The Rise and Rise of the Side Oven Bakery

Driffield farmer's wife turned organic entrepreneur launches new premises and new ranges

It sounds like something quite impossibly idyllic – straight from The Famous Five or or Swallows and Amazons. A loaf of bread created from wheat grown organically and then milled on site and baked in an outhouse in a wood-burning oven by the farmer's wife.

But the Side Oven Bakery is no fairy tale. It's a viable, growing business, on the verge of great things and one that's already won a major award for business skills development from the Regional Food Group for Yorkshire and Humber (RFGYH).

Although she's been running the Side Oven Bakery for two years, Caroline Sellers has just taken it from kitchen table (or kitchen oven, to be more precise) to a major enterprise, with a bakery, complete with purpose-built wood-burning oven.

Throughout the upheaval, Caroline has continued to fulfil her existing customers' orders for her own wholemeal malt grain loaf, plus a range of flavoured breads, including sundried tomato, tapenade and pumpkin (which, as Caroline says are 'perfect for supper parties. Or just to be greedy and sit and eat').

And as if that wasn't enough, she's also launching a range of toasted cereal bars and mueslis, which she developed as a way of using up the residual heat in the bread oven.

In early tastings, the cereal bars have proved a big hit with mothers looking for healthy lunchbox fillers for their children – particularly in the wake of Jamie Oliver's healthy eating campaign. And the toasted mueslis have also been given a warm welcome by customers.

Caroline admits that although the energy is hers, many of the business skills have come from the RFGYH. She's been a regular attendee at the group's 'Skillfully' line-up of workshops and seminars, which cover topics including merchandising, understanding your market, presenting to potential customers, taking on staff and benchmarking.

Caroline said: 'I've learned so much about things like marketing, which used to be a total mystery to me. They fire your enthusiasm and if you come away from the morning with even one thing that really burns in your brain, it has to be good. The sessions are great for networking too.'

Caroline and her husband Tim are no strangers to innovation and hard work. Having farmed for many years, they switched their traditional farm to organic in 1999 – which necessitated a radical change in the way they thought and worked.

Then three years ago, Caroline fulfilled a long-held desire and went on a weekend bread-making course at The Village Bakery in Melmerby. The course inspired Caroline so much, she promptly came home and started experimenting seriously - testing her wares on willing friends and family. It was their enthusiasm that led her to set up her own business, producing bread from her farmhouse kitchen.

When it outgrew her domestic Aga, Tim renovated the farmhouse's old bread oven – giving rise to the name, the Side Oven Bakery.

Response from farmers' markets and farm shops provided so overwhelming that Caroline found herself having to turn down orders through a lack of capacity

In addition, Caroline and Tim were finding it frustrating to have to send all their grain to Cumbria for milling.

These frustrations and the dream of a big, proper wood-fired oven gave rise to the latest project – the renovation of an outbuilding to create a new bakery.

Meanwhile, the farm has taken delivery of its own stone ground mill, which enables Tim to mill his own organic wheat on site.

The most nailbiting part of the expansion process was an organic inspection. Until the products passed the strict criteria, nothing could be officially labelled as organic, something that's of vital importance to the business.

The organic certification is now in place and the oven and mill up and running. Work continues to finish a small distribution centre, but Caroline is already freer to concentrate on making and marketing her breads, mueslis and cereal bars more widely.

And many more potential customers of the Side Oven Bakery can be glad that the business is on the rise. Because although organic principles are at the heart of the Side Oven Bakery's philosophy, taste comes first. As she says: 'It's all very well being healthy, but rabbit food is hellish boring!'