Our Story

Gary  McAllister  - Director of The Bread Guy's Bakery

I started my apprenticeship at Kelly of Cults at the age of 17 where I trained for 6 years under some of the best bakers in the Northeast of Scotland, where the emphasis was always on high quality. I am pleased to say that some staff who I worked with at Kellys now work with me at The Bread Guys Bakery.

I learned a lot from my time with those bakers, creating a full range of artisan breads, pies, cakes and scones. It was very hard work for a 17-year-old working from 6 pm until 3am 6 days a week but this is where my passion for my craft began. Kelly of Cults was a very respected family bakery lasting over 100 years of trading, instilling me with a passion for craft baking.  After the closure of Kelly of Cults, I moved on to work for a large company called MacPhie of Glenbervie a food ingredients manufacturer. I was employed as a QRD Baker (Quality, Research & Development) which was a very different type of baking. It was more technical, looking at the reactions that different ingredients have on baked products. A big part of this was looking at baking around the world - how we baked differently to bakers in other countries learning their techniques was fascinating. We looked at market trends and tried to gauge what the next trend might be and develop our products around this. My mentor at MacPhie of Glenbervie, Alan Leith was also a great lover of bread making and helped me to raise the bar on breads to infuse new techniques with old.

I would say this is how the idea of The Bread Guy was started; he got me thinking about how high-quality hand produced bread had disappeared from our communities and had been replaced with mass produced “modern bread” the skill had been removed and chemical additives substituted to replace the traditional techniques. 

The Bread Guy was set up with the aim to bring traditional artisan bread back to the community and offer local restaurants the chance to put it back on the menu whilst keeping the cost low to compete directly with supermarkets. 

With the help from my sister Donna, my business partner, we launched The Bread Guy in May 2019 in Inverurie with a small industrial unit in Blackhall Industrial estate. We needed to bring in some baking equipment but with very little start up cash and no loan from the bank except just the cash we had personally saved we bought a 20-year-old second hand oven - an antique of the baking ages but I still tell the bakers now it was the best oven we ever had. We bought a small bread mixer stainless steel table and went to the local Morrisons for the rolling pin and scales and started baking. 

Our first wholesale customer was Andy Stephen, Head chef at the Number 10 Bar and Restaurant. I had worked with Andy before whilst at another local Aberdeen bakery creating a product to his specification this was the level of service he had been looking for. I believe this level of service has helped to make The Bread Guy the go to bakery for chefs as before they had no input into the bakery products they were using. We attended local farmers markets to launch our products to the public; it was incredibly rewarding to hear the feedback on our breads first hand and made the long hours of baking much easier.

Now in our third year of business, we moved from the small site in Inverurie to a much larger site in Torry, the former premises of Aitkens bakery. We opened our first shop in Torry in June 2020, in the heart of the local community. Being part of the Torry community has been a huge deal to me as I spent a lot of my young age living in Torry and starting my own family here we have tried to give back as much as possible with our community fund that we donate to local charities.

 

Our second shop on Great Northern Road opened in June 2021. The shop had been vacant for a long time before this. I had driven past the derelict shop so many times as its bright green signage always caught my attention and probably that of everyone else who ever drove down that road. I always found this disappointing, that the shop directly opposite the Kittybrewster Primary School had its shutters down, and a massive for lease sign looming over the playground, it is a very unambitious sight for the kids to see. As a father of 4 I want my kids to be brought up around local stores where many of us got our first jobs like it was when I grew up. We had so many local bakers, butchers, fishmongers and local grocers in the neighbourhood but now every second shop in Aberdeen is empty, a drive down Union Street is just a wave of for lease signs not what you would expect to find in what is or was the oil capital of Europe. Of course, the pandemic also influenced all business, including our own, but it’s not the root problem of our empty communities.

 

It’s great to see the business growing as it has, now employing 35 members of staff. Our team are all close and always joke that we are a work family. We all work to achieve the same goal. It’s great to have some of the old team from Kelly of Cults with us as we have worked together for a long time, it was their quality and their passion for the industry that brought them here to The Bread Guy, I think that really separates us from the competition. We have come a long way from the days of the Morrisons rolling pin, the guys still like to joke about this, we have made so many accomplishments since then like being finalists in the Scottish Wholesale Bakery of the year in our first year of trading. This is something that has never been done in all the years that the bakers association have been hosting the awards, to our first and second store opening. Seeing the feedback we have been receiving means we have achieved what we set up to do.

Following the success of our Torry and Great Northern Road locations, we decided to expand to supply more of our community. Since 2021 we have opened two more shops, one on Thistle Street in Aberdeen City Centre and one in Inverurie. Having a larger connection to our customers means that we are lucky to gain more invaluable feedback via our four shops. We also expanded our bakery site, now including a new purpose-built confectionery room, packing room, office and storeroom. 

This space allowed us to take on more wholesale customers, in 2022 we were asked to develop a bagel line, now supplying Aberdeen’s first bagel café with over 3000 bagels a week. Now we supply over 200 of Aberdeen City and Shire’s well loved and respected cafes, restaurants, farm shops and retail stores. Maintaining relationships with wholesale customers creating bespoke and innovative products has remained a key part of our business to this day. 

In 2024 we won the Scottish Bakery of the Year Award 24/25, a testament to our consistent growth.  Our success seems to be continuing as Costco reached out to us in early 2025 to supplying them with our butteries.