Anfield bakery on a roll following charity investment
Howard Lake | 19 March 2019 | News
A Liverpool community bakery, knowns for its Scouse and Shankly pies, has received investment from a social impact business to meet a surge in demand for its award-winning produce.
Homebaked, a co-operative bakery and café in between Everton and Anfield, produces 3,000 pies, 300 sausage rolls, 250 loaves and 250 scones a week. It won 10 medals in this year’s British Pie Awards.
Its ‘Shankly’ pie is made with steak, bacon, mushroom and onion, and ‘Scouse’ pie contains a beef stew. The ‘Blue’ pie is made with steak and cheese. The bakery supplies Liverpool Football Club with 700 pies per game.
Social enterprise funding
Faced with a growth in demand, Homebaked applied for £61,000 to First Ark Social Investment (FASI), which provides a blend of grant and unsecured loan finance for charities and social organisations in the North West of England, and investments of between £50,000 and £150,000.
The funding will be used to enable the bakery to:
- become a larger wholesale producer
- expand the increasingly-popular café
- attend more markets
- create new roles
- offer more volunteer placements and training courses.
The investment for Homebaked is made up of a grant of £15,500 and a loan of £45,500.
It claims that for every £1 invested a social return of £20.37 will be generated.
Advertisement
The results are in & we have won 10 medals at #BritishPieAwards. 1 Gold, 6 Silver & 3 Bronze. The team at our little community bakery in Anfield have smashed it & we won the 3rd highest number of medals out of 150 pie producers. #morethanapie #communityisourbusiness pic.twitter.com/weoDD9pCOz
— Homebaked Bakery (@HomebakedBakery) March 9, 2019
Mentoring
First Ark Social Investment also mentored Homebaked in drafting a business plan and helped write an application to access £14,000 from The Reach Fund, a national grant programme that helps charities and social enterprises raise investment.
Benefits of the investment:
• A healthy eating course for children will be created
• Space has been created to run regular community baking courses
• 3 permanent part-time jobs, 20 volunteer placements and 10 work placements for young people will be organised
• For every £1 invested a social return of £20.37 will be generated
Sally-Anne Watkiss, Treasurer of Homebaked, said:
“Investment has given us a chance to grow, employ more people, bake more produce and more importantly re-invest in Anfield and its residents.
“The funding from First Ark Social Investment has made a huge difference because we need to expand our premises to cope with demand. We’re now renting an industrial space in Bootle which was previously a food business, so the right kit is already installed. We’ve also been able to buy extra tables, shelves, a mixer, an oven, a fridge and freezer, as we want to scale-up production and extend our café to welcome more customers.”
Leann Hearne, Group Chief Executive of First Ark Group, added:
“We supported this stand-out project, during the investment period, with guidance when applying for investment from our funds and social value monitoring. Homebaked is so much more than a bakery and a café, it’s an educational, social and training hub and does everything from teaching the community about healthy eating, to backing ongoing local community initiatives. This year it has also provided produce for ‘Fans Supporting Foodbanks’, a unique partnership between the Everton Supporters’ Trust and the Spirit of Shankly, the Liverpool Supporters Union, to tackle the foodbank shortages.”
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.