All baking done on site to ensure freshness

Press, 28 November 1989, Page 24

All baking done on site to ensure freshness

While Christchurch sleeps, the staff in the bakery section at Countdown Northlands are hard at work preparing the freshest possible range of bread, cakes, muffins and biscuits for its customers. The Northlands bakery is another first for Countdown as it contains an area exclusively set aside as a bakery. The bakery manager, Mr Harry Simons, says that the first staff start in the bakery at 2 a.m. and on late nights the last will leave at 9 p.m.

“Everything will be baked on the premises. As a rule we will start making cakes first followed by bread which will start coming out of the ovens about the time the store opens.” Countdown will’offer a full range of white, wholemeal and oat bran breads with a grain bread to be introduced at a later date. There will also be eight different types of buns, hot scones and a range of eight different muffins including sultana, apple, blueberry, banana, apri-

cot, ginger, fruit and nut and oat bran. Others will be added to this range, depending on demand. Because of the need to run two shifts, the bakery will have up to a dozen staff including four bakers, two apprentice bakers, three packers and part-time workers. Harry Simons comes from a family of bakers. He entered the family business about 18 years ago and for the past seven years he has been with Woolworths. “In the baking trade

Saturday is becoming an increasingly popular shopping time and I see this trend continuing at Count- * down,” he says. Twelve different cookie lines will be an attraction for customers, offering afghans, gingernuts, peanut brownies, chocolate chippies and many others. Different slices such as apple and apricot, custard squares, croissants, Danish pastries, hamburger buns, torpedo buns and winter puddings, as well as Christmas and Easter items, means

Countdown will have an extremely comprehensive range. “Because we have a very flexible operation customers can approach us with ideas of what type of cake, biscuit or bread they would like and where possible we will make it,” says Mr Simons. Anything left at the end of the day is thrown out to ensure the bakery carries nothing but the freshest products. There is also a ban on animal fats, vegetable fats being the replacement.