In 2016 it joined the Cérélia group, a French-owned pastry and dough manufacturing company headquartered in France, before moving into a new factory in 2020.

Now its portfolio has expanded to consist of both sweet and savoury dough and pastry products, from filo pastry and pizza ready-rolls to cookie dough and pancakes, as well as brands such as OaYeah!, Abra-ca-Debora, PizzaExpress Dough and MyProtein protein pancakes.

Grocery Gazette sits down with BakeAway commercial director Doug Hall to find out about the rise of at-home baking and where the key opportunities lie in this category.

BakeAway has been growing since its inception really in the UK. So we’re very fortunate to be in a relatively new and fast-growing business. We come to the end of our fiscal year and we are experiencing very positive growth. Over the last year, our growth has accelerated slightly ahead of expectations, with double digit growth across brands.

That’s probably partly linked to the cost-of-living crisis, as the category we operate in is all about making food in your own kitchen and at home.

BakeAway has experienced strong growth in the pastry and dough category, this is now worth £112m a year, while the pancake category is worth 44M with a value growth of 5% year-on-year.

I think we’re seeing the benefits of fewer eating out occasions – due to the cost-of-living crisis and, more recently, in-home occasions – because we serve most of our products with grocery.

We’ve had to deal with inflation, as has every food supplier over the last two or three years, whether you’re a reseller, or a manufacturer or a consumer, given the cost-of-living crisis.

We’ve managed to do everything that we can to keep our pricing low and only pass on the cost when necessary through efficiencies, or group sourcing. Luckily, we’re part of a large European group so we can rely on them to help us source as competitively as we can.

But when it comes to retail pricing, much of what we do is retailer policy. We’re a co-manufacturer, so we manufacture for retailers under their private-label brands. We manufacture for Jus-Rol, but that’s again a brand that we don’t operate…however, we do have a couple of brands that we can play with.

We operate with our brand partners like Pizza Express, which plays right into the hands of families that can’t afford to eat out at restaurants, and so try to recreate a restaurant experience at home. Our products are a very cost-effective way of doing that.

We’ve also dialled up our marketing around those types of brands that help people recreate the restaurant experience at home.

Protein remains an area of interest for us. I think there could be further development around products in that category and we’ve now got a strong partner with MyProtein.

There’s a number of really interesting segments for me. Who doesn’t love a cookie or a brownie?

We offer those products into the market under private label, but it would be great to partner with a brand in that space. There are lots of things that I think we could do to probably drive the category further.

I’ve never really worked with businesses where there’s so many opportunities and headroom for growth. If you look at the underlying trends, there’s plenty of sub-sectors within pastry and dough that are exciting, and that do lend themselves to growth opportunities.”

A BakeAway brand partnership with MyProtein

Pizza dough has been our other growth engine over the last two or three years, and that excitement continues.

Yes, it is partly about creating the restaurant experience in-home and the Pizza Express brand lends itself really well to that.

But actually, I think the other trend here that is underlying is that many people are investing in pizza ovens over the last few years, almos replacing the barbecue to a certain extent.

This means there’s a requirement for an easy go-to solution for pizza dough which we offer in the supermarket. So we’re seeing real growth coming through from pizza dough and that is going to continue.

I think the other opportunity that’s really interesting is protein. It’s a mega trend and not something that’s coming and going too quickly if you look at the USA, which is always quite a good lead and lag indicator for trends.

We’ve worked with MyProtein to bring protein pancakes to the market very recently. Again, it’s a brand new partnership where we knew that we had a great product, and we knew that there was a consumer demand for it.

It is also HFSS compliant, so it’s healthier, and it obviously taps into a huge trend around protein growth within foods.

And it’s a great breakfast solution to serve up with a protein yoghurt. We launched that into Tesco and Morrisons over the last couple of months. It’s performing very well, and we’re looking to roll that across other retailers.

So, I think just really working with a partnership that we have now with MyProtein to bring further products into that space, is another really great growth opportunity for us.

That’s where product development comes in. There’s no brand of restaurant that would launch unless they were happy with the quality of the supermarket [product].

So you work through that with the right stakeholders. In that situation, you’ll probably be dealing with the same person that decides the food in the restaurant, and that’s a collaboration around making sure that product quality is there before you bring it to market.

So we would go through that process with any brand partners to make sure that everyone was satisfied with the quality before you got to market.

Yes, I think is the short answer – if the right partnership came along. Pastry and dough, as a category has probably around about 45% penetration. So there’s 55% of the population of shoppers that have never even come to your fixture within this window.

I think part of our job is to actually make it more accessible, more inspiring and more interesting and one of the ways of doing that is with bringing new brands, innovation into the category.

So do I see there being room for more innovation with more inspiring brands coming within that category? Absolutely.

Even on pancakes here, we’ve got our own brand in Abra-ca-Debora and it’s doing extremely well in pancakes. And that’s growing really well. And, you know, we’ve got a lot of affection for ‘Debora. She’s been with us for about 10 years now and is experiencing 40% growth.

And more and more retailers are listing Abra-ca-Debora pancakes so we think there’s something there with that. Abra Ca-Debora has grown by 20% value and 12% units YOY. Pizza Express dough +15% value and 9% units. We’ve got a great partnership with Pizza Express and I can see that only go from strength to strength, with future products being added.

Health-conscious consumers are becoming more concerned about HFSS products and ultra-processed foods – how does this impact BakeAway’s current and future portfolio?

We have reformulated our pastry products over the last 12 to 18 months to reduce fat, to reduce salt across the majority of our recipes and this is in collaboration with the retail partners that we work with.

We have made our existing pastry products healthier… but there’s only so far you can go with certain products like pastry because fats are necessary for rise of pastries.

We’ve tried to optimise our recipes and make them healthier at the same time. So we’ve reduced fat reduction at the majority of partnerships that we have.

The best examples of this is how we launched an oat milk pancake under a brand called OaYeah!, with Sainsbury’s just over a year ago. This was partly due to wanting to make healthier products and something that is HFSS compliant and able to launch where other pancakes wouldn’t be allowed to venture because of the HFSS regulations.

We did that to create some noise and impact around the launch, but we’ve also used oat milk specifically because it adds sweetness to the pancake. This means you need to use much less sugar because it’s naturally been sweetened, and this has also lowered the amount of saturated fat.

Alongside this, over the last year or two, we’ve removed all palm oil from our pancakes. We continue to do everything that we can to make sure that we’re suggesting the best and the most healthy recipes that also perform and don’t obviously compromise on quality for all of the partners that we work with.