Investment opportunity to save Brummie bakery

Loaf team members. Copyright: Ellie Smith

Published: Tuesday 26 May 2026

Community bakery Loaf has been homeless since February 2026 and needs help to continue being able to provide Real Bread to people in and around Birmingham.

The bakery was due to move into Stirchley Co-operative Development (SCD), a pioneering co-operative workspace and social rent housing project, in October 2024 with two other co-ops and 39 households. The handover date has been pushed back repeatedly and the purchase price has skyrocketed by more than £2million.

The offer

To enable Loaf and co. get keys to their new homes at last, SCD is offering a formal bond to community-minded investors. They are looking for short to medium term loans of £20,000 or more and are also open to smaller offers.

The Loaf team says: ‘Even a modest loan has an outsized effect on their cash flow, and just a few loans or grants will get SCD over the line. If you or someone you know can consider an ethical investment or grant, please get in touch with SCD and they will send you the bond offer pack.’

Full details of the bond offer can be found on the SCD website.

The situation

SCD was designed to be co-managed by residents and businesses. Residents have been selected, Registered Provider status has been granted, and a mortgage in principle is agreed.

Work began in June 2023, but then the project hit a major snag. After the original contractor went into liquidation, GreenSquareAccord (GSA) took over project management. The completion date was pushed back to June 2025, then to June 2026, with GSA raising the purchase price from £10.68m to £12.57m and then £12.94m.

Rising interest costs mean SCD is still £1.3m short, even after a generous grant from Birmingham City Council in April 2026. Additional grants and bonds at ethical rates are the only way SCD sees to close the gap.

Amazingly, SCD's 39 homes represent around 10% of all new social rent homes built in Birmingham between 2020 and 2025. In that period, just 407 of the city’s 22,483 new homes were let at social rent, in the face of a waiting list of 25,000 households.

Since being forced to leave their former home in February 2026, the Loaf team has been keeping going through pop-ups, while waiting for work to finish on the new building.

You can find out more on the SCD website.

Chris Young has coordinated the Real Bread Campaign since March 2009. In addition to lobbying for an Honest Crust Act of better loaf composition, labelling and marketing laws in the UK; he created and runs initiatives including: Sourdough September; Real Bread Week; Real Bread For All; Together We Rise, promoting therapeutic/social benefits of bread making; No Loaf Lost surplus reduction guidance; and Lessons in Loaf for schools. He’s the author of the Knead to Know…more microbakery handbook, Slow Dough: Real Bread recipe book and Bake Your Lawn grow-a-loaf guidebook; and edits True Loaf magazine.

From 2014-18, Chris also coordinated Sustain's London Food Link network, which included editing The Jellied Eel magazine and helping to launch and run the Urban Food Awards with the Mayor of London’s office. Chris has pulled on his judge’s wig for BOOM Awards, The Cateys, The Great Taste Awards, The Scottish Bread Championship and The World Bread Awards. In 2017, The School of Artisan Food honoured Chris with its first Fellowship, and in 2025 he was named joint Person of The Year by Slow Food in The UK.

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