and all of that at the time, they weren’t doing apprenticeship so I kind of stumbled upon YTS, a Youth Training Scheme, and I did a YTS course. I was lucky, I got a good placement in a restaurant called Thackeray’s House, which is down in Tunbridge Wells, which was really one of the restaurants at the time, it was in the Good Food Guide and it was way ahead of its time, you know, it was doing all the sort of classic stuff, proper homemade terrines, all the fish came in whole, the pheasants came in whole, you had to pluck them and gut them, so I learned all of that. We made puff pastry, we made bread from scratch and it was just the most amazing, immersive education in that restaurant for two years of my life and at that kind of pivotal stage for me being sixteen, seventeen when I kind, you know when the boy becomes a man really and I think it just really got ingrained deep in me, I fell in love with it.
Elliot Moss
As you were talking then I just, I was just looking at your eyes, which sounds a strange thing to say but that’s what I do, Matthew, and I kind of thought he’s gone back there, you were just almost visualising it. It strikes me and you use the word ‘immersive’, was it very, very visceral? Was it one of those things that you don’t, it’s like often people’s lives and the work they do, it doesn’t touch them emotionally, they kind of do it and it’s a bit rote and that’s the tough thing, we always look, we all of us look for things that we really, that really touch our soul but was it really, did it hit you every day, that star feeling?
Matthew Jones
Yeah, as soon as I, you know I left school and I wasn’t an academic, I just left school, I didn’t have any O-levels and I, I wanted to be a chef, I wanted to do my thing you know, and I found it in the kitchens, in cooking and I think I just, yeah, it was, I was all in, you know I just went all in and I think you know when you look at anybody who’s gone to the top of a career, there is no half measure, you’re either in or you’re out and I was just in there, you know I loved it, I used to go into work on my days off, I used to clean things, I would always stay behind, I was always early, I gave a 100% of myself to my career.
Elliot Moss
Matthew Jones is my Business Shaper, he’s the founder of Bread Ahead but he was also the founder of another business, which I want to talk about for a minute, Flour Power City Bakery. I want to ask you a question there before we jump into that, which is around being someone who loves cooking, seeing someone who is a fabulous chef and then making that a commercial endeavour. It’s one thing working in someone’s kitchen and enjoying the craft and there’s another thing actually pivoting into “okay, I’m going to run my own thing.” What made you move from the making to the creating the business?
Matthew Jones
Yeah well I always had it in me I think to be self-employed, I was, even when I was a chef I used to have sort of part-time jobs, I used to do cooking in people’s homes, I was doing private chef work and I was always looking for opportunities, you know I just had that kind of mind and my career, well I started in the main kitchen as a chef but I kind of migrated into pastry and then baking, I think largely because nobody else wanted to do it, I was kind of, I just could, I had this sort of natural ability to make great pastry.
Elliot Moss
You talked before and before we get onto the pastry thing about the work that you did on your days off, you talked about the cleaning and you talked about all that, the graft, the hard work, has that been a big part of why you think you’ve been successful?
Matthew Jones
Yeah, it’s everything, I mean it’s the commitment to you know because it’s just hard, I think you know running a bakery business or a restaurant business is just, it’s a horrible, really, it’s hard work.
Elliot Moss
You’re saying it’s horrible. Well I know, it’s really tough, it’s brutal and it’s, and, and it’s incredibly intense I imagine because so many things are happening at once.
Matthew Jones
Yeah, it’s just, it’s a sort of a problem that’s never going to be solved, you know you’ve got to do that job, you know be it making crème brulees or flipping steaks or you know rolling baguettes, you’ve got to do that for the rest of your life so, enjoy it. And I’d kind of, I think one of the things that’s you know really important about going into a career, a chosen career, at a young age, is you learn the craft so you almost forget you’re doing it and it becomes a, sort of an autopilot thing, I mean I can go into the bakery now, roll a thousand croissants and my mind is kind of somewhere else.
Elliot Moss
I was, you know, I was going to absolutely ask you about how meditative this thing is because it’s so, your, you have to be so in it, so where is your mind when you’re doing it?
