Andrew Chisholm, Owner and Director of Christie
All articles‘Christie The Baker’ has been in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire for over seventy-five years- an award winning traditional high street baker with additional shops in Coatbridge and Whitburn, now with sixty staff across the three shops and the bakery. Christie is best known for their award-winning Scotch Pies, Morning Rolls and Cream Rings to name but a few.
Meet the Bakers spoke with Andrew Chisholm, Owner and Director of Christie to find out more:
AC: I first came into the bakery industry in 1983, when I was sixteen. My father was a baker, and my grandfather was a baker, in fact he was the bakery manager at MacDonalds in Glasgow, before it became the House of Fraser. My father did his apprenticeship in baking there, and I followed in his footsteps, finishing my 4-year apprenticeship in Glasgow, at Flecks Vienna bakery with a company that supplied continental bread to Marks & Spencer.
I spent the bulk of my career doing a technical job, as a Technical Manager, for Carrs Flour Mills in Kirkcaldy, visiting major bakeries in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Northern England, solving technical problems, and helping bakers to develop new products for new markets.
After 23 years of working for Carrs Flour Mill, I handed in my notice and bought Christie’s bakery, complete with forty staff and two high street shops, one in Airdrie, and one in Coatbridge.
The bakery was previously known as JB Christie, owned and run by the Christie family. I had known John Christie for over twenty years. Twelve years ago, John asked me to help find someone to buy the business from him. After multiple conversations with my family, we decided that we should do just that. I think John was always looking for me to put myself forward to buy the business, and here we are today.
The business had not really changed much over the years and that is what attracted me to it. I wanted to, and still want to, make traditional bakery products by traditional methods.
We are thankful that in North Lanarkshire, many of our clientele are fourth generation customers, and we know that we can keep these customers for more generations to come, as long as we maintain the quality of our products.
AC: There is a definite lack of knowledge in bakeries. If any bakery out there has a decent baker, they should hold onto them because there really is a lack of good bakers coming through the industry.
There are some good young people coming into bakeries, but they are not getting the real grounding in the technical abilities in raw materials, that young bakers would have done in my grandfather and my father's days.
We have two young apprentices in the business right now and they are great, they are like sponges, taking everything in, they want to learn, learn, learn, and we are happy to give them as much knowledge as we can, but I know this is rare.
MTB: What are your best-sellers and why do you think these became favourites?AC: Our best-selling products are our savouries, for example our scotch pie. The first year I bought the business we won the World Championship Scotch Pie Award; every year we have entered since then we have placed in the top three.
We sell big volumes, and our customers always comment on the tastiness and the quality of our scotch pies. Our morning roll is also a great seller.
AC: From a fermentation point of view, the classic loaf, the traditional Scottish batch bread is our signature bake. Historically, bakeries in Scotland and Ireland would have all made and sold a batch loaf, but in the 1980’s supermarkets began selling bread for 10p a loaf. Bread was sold by them as a loss leader and many craft bakeries just stopped making bread entirely. So, we developed a plain loaf, and it has been an overnight success and we cannot make enough of it.
People claim that our bread tastes ‘how it should taste’ and that it tastes like the bread they can remember when they were children; that one slice of toast is never enough! The important thing about it is that it is a long process bread, it has no added sugar, no added E-numbers, no fat, and it has a long shelf life.
But this is a process- a six-hour process! All the time is about creating flavour, texture, and visual appeal. It is a delicious loaf of bread, with a big thick crust on it!
We also sell a lot of cakes, selling over 100 different varieties of small cakes. The most popular cake by far, however, is what we call the Domino Cake. The Domino Cake is a layered cake of around eight inch in length and three inch in depth, iced on the top, and made to look like a domino piece. We sell thousands of Domino Cakes a week.
We work very hard to keep the ‘scratch’ recipes, to keep that fresh product going out all the time. Many bakeries will look to sell products with a longer shelf life, but we go the other way and just make the products more often, to keep them fresh.
MTB: What advice would you give to bakers starting up today?AC: Bakers starting out today need to be prepared to work hard. They need to understand that if they work efficiently and put in the long hours that they will reap the benefits. They need to understand that if they are going to be a business owner in the bakery industry, that everything lands at their feet. They need to be in it for the right reasons…because they love it.
AC: For a business of our size and smaller companies it is really difficult right now. The price of gas has increased by around 300%, electricity has increased by 100-150%, and the costs of raw materials are constantly on the move upwards. Consequently, it is very difficult to do a proper costing, so you are making the best predictions you can when it comes to your own price increases, all the time fully aware that you can’t charge too much, or people will stop walking through the door. But there is nothing we can do about it; we are all in the same boat and we have to try to weather through it.
Somebody once said to me that in the bakery industry we create affordable luxuries. Whether that is a cake, or a biscuit, I just hope that it helps people to get through not having a lot of money right now.
It is really all about just how long the rising costs will go on for. I have colossal energy bills right now, and there is nothing I can do about it. The bakery industry is a high energy user, and we can’t switch our ovens off. What we hope for is that there will be a softening in ingredients prices, as that would help with the upward trajectory and the price increases.
AC: BAKO works well because they listen. I feel that although BAKO is a national company, they are still working in a traditional way. For example, if we run out of something, BAKO is very good at getting things to us in time, and although it may come from their depot in Durham, it still gets to us quickly. So, for me, the relationship works very well, and it stands out to me that they go the extra mile.
AC: We have created a couple of savoury products and accompaniments, again going down the traditional route. We have developed a baked dough ball dumpling and puff pastry squares to add to stew or mince. A big part of these new products is to help people to make simple, cheap, filling and tasty meals.
We have also developed a couple of puff pastry products. We have the steak gravy Stovie bridie, which is a northern meat and potato and vegetable filled savoury, like a Scottish pasty, and we are extending the selling period of our extremely popular haggis meat and tattie bridie, to meet customer demand.
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