The baker, his bread and his plan

Doing it differntly

I met him in his usual haunt which is a pretty good bar. Hervé liked socialising and spending time with his mates. And why not? He knew this full and well and when he started working out his business plan one key factor was not having to work 24/7 and so have time to socialise. Something which is difficult with the standard baker business plan which involves very early mornings and a lot of hard work.

So Hervé figured it out backwards. I need X number of hours socialising and I need Y€ as an income which equals Z kilos of bread a week he said to himself. He also really didn’t want to sell his bread in the local markets. Another factor was that he didn’t live alone but with his wife and 2 very young children.

He developed the following model :

Hervé calculated the number of loaves he needed to produce each week, the sale of which would give him a viable income and leave him time for fun stuff. Not going to the markets meant selling from home. Two big bakes a week and his customers coming and picking up their bread from his house seemed the ideal plan. He was right, people turned up on the appointed days, took their bread and left the money in a tin, neither Hervé nor Isa even needed to be there.

He and Isa bought a small piece of land that nobody wanted and built a small straw bale house on it with an adjoining bakery. Hervé’s socialising bore fruit as he convinced people to buy his bread rather than the supermarket rubbish. His marketing points were handmade locally produced organic bread at a reasonable price.

He hit his target number of clients pretty quickly and started to live his dream. Up went a wind turbine, photovoltaics and solar water heater, which avoided the need and costs of linking to the mains electricity. Their strawbale house was heated by the bakery and when needed, which was rare, by a small wood burning stove. They stuck in a reedbed gray water treatment which avoided the considerable costs of a ‘normal’ system and together they planted fruit trees and bushes and opened up an area for vegetable growing.

The set up went along very well and produced a small profit over and above their living needs that was put aside for the next phase. This involved building a grain silo in wood with metal straps and buying a small electric mill to make the flour he needed. They bought another piece of land and started to work it with two horses and planted old traditional wheat varieties which they hand harvested. This reduced the cost of buying in flour and increased their profit. The number of clients and the number of loaves stayed the same all this time, anybody who dropped out was quickly and easily replaced by new people.

The two of them dreamed of building a bigger house and so Hervé and Isa left containers in all the local restaurants and bars, I’ll come back to this in a moment. They found a wood planted with Douglas firs and arranged to buy them, have them felled and cut into long squared trunks which were store away awaiting the moment when the money was there to build the house. This came about 8 years after they had started and at the moment when they really needed more space, you may have noticed that very small children have a tendency to become big children and eventually teenagers.

Neither Hervé nor Isa wanted to terrace their sloping land and they certainly didn’t want to pour a concrete platform so they dug lots of deep holes into which, well yes, they poured concrete but not really very much! On the flat concrete surfaces they cut chestnut logs of the different lengths they needed for them all to have the same level. The time that could be spent socialising was dramatically reduced during this period but a compensation was that the friends came and helped with the build. The Douglas trunks were laid log cabin style, windows installed and the two storey house with a traditional timber frame roof covered in shingles went up little by little. The containers left in bars and restaurants bore fruit and over 3 years they had harvested 10 cubic metres of bottle corks. These were chopped up in a big shredder and used for the under floor and roof insulation. The only niggle here was the time spent taking the plastic corks out of the harvest!

So, still with the same number of clients, the same number of loaves and two bakes a week the family now had a big three bedroom house with an open kitchen area and salon on the ground floor. They were very comfortable.

Interestingly another person set up a bakery with a similar model and not very far away from Hervé and his family. He kneaded the dough with a machine, Hervé did it by hand. I can eat Hervé’s bread everyday but not the other fellow’s, that was two days max or I would feel very bloated. Having two bakers in the same area reminded me of an article I wrote a long time ago about ‘free market cooperation’, ethical price fixing and rational diversification. I postulated that two bakeries in the same village could either compete with each other, the norm for an anti-social competition based economic system. Or they could cooperate, fix a fair price and each one could diversify to produce other baked goods, for example one could produce pizzas and the other cakes and suchlike. I used bread as an example because, in economic theory, it is a bit weird. Total demand for bread is little impacted by rising prices, it is inelastic, eventually when the price gets too high we see increased social unrest and even revolutions.

One morning I was cutting a loaf and I felt confused. The bread wasn’t as dense as the other fellow’s but much more dense than Hervé’s. I couldn’t really work out what was going on, then I realised that it must be Hervé’s bread but it couldn’t have been him who had done the kneading. I popped round to see what was going on and Hervé had a broken arm having been kicked by one of his horses so Isa had done the kneading. Unfortunately for her the whole set up was designed for Hervé who is quite big and she is quite small which made the whole operation a struggle. The situation was an opportunity for his customers to rally round and lend a hand, one of the great advantages of a pro-social business plan.

So they were living their dream, a great house, enough income, plenty of time to socialise and all on two bakes a week. It would be great if this story had the happiest of endings but the couple split up. Isa took a saw and cut everything down to her size and continued producing great bread. Hervé went off wandering somewhere.

We are continually bombarded with arguments defending growth based economic systems, we don’t need them, Hervé and Isa showed this. They had no need to grow their business beyond a certain modest scale and then they kept it at that size, it is an example of stationary state economics. It is also an example of the importance of things other than income and the uselessness of economic indicators that place no value on quality time spent with your feet up chatting to your friends.

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