November 30th, 2023
Bex Young
4 minute read‘Tis the season for minced pies, chocolate logs and Christmas pud. So who better to catch up with than our Cambridge client, Stir Bakery? The business has grown from strength to strength over the last 8 years, and now makes over 4,000 pastries and over 3,000 loaves of bread every week – “an amazing number given everything is made individually by hand” says Fin, their Marketing Lead.
We’ve been helping Stir with their deliveries around the county for a number of months now, and we’re so proud to be their trusted delivery partner. They have few different spots around Cambridge, including Green Street, CB4, Fulbourn, Chesterton and Histon.
We chatted to their Fin to find out more about their USP, their goals, and why they chose to go for cargo bike deliveries with Zedify.
WhatdoesStirdo,andwhywasthecompanystarted?
“Stir started as a coffee shop in the Chesterton area of Cambridge in 2015, but opened its own bakery in 2017 after having trouble finding consistent, high-quality suppliers of bread, pastries and cakes.
Since then, the bakery has seen huge growth, growing from just four staff in 2020 to a team of over twenty bakers, pastry chefs and cake-makers now. Stir Bakery had less than ten wholesale customers 18 months ago but now has over sixty loyal partners.
As well as the bakery, Stir now has five outlets across Cambridge, offering a mix of great speciality coffee, amazing menus and, of course, the mouth-watering Stir Bakery products.”
What makes Stir stand out from other bakeries?
Stir Bakery is unique in Cambridge because it combines the quality of a small craft bakery, with its award-winning products all being made by hand using traditional methods and natural ingredients, together with the capacity, extensive product range, service and support that you would usually find in a more commercial operator.
As an operator of hospitality and retail outlets ourselves, we know the kind of support that can really make a difference and so we offer a seven-day delivery service, a dedicated account manager, the option to have products bagged or sliced, and we love working with customers to create bespoke products.”
What are Stir‘s 2024 goals?
Having won gold medals for our bakery products in the World Bread Awards and Britain’s Best Loaf in the last year, we are hoping to win more prizes for our bakery products. Sandor, who heads up our bakery, is also one of three finalists up for Baker of the Year in the prestigious Bakery Industry Awards in November so we are keeping our fingers crossed that he wins.
We hope to take our bakery products, and the wider Stir offering, to more people across Cambridgeshire in the year ahead, both by opening more outlets of our own and building more targeted partnerships through our wholesale activities.
Why cargo bike deliveries, and why Zedify?
Although it can be hard as a relatively small business, especially during challenging economic times, we are eager to become a more sustainable business. Many of our customers are supportive of us making this move too. Switching some of our deliveries from our vans to cargo bikes felt like a small step in the right direction. We also have a lot of business in central Cambridge and so the cargo bike service is actually a more efficient way of reaching many of our customers.
Zedify is a neighbour of ours, based just a couple of hundred metres from our bakery, so it felt like a natural partnership. We have been delighted with how things have gone so far and are already in conversations about expanding our partnership.”
