By Andrew Hughes - 17 May 2018

By 2025, it is predicted that the UK food and drink industry will need 130,000 new skilled workers to meet demand and replace retiring workers. The baking sector is a vitally important part of the food manufacturing industry and in the UK is a £3 billion industry and employs over 20,000 people. With potentially so many vacancies, it’s essential that bakery industry acts to tackle the issue of skills and training.

The skills required by a good baker are often underestimated. While technology and machinery have replaced much of the manual work, it is still important that bakers understand the fundamental elements required to make bread and other baked goods. This requires knowledge of bakery ingredients – their functionality and how they interact with each other to impact on the finished product’s quality.

Stop your bakery teams picking up bad habits

Most bakers begin their careers as apprentices or trainees with many bakery jobs requiring no specific formal qualifications. This applies particularly to junior positions in the plant or in-store bakeries where on-the-job training is provided. Learning at work is freely available and requires little upfront investment in time or money. However, it can lead to trainees picking up bad habits or learning to cut corners when shadowing colleagues. This may affect product quality or shelf life and create a vicious circle in which new bakers going up through the ranks learn incorrect techniques, adopt bad practices and never truly understand how the finished baked item should look, taste or feel. It’s therefore very important that on-the-job training is supplemented by more formal, structured training.

Solve long-running bakery issues

Off-the-shelf training can be a great way to ensure your team has the right basic skills and knowledge. But tailored training provides much more flexibility and allows you to cover any aspect including basic knowledge sharing, raw material technology, ingredient functionality, troubleshooting and more. Because the training is private to just your company, it provides a great opportunity for colleagues to openly share specific issues and problems and solve long running issues. Having open access to the knowledge and experience of each other as well as the bakery experts can sometimes provide surprising results, as a group from the production and technical departments of Pukka Pies found out when they attended a tailored Campden BRI training course on pastry technology.

Pukka pies reduce pastry waste by 40% thanks to tailored training

During the wastage reduction part of the pastry processing module, the Pukka Pies team mentioned that they consistently create a significant amount of scrap dough during their production processes. After discussions with Campden BRI, Pukka Pies invested in an extensive internal work programme on waste reduction resulting in very significant reduction in waste and increasing their efficiency.

Phil Smith, Operations Manager at Pukka Pies said, “With a new understanding of pastry and the science behind it we were able to re-design our production processes and reduce our pastry waste by around 40% on one particular product. The bespoke training that Campden BRI was able to offer us has been invaluable and will continue to help move our business forward in the future.”

For more information on bespoke training programmes that can be tailored your company’s individual needs please contact

Andrew Hughes, Bakery Technology Section Manager
+44(0)1386 842190
andrew.hughes@campdenbri.co.uk