The Flour Pot Bakery, founded by Oli Hyde in 2014, continues to inspire as the craft bakery chain continues to build on its capacity to deliver the best bread and baked products to retail and wholesale customers across the Southeast coast.

The 10-shop strong bakery chain is a unique bakery based in Brighton, Sussex with shops across the town and surrounding area. Using quality fresh ingredients to produce the highest quality baking bread, cakes and pastries, the bakery has recently invested in machinery to increase capacity in the most sustainable way possible.

Oli is a trained chef, who before starting The Flour Pot, used to run bars, nightclubs, restaurants, and an exclusive catering business. His commitment to excellence both front and back of house is evident in the bakery range today. The production kitchen and bakery is filled with highly skilled chefs and artisans producing authentic sourdough, and delicious pastries and baked goods seven days a week remaining true to its roots. The Flour Pot Bakery is a family-owned local chain that is delivering on its grand plans with unique consistency and standard.

The new heart of the bakery is the recently installed Polin steam tube deck oven. A true thoroughbred in the baking stakes, these ovens are built from almost a century of baking experience, where the heat transfer to the product is considered just as important in the recipe as the quality of the flour, passion, and skill of the bakers.

The oven delivers heat to the products through steam circulating around the decks, and the new oven at The Flour Pot bakery features four massive decks each over 6m², allowing the business to produce over 1,500kg of dough a night.

The oven implementation has allowed The Flour Pot Bakery to continue its investment into sustainable production. The Polin oven is fuelled by a wood pellet burner and is touted by the manufacturers as ‘zero emissions’ and as well as being low impact on the environment, the business is sourcing their fuel from the UK and offsetting some of the rising cost of energy. 

“We’ve been working with Oli since around 2011 and have seen his business grow to what is now an inspirational bakery and concept. The retail stores ooze style and flair and the products speak for themselves. Helping The Flour Pot Bakery expand baking capacity this year has been a pleasure and we’ve worked closely to ensure the right choice of oven, I’m delighted for Oli and his team, seeing the benefits is brilliant”
Ann Wells

Since installation in November, the oven has improved efficiency and consistency in the bakery while not compromising the high quality the bakers and customers expect. This is also aided by the arrival of a new grid divider that ensures consistent portioning of doughs for the hand-crafted products. 

Whether higher hydration ciabatta or cutting focaccia squares, the divider is used tirelessly to aid the bakers in achieving accurate weights of the key product lines. The divider handles the dough with care ensuring low stress on the products, maintaining the structure and integrity of the product. In the few weeks since adding these key pieces of equipment, Oli says the bakers have seen a dramatic improvement to workflow and can achieve the results they require in the processes within the bakery.

“We could not be more pleased with the purchase of this Polin oven. We have some of the best bakers in the country and it is important to us that they are working with equipment that allows us to continue to produce the highest quality products as we grow. To be able to do this fuelled by a sustainable by-product of the renewable British lumber industry, is also really exciting as we aim to have a low impact on the environment in everything we do.” Oli Hyde, Founder of The Flour Pot Bakery.