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Dusty Knuckle, one of London’s best modern bakeries, has announced that it will raise the price of its bread, pastries, and sandwiches in its cafes in Dalston and Harringay — a response to the rising prices of ingredients and energy which will enable the business to continue to be London Living Wage employer, where staff are paid a minimum of £11.95 per hour. The price rises will come into effect on Saturday 1 October. The bakery said it had not been an easy decision, nor an easy mathematical exercise.
The headline, though, is that the bakery has calculated its monthly costs to have risen by £13,000 and without price increases, the business could not continue to meet either its standards nor its promise to its employees.
“This isn’t something we’re looking forward to. In fact we’re pretty much shitting it. Everyone is putting up their prices and we don’t want to add insult to injury,” the bakery said on Instagram on Thursday 29 September. “But bakeries use a lot of power. Even after old Trussy’s package we are pretty much double where we were. And that’s a lot better than some.
“Flour is up. Butter is up. Oil is up. Fuckin oxygen is up.”
It went on to say that it was also intent on continuing to pay its staff more than the government’s national minimum wage, which currently sits at just £9.50 per hour. “We have some self-imposed red lines too,” it said. “We want to make sure our staff can afford to live. If not, who the f**k’s gonna bake the bread in your breadbin.”
Dusty Knuckle doubles as a social enterprise, offering training programmes for young Londoners “in and around the justice system — helping them improve their legitimate work readiness through carefully designed real-world training programmes.” Those costs money, they said. “We do not want our trainee numbers to shrink.”
Referring to the COVID-19 crisis, the bakery said it had “survived a lot of bumps in this long old road ... Cold hard reality is that we’re facing around £13,000 / month worth of additional costs for us to run exactly the same business, pound for pound.”
“We wanted to just present you the maths in the hope that we won’t get feedback like “‘£10.50 for a fackin sandwich!’”