Ujima Bakery – coming soon

The situation

Kenya is a land of extremes. Just a few miles from luxury lodges overlooking stunning lakes there are people living on rubbish tips. Many working mothers struggle to put food on the table for their kids and while mums work, their older children often miss out on an education to take care of younger ones.

The vision

A bakery-café-college with an ethos of transparency, quality, sustainability and giving.

Quality

Food products will be home cooked, not processed and reduce risk to long-term health conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Each item’s nutritional benefit will be clearly marked.

For food to sell, it primarily must be tasty and suitable for the local palette.

For high quality to be maintained the ingredients will be carefully sourced and as far as possible will come from ethical producers.

The highest levels of hygiene will be carried throughout with regular checks and retraining of staff.

Staff training will encourage creativity and autonomy with out a reliance on stringent protocols that do not allow staff members to think for themselves and adapt to new scenarios.

Transparency

The kitchens will be visible to customers in the café area and therefore poor standards of hygiene will not be tolerable. The visibility of the kitchen will be educational to customers who will be able to witness the preparation and cooking processes.

Unfortunately corruption is endemic in Kenya and we will seek to put in systems whereby stealing on any level will be visible and stopped.

This is a not-for-profit venture and money generated will be clearly visible in how it is used for staff training, community education and eye care (see below).

Sustainability

For a business of any description to work the model must be sustainable and the local market must be well understood through targeted research.

Local Kenyan business people with a strong track-record for successful business and whom share the vision of the project will be sought to run the bakery at a business level, allowing the business to give.

Giving

We wish to encourage giving within the Kenyan community. The decades of aid coming in to the country has hampered the will to give to one another.

Giving through this venture will be multi-faceted.

• Giving of new skills to the bakery staff. Staff will be carefully selected to develop their abilities.
• An emphasis on training unskilled mothers who otherwise would have little opportunity
• Healthy, nutritious alternative to processed baked goods that is affordable
• Through the transparent labeling of food products with simplified nutritional advice this will provide ongoing education
• Classes will be provided at the bakery across a range of ages and abilities to develop skills in baking high quality, healthy artisan products
• Part of the job description of a full-time employee will be to provide community outreach nutritional workshops one day a week.
• When the bakery is up and running a percentage of the profits will go directly towards eyecare in the local community

Our plan

Our Kenyan friends telling us how they’ve really enjoyed eating Real Bread and other baked goodies we’ve made in our kitchen gave us the idea of setting up a social enterprise bakery-café.

Our range of delicious Real Breads and baked goods will be unlike (and better than!) anything else available in the area. The café will be designed to be attractive to tourists, local Kenyans and ex-pats alike.

We will invest profits from this unique business to provide training and employment to local mothers who are eager to learn. This will not only help them to feed their families but also to share with them and other people in their communities the benefits of eating healthy food. A crèche facility would allow baking mothers to bring their young children to a happy working environment and allow older children to pursue an education.

We aim to establish a sustainable business model that will not be reliant on donor money to succeed and can be passed on to local people to run by the time we leave.

Join us!