Matthew Jones
I’m planning, I’m, if I, I mean my perfect day is, not that I’m doing it right now but perfect day in the bakery is arrive at 5.00am, be the first one in because I love it, I love the sort of clarity of having an empty space, get into production, get sort of three jobs on, croissants, Viennoiserie is a lovely thing to do because it’s just, it is a meditative process and you…
Elliot Moss
Just describe that process for me, for people that don’t know.
Matthew Jones
Yeah. I mean you’re in a temperature controlled room, you are essentially working in a fridge. That doesn’t sound very appealing but I love it. It’s peace and quiet, you can have the radio on in the background and you can roll batches, so you do a thousand croissants, you do them in batches of 250 and you can just roll them by hand, I can do 13 in one minute is my kind of pace, it’s a bit like a…
Elliot Moss
13?
Matthew Jones
Yeah, I can roll 13 croissants in a minute which is pretty quick really. Hand rolled. And I love the pace of it and I just enjoy it and I can allow my mind to sort of drift away to what I’m doing for the rest of the day, to you know business planning, maybe a bit of product development and think things through and you know a couple of hours of that in the morning really sets me up.
Elliot Moss
So it’s not tiring?
Matthew Jones
No, I mean I, you know, I think I keep myself in good shape, I go to the gym every day and I, I don’t feel tired, actually I think I feel more awake after baking than I do before it.
Elliot Moss
Have you always been very structured, Matthew?
Matthew Jones
In work, yes, yeah. Funny thing that really because, and I often say you know my work really has been like the pillar of my life because I guess like many people, you know I’m in my fifties now, I’ll be 55 next month and you know I’ve had a few little bumps in the road, as you know, but I’m coasting.
Elliot Moss
The wise smile.
Matthew Jones
Yeah, you know, I mean and there’ll be listeners out there who will go yeah, I know Matthew. And but the one constant in my life has been work and I always show up on time, I’m always there first, I’m always committed, I always finish the job and it’s, that part of it, I always got, from the very first day I walked into a kitchen, it’s just you look the chef in the eye, you shake his hand, it’s “Yes Chef”, you know, we’re here, we’re committed, we’re going to do this, you know. There is no half measure, you’ve just got to be there and make it happen.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much more from my excellent Business Shaper today, it’s Matthew Jones, he’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Right now we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Sessions, which you can find on all the major podcast platforms. Lydia Kellett invites business founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing. In this clip, we hear from Tariq Rauf, architect and founder and CEO of Qatalog, a digital work hub aiming to give people a radically simpler way to coordinate work.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you’d like to, just pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Matthew Jones, founder of Bread Ahead, the artisan bakery and baking school. I promised I want to talk about the Flour Power City Bakery. That was a, just over ten year chapter of your life, did you learn a lot?
Matthew Jones
Wow, I mean, yeah. Flour Power was, I was a younger guy, you know I was 29 years old, I was previously working at Mezzo, so it was a, Sir Terence Conran’s restaurant in the late ‘90s, I worked for Sir Terence for eight years in the various, in Bibendum, in the Pont de la Tour, so that was my you know long term part of my career and I left Mezzo to open my own business on a wing and a prayer, I mean it was chaos, it was scary, it was I mean just about everything that I could imagine really wrapped up into a bundle of, yeah, nightmares really. And I made it, and I made it work.
Elliot Moss
Did you?
Matthew Jones
Yeah, I mean I was a different guy.
Elliot Moss
How? How did you make it work?
Matthew Jones
Just brute force, you know. I could bake, I knew how to bake, I knew nothing about VAT returns or business or computers or anything but I knew how to bake and I took a, well by luck really, I found a disused bakery on Hoxton Street, in the rough end of Hoxton Street, this was 1999, I mean it was a different landscape up there, and just got going and started supplying people like Neal’s Yark Dairy and at the time there were restaurants in London, it was the Bleeding Heart restaurant, it was Wholefoods were actually at the time called Wild Oats, it was, this was way back and I built a business. We started doing farmers markets in London and that was right at the beginning of Borough Market in 1999, when it was just like four times a year and it was, it was a really different version of Borough Market than you’ll see today, it was…
Elliot Moss
It’s been slightly corporatised Borough Market now, it’s still great, I love it but it’s different even from five years ago.
Matthew Jones
Oh yeah, it’s been, I mean you’ve still got the, the old guard there who are really, people like, you’ve got Monmouth, you’ve got Turnips, you’ve got Ginger Pig…
Elliot Moss
Ginger Pig’s great, those sausage rolls.
