Would you pay £10 for a bacon sandwich?
Are visitors to Frome’s Rye Bakery getting fleeced, or is this the true cost of a good, responsibly-made sarnie?
When I first came across it, I wondered if Rye Bakery’s £10 bacon sandwich was intended almost as a statement – a performative act, if you will, designed to ironically or un-ironically call public attention to the true cost of food.
But then I noticed people eating it. Looking online (by which I mostly mean Tripadvisor, for which one should always have ready a pinch of salt), customers describe the sarnie as anything from “nothing special” to “the best bacon sandwich I’ve ever had.”
The common criticism though is that this bacon sandwich is expensive. Whenever someone makes such a claim, I wonder what they mean – that they perceive the food is fairly priced, but they can’t afford it? Or that they think the producer of the item in question is knowingly overcharging? Even as someone sympathetic towards food producers and independent hospitality businesses, a part of me, in this case, begins to wonder if there’s a chance the latter could be true.
“In a way,” Rye Bakery co-founder Owen Postgate tells the WFJ, “we started as a bit of an experiment – how could we run a food business that allows us to work for ourselves as parents, and pays the real cost of food to producers in a way that could also be economically viable? What started as a way to take back control and build a local food system in a way that we thought might work, turned out to be a stark reminder of the disparity between the conglomerates that hold control of the mass markets and the small, human-scale producers that feed communities nutritious food.”
In other words, making good food (which from this author’s perspective is generally what Rye Bakery does) that exists outside the usual extractive model costs money, which cheap food serves to highlight. As is becoming clear, nothing from Rye’s daily menu reflects this imbalance more than the bacon sandwich. Probably because it contains just the four components of bread, bacon, butter, and brown sauce, and probably because we can all make a bacon sandwich at home and have at least a rough idea of how much it’d cost us to do so (in case you’re interested, a ballpoint-and-napkin calculation suggests it’d cost around £4 to source the same ingredients – i.e. not at wholesale price – as are found in a Rye bacon sarnie). In comparison, most of Rye’s other dishes, such as pizza, starting from £12, and stews and pie and mash in a similar range, seem much better value, even if the profit margin on those items is within the same ballpark.
In reality, for something so simple, there are fewer places for mistakes or shortcomings to hide. As for the bread, that’s made with flour milled on site at the bakery; the grain from a network of local organic suppliers, including Gothelney Farm near Bridgwater, and outside of the usual high-yield destructive and extractive commodity markets. “Flour milling costs us more than twice what it does to buy commodity flour,” says Owen.
The bacon, meanwhile, also comes from Gothelney Farm (pigs, as natural excavators, are pretty handy at ploughing up arable land) and is, by quite a long shot in my experience, the best you can get your hands on in Somerset. In contrast to their commercial counterparts reared indoors and fed on chemically treated and genetically modified soya, Gothelney’s pigs spend almost their entire lives outdoors, either foraging the farm or fed on a mix of oats, barley, and peas. “Our pigs are slow grown and are around ten months old when they are killed,” says Dan Foy, Gothelney’s butcher, “compared to commercial systems where they want them at [the desired] weight ASAP and kill them young [editor’s note: usually four to seven months old].” When asked what makes the biggest difference between good pork and bad pork, “I suspect it is a case of welfare, time, and diet all combined,” Dan says. Although, Gothelney’s dry cure method for their bacon – compared to the much more common wet cure process that tends to dilute rather than concentrate flavour – probably has a lot to do with it too.
Round off the bread and bacon with a dose of local butter – often from somewhere like Ivy House dairy – and brown sauce made on site, and there’s your bacon sandwich. All of which, Owen says, costs Rye roughly £2 for each portion. About another £5 accounts for staff, overheads, and other fixed costs, while the tax man takes £2. After wastage, there’s a grand total of 82 pence – or 8% – in profit.
Whether or not you think £10 culminates in decent value (restaurants and cafes generally operate on a margin of 5-15%), it is at least accounting for new costs in the near future. When the new financial year comes round in April, hospitality businesses will be presented with an increased bill for National Insurance contributions and business rates, leaving a lot of them quite rightly fretting over their long term existence, and with no choice but to ask their customers for more, or give them less. “It’s an already impossibly not profitable scenario,” says Owen.
If Rye make such little takings on their £10 bacon sandwich, then I suppose the situation is what you make of it: Is it that nutritious, well made food relying on local networks and nature-friendly farmers is laying bare the various costs (to health, communities, the environment, and so on) of cheap food? Or is cheap food exposing just how financially imposing good food can be on the end consumer?
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What a bargain. If only we lived closer.