Our Story
It started with two day jobs and a lot of bread.
Live Love Loaf began in Manchester. I was working as a bank manager, Clare was working as a nursery nurse, and baking was the thing we kept coming back to because we loved it.
Testing the idea
A year of markets alongside ordinary working life.
We started selling at a market while keeping our day jobs. We carried on from 2013 into 2014 because we wanted to know that the first sell-out was not simply beginner’s luck. Happily, it kept happening.
Those market days taught us what people came back for: proper bread, made carefully, with flavour that had been given time to develop.
Coming home to Leek
Then we decided to make the bakery real.
We sold our family home, entered a Dragons’ Den-style start-up competition and brought the idea back to Leek. It was a fairly enormous leap from baking around two jobs to opening a bakery of our own.
When the doors opened, people queued outside. That support gave Live Love Loaf its beginning on Bath Street and has kept the bakery moving forward ever since.
Today
Still hands-on. Still learning.
The bakery has changed and grown, but the important part has not: dough is mixed, shaped and baked here in Leek, in batches planned around the bread rather than a factory timetable.
We also run practical bread courses because sharing the method is part of the enjoyment. You should leave understanding what the dough is doing, not merely carrying a page of instructions.
We are always refining the range, the bakery and the systems behind it. Live Love Loaf is not a finished corporate story; it is the bakery we continue to build every week.
Come and see us