Matthew Jones
…you know, Northfield Farm. Yeah, a lot of family businesses there, you know that have really stuck to their guns and just really focussed on prime ingredients and food experiences, you know, so these amazing one-off hits like a, yeah a Ginger Pig sausage roll, you will travel across London for that, it’s epic.
Elliot Moss
It’s epic, it is epic, especially after a run. Often, I go for a run there and then destroy any good things I’ve done on the 10K to get to Borough Market on a Sunday morning.
Matthew Jones
Well look, those are very much our sort of customer, we’re after those kinds of guys who are, you know they want experiential food and they will make a journey, a detour for that crème brulee doughnut as we do or for…
Elliot Moss
I’d written down crème brulee doughnut, I mean, it was just, I just looked at that and went “you’ve got to be kidding”, I need a crème brulee doughnut probably right now. Where does that even come from, that smashing together in that environment? That, that idea?
Matthew Jones
So, bit of a hybrid. So we launched the doughnuts from pretty much Day One of the business in Bread Ahead and we just smashed it from Day One, they were a, a runaway product and we, for years the classic vanilla was our top seller and then just a bit of messing around in the bakery, we had a branding iron and we just put some sugar on top of one and we just burned it and we kind of invented the crème brulee doughnut, it just happened and it’s just flown, it’s our biggest seller, we sell thousands of them, I mean it is, daily, it has just become a viral you know Instagram and blah, blah, blah. It’s become a viral product online.
Elliot Moss
I want to describe the crème brulee doughnut but you got there first, which is fine because you made them and I didn’t, but I’m going to eat one, but I want to just finish off the Flour Power thing. You talked about VAT returns, the computers, all that stuff, despite not knowing anything about business, you created a successful business. Many people go how did you do that? How did you do that, Matthew?
Matthew Jones
There was brute force. I mean we, I just attacked it, you know and I just threw myself at it in every single way I could until it worked.
Elliot Moss
But did you have people, did you get people involved who knew what they were doing on those things?
Matthew Jones
No, and I probably should have done sooner. I employed a bookkeeper after being open about six months, which then took a further six months to sort everything out. I just used to do everything myself. I used to bake everything, I was the delivery driver, I was the cleaner, the everything and it was, I mean, I don’t know if I’d have the strength to do that again in my life.
Elliot Moss
Do you miss that though, that, that excitement?
Matthew Jones
I’m glad I did it and it was, it was just a crazy time in my life really and I think, yeah, I was pretty chaotic really and I think I kind of emerged out of that chef scene and just, you know, I often look back at my, the world I was immersed in, I was this young kid, fifteen, sixteen years old, left school and it was just that world of drinking and adults and just behaving badly and it was just work and the pub and that’s all we did and that stayed with me for a big part of my life and I carried that into my world at Flour Power when I was a, sort of a younger guy really and it nearly broke me, I mean it was really, you know, what I did to myself, you know it was just, you know just drinking, working, it was chaos and but somehow I made it work.
Elliot Moss
But then that kind of chaos stopped did it?
Matthew Jones
That stopped abruptly. Well fifteen years ago actually, I mean I kind of just changed my outlook on life, I stopped drinking, that was a big one.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, completely?
Matthew Jones
Yeah, yeah, totally, yeah, nice cups of tea now, all day long please.
Elliot Moss
With or without sugar, sir?
Matthew Jones
Without. Sugar free.
Elliot Moss
Okay, just checking. How much milk? Oat milk or just regular milk?
Matthew Jones
Oh no, regular milk.
Elliot Moss
Good.
Matthew Jones
Yeah. Little cloud in there. English breakfast tea.
Elliot Moss
Yeah nice, I like that as well. But that’s it, joking aside, that clarity of the okay, that was chaos, that was, that could have killed me, I now move onto the new thing. Is Bread Ahead a totally different story?
