An A to Z of Sourdough September
People from Australia to Zambia join the 10th anniversary celebrations.
Photo © top: Nancy Reilly, Ulla Ojanen, Sam Matthews; below: Laura Bassett, Simon Clifford, Anna Davies.
Thank you to everyone around the globe who joined the Real Bread Campaign’s 10th anniversary Sourdough September!
This includes all those of you who:
…plus everyone who passed on their knowledge, skills and starters.
Welcome to our world
It’s hard for a small organisation like the Real Bread Campaign to gauge success of an initiative such as our Sourdough September.* As indicators we can look at media coverage and social media posts.
On social media, people used our #SourdoughSeptember hashtag, or told us they were celebrating, in 56 countries: Australia, Austria, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Cayman Islands, Croatia, Curaçao, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Grand Cayman, Grenada , Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Kuwait, Libya, Libya, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Suriname, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, USA, Wales and Zambia.
The hashtag was used around 1900 times on Instagram alone, a figure that would be much higher if we had been able to count posts on other platforms. We gained 990 followers on Insta and 683 Facebook likes.
Media work by the Campaign and our supporters helped to secure national, regional, local and bakery trade press coverage around the UK, plus mentions in Bangladesh, Canada, Egypt, Greece, South Africa, United Arab Emirates and USA.
During the month, 118 people either joined the Campaign or renewed their support for our charity's work.
How was it for you?
"I am a French citizen (with Mesopotamian roots) running a Real Bread business in Mexico City. Keep up with the great job you are doing, it is tremendously useful for small businesses like mine, helping me to convince my clients that I am not talking nonsense to them." @Nuro_Elemental_Cuisine
"I sell a few loaves to folk at work and used your campaign and hashtags on my posters throughout the month." @whitleyloaves
If you run a Real Bread business, we hope you’ve valued this opportunity we created for you to promote it. If so, please drop us a short email about the way(s) that you benefitted or post a comment on social media: We’re @realbreadcampaign on Insta and Facebook, and @realbread for the dwindling number of Real Bread lovers still there.
We’d love to see and share photos of you with the sourdough bread you made (rather than just bread on its own), bakery crews in action, and children with their Dough Monster creations. In short: email us your people photos, please, people.
People of every background and identity make and enjoy genuine sourdough bread and we’d love to be able to reflect this in the feedback and comments we publish. Please note that this is an ‘as well as’, rather than an ‘instead of’ invitation.
More this month
September 2023 also marked the 10th anniversary of caterers serving Real Bread being able to gain points towards their Food For Life Served Here Award and Food for Life Schools Awards.
During September, we partnered with the Soil Association on the Knead for Change initiative. This encourages bakeries to celebrate using certified organic ingredients and consider getting their businesses certified.
Send us your dough
If your Sourdough September activities included raising money towards your Real Bread Campaign’s work, you can send your doughnation to our charity here.
Save the date
Just as people make genuine sourdough and other Real Bread throughout the year, so we continue to celebrate them and challenge obstacles to their rise, all year round. As the other annual tentpole in all of this, our next big awareness-raising shindig will be Real Bread Week, which runs from 17 to 25 February 2024.
*While our network of supporters and friends runs to thousands (tens of thousands if you include social media followers), the Campaign has only one dedicated member of Sustain staff, who works on a part-time basis. We have no corporate sponsorship and our only grant funding ended in 2012.
Few people complete feedback surveys and even fewer contact organisers spontaneously. In an attempt to make our Dough Monsters guide as easy to access as possible, we did not collect data when people downloaded it, so have no record of how many did.
Published Monday 2 October 2023
Real Bread Campaign: The Real Bread Campaign finds and shares ways to make bread better for us, better for our communities and better for the planet. Whether your interest is local food, community-focussed small enterprises, honest labelling, therapeutic baking, or simply tasty toast, everyone is invited to become a Campaign supporter.
