Cogs turn in the Davies Bakery 360 days a year. Smells of dough, fruit and chocolate linger in the carpark where freight trucks come and go, ferrying thousands of loaves of bread to supermarkets across the state.
For the past few years, the family-owned Broadmeadows bakery has supplied every ALDI store in Victoria with loaves of bread, hot cross buns, muffins and crumpets. It’s no small feat for a bakery still in family hands.
The Davies family and ALDI representatives opened the Military Road bakery’s doors to the media for the first time last month to show off its state-of-the-art baking machinery and sustainability practices. Davies is now in the hands of the fifth generation. Chief executive officer Matthew Davies maintains the practices of his great-great-grandfather John Davies, who was taught the tricks of the trade by a German baker during Ballarat’s gold rush era.
Now more than 50,000 loaves of bread are baked daily and delivered to stores within 15 hours of leaving the oven.
In recent years millions of dollars has bought new equipment for the Broadmeadows factory, including machines made in Melbourne. Operations manager Kevin Devereux says it’s a highly automated process. “If an oven stops working for just five minutes, 60,000 loaves of bread will have to be thrown out.”
… Lexi Cottee