Matthew Jones
It’s a different animal. Yeah. And I am, I’m a different person, you know, I really grew up, you know. I mean one of the things that I think really was a real gamechanger for me was at the end of Flour Power, I took an investor on, Luke Johnson, that was the first time I’d been exposed to working with a proper business person let’s say, and I know he’s a pretty controversial character, he’s been, you know, but I, to be honest I take my hat off to the guy, you know, he’s been a phenomenal, successful entrepreneur who, you know, look at Gail’s, look what he’s done, it’s been an incredible success and you know I often reflect on that, I think when I grew up in the UK, we had nothing like that, you know, it was just, we had local bakeries and they were dreadful and you know when you see these companies like Gail’s who have emerged, they’ve got great coffee, they’ve got great croissants and they’ve done so much for the industry, I mean we’re quite a different business than that, a big part of our USP really is teaching so, we, we teach 20,000 people a year through our courses and we are smaller, much smaller as a brand, we’ve got six London locations, we’re, well we’ve got international as well that we’re building considerably but I quite like the size of the business it is right now, I can get around it every day myself, I know all the staff, we’ve got 180 people and it’s, it feels very comfortable as a size of business.
Elliot Moss
Suits you.
Matthew Jones
Yeah, it does. I like it, I really like where it is.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with Matthew Jones, my Business Shaper today and we’ve got some Black Keys for you too, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Matthew Jones is my Business Shaper for a little while longer, not long enough for me to zip out and go and get a crème brulee doughnut but that’s next time, Matthew. When you talk about, and I’m pleased you talked about the teaching because the teaching is in an interesting adjunct to what you do, I feel like I’m talking to someone with missionary zeal, sort of an evangelical person, but it happens to be about the world of baking and the food and it’s in your eyes as well, you’re very intense about the thing and I think I heard an interview with you where you said, “It’s an honour”, it’s an honour to be a baker and is that, is that very much still the way you feel about life?
Matthew Jones
Absolutely, it’s a pleasure, I mean I love what I do, I’m so fortunate, even you know after all these years of working in the industry, I look forward to going to work every day, love it, I look forward to it, it’s a, it’s a pleasure to take cinnamon buns out of the oven, it’s lovely to roll croissants, it’s, it’s great to make sour dough bread and to you know to teach people. We do a lot of work with local schools down at Borough Market and in our big site in Wembley and have all these school kids in and they just, you know you see them transformed, they’re just, you know suddenly you can find people’s creativity and you can tap into it and you can take them from start to finish of a product and the gratification people get from that is, there’s nothing like it, you know, it’s we want really what I want, people do just fall in love with baking and food.
Elliot Moss
And within all of the things you do and you talked about the size of the business being just right for you and not wanting to be a kind of Gail’s with hundreds or however many you know cafés they have, when are you at your happiest? Is it when you’re teaching? Is it when you’re helping, as in people outside the business, is it when you’re overseeing the actual, you know, other people cooking? Is it when you’re preparing? Which bit really buzzes you?
Matthew Jones
I think showing people around the business is really nice now because it’s something to be really proud of. I mean something happened recently in the business which was a real moment actually and I, a couple of the older guys who work, my age, their children have started to come to work in the business and I remember years ago somebody saying to me, “When your staffs’ children come to work in your business, you know you’ve done something right” and that was, and I realised it, and I saw it and it’s happening naturally and that’s almost generational now, we’ve been around for you know many, you know more than ten years and to see that transition kind of happening, that really meant a lot.
Elliot Moss
It’s been great talking to you Matthew. Thank you. Thank you for your time and thanks for bringing, bringing the look of intensity to your thing. I can’t imagine, if I asked you, what else would have done with your life? I just don’t even know what you’d say.
Matthew Jones
At one stage I wanted to be a hairdresser when I was at school and I probably would have been good at it but you know I discovered baking and it’s now my thing, you know.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, yeah, fills the room.
Matthew Jones
Mm, yeah.
Elliot Moss
Just before I let you disappear to go do more baking, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Matthew Jones
Oh I think we’ve got Nancy Sinatra, Sugar Town. She’s got a great vibe, I could play it all day long in the bakery.
Elliot Moss
Nancy Sinatra there with Sugar Town, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Matthew Jones. He talked about the hospitality business as a problem that is never going to be solved, so you may well enjoy it, he said. He talked about work being the key pillar in his life and that makes perfect sense when you think about the intensity and the commitment that he has brought to what he does. And finally, a really interesting thought about when he’s actually in the moment, when he’s cooking, when he’s preparing, he almost goes on autopilot, it’s almost meditative and it enables him to think about all sorts of other stuff at the same time, really interesting. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.