The pie recipes are still the same and so are the bakers who now own the keys to the Wakey Bakey.
This week was the official handover of the Wakefield Bakery from Trish Sullivan who has owned it for 15 years to the ‘baker bros’, who have been making the bakery’s famous pies for the past few years.
Head baker Isuru worked as a pastry chef in Dubai before making the monumental shift to the village six years ago to make the famous pies. Jesse joined him in the bakery among the pastry and ovens four years ago, and when Trish decided to sell the business the two friends, who are known at the gym as the Baker Bros, decided to step up and buy it.
Jesse says they decided they didn’t want to work for anyone else and fortunately, they both like pies, especially steak and cheese as well as the butter chicken. He confesses he is also partial to a date scone. As the new owners of the popular bakery, Isuru says it will be business as usual, from the recipes to the staff and getting up at 3am to crank up the ovens and get pies cooking for the first customers through the door at 5am.
“The community doesn’t want to change it; they want the same traditional products we have here,” he says. “It’s all homemade – nothing frozen and everything is fresh every day. We almost always run out of products!”
Trish says selling the bakery to her two bakers is the best outcome for the business. She always said she was selling more than a bakery - she was selling a team with a “massive reputation”. She didn’t want to see it become a franchise, part of a business portfolio or tied up with a supermarket. She wanted it to stay local and she got her wish.
“This is Wakefield and the local people are incredibly proud of it.”
She intends to stay around as long as she is needed because it is the pair’s first business and a huge undertaking to a busy bakery that often has a line of people queuing out the door. But she reckons they have it under control.
“They’ve been, for all intents and purposes, running it for the last year and they have a decade of experience between them in the bakery.”
She joined the bakery 15 years ago for a four-month stint but ended up taking over the business. Since then it has grown in size to 25 fulltime employees that operate a 24/7 business affectionately known by locals as the Wakey Bakey.
