Hello,

This is the weekly newsletter from Loaf in Stirchley, keeping you abreast of our bakery and, once we can re-open it, our cookery school.

This week we take a look at the Real Living Wage campaign. Loaf became an accredited employer last year and we’d like to explain why.

But first, if you would like to pre-order your bread and pastries for the coming week, our website is now open.

We have plenty of bread and pastries on the shelves too, with lunches served from noon on weekdays. Scroll down for this week’s lunch menu.

Our opening hours are:
Wednesday: 12-4
Thusday: 12-6
Friday: 12-6
Saturday: 8-1

The Breadlines

🍎 Loaf wants your apples! It’s time to start making the mince pie mix and we always like to use locally grown apples. If you’ve got some that would otherwise be going to waste, bring them to the counter and we’ll trade them for some baked goodies.

🍞 Nottingham Urban Stone Mill is a fantastic project to open a flour mill in a shop window so everyone can see how flour is made for the local community. We’ve chipped into their crowdfunder and look forward to visiting them.

🥩 Ethical Game is a small-scale wild game butchers in Stirchley. Alan sources venison from local woodland management schemes, saving it from going to landfill, and prepares it on their Pershore Road site for wholesale. A fascinating operation.

Paying a Real Living Wage

Over the summer we found the welcome pack from the Living Wage Foundation which had arrived at the start of the pandemic and had somehow been forgotten. Among other things it contained a sticker which you might have noticed in the shop window.

A few years ago we decided to peg our wages to the Real Living Wage, making it a fixed item on the balance sheet. If Loaf’s profits increase then we can of course pay more, but we won’t go below it.

So, what’s that all about and why did we join?

The Living Wage Foundation was set up in by Citizens UK and is independent of the government, though it has cross-party support. The rate is calculated each year based on the cost of living — the current rate is £9.50 per hour — and paying it is purely voluntary.

The reason it’s called the Real Living Wage is to distinguish it from the mandatory government National Living Wage, a 2016 re-brand of the “minimum wage”. This is based on a different calculation and is currently lower, at £8.91 per hour. While the naming might seem cynical, the gap between them has been reducing and the intention is that they eventually reach parity.

We decided to become an accredited living wage employer because supporting this cause is important to us. As a worker-owned business we set our own pay, but many of our peers in the food sector do not have this right.

Campaigning for a real living wage doesn’t just help workers live a decent life — it also normalises the conversation about wages and workers’ rights. Many of you are concerned about the provenance of your food, and rightly so.

What we ask is that you also concern yourselves with the people preparing, serving or delivering you that food. Are they being paid enough to live on? Is their employment stable with regular hours? Can they be fired with zero notice? Are they able save for a rainy day?

We’re not interested in shaming small businesses and we don’t ask you to interrogate your server about their wage packet. We just ask that Birmingham’s food and drink renaissance brings the workers along with it.

Lunches this week

This week's sourdough pizza is mushroom, kale, caramelized onion, parmesan and mozzarella (V) on sale Wed to Fri.

The soup pot will be serving the following with a slice of sourdough bread:
Wed: Tarka daal curry (Ve).
Fri: Aubergine and chickpea curry. (Ve).

Thursday's focaccia sandwich is broad bean hummus, chargrilled courgette, hazelnut dukkah and rocket focaccia sandwich (Ve) or with goat’s cheese (V)

Savoury snacks include our famous sausage rolls and vegetable rolls, available all week, plus ham & cheese and walnut pesto & cheese croissants on Thursday and Friday.

Lunches are made fresh every day for 12 noon. Our menu for the week is on the website here.

Fighting food poverty

Thanks to your support we are able to bake extra bread to give to the following organisations each week who are working across Birmingham to combat hunger. They can always use more help, from cash and food donations to volunteers.