Nothing is guaranteed in business but generally, truly good food made from high-quality ingredients is a sure-fire way to keep the customers coming back. At least, this is what Alex Alewood and Jamie Goodin have found since opening their first solo venture, Goodwood Bakeshop, at the end of September, 2021.

If you clocked the delightful mashup of Jamie and Alex’s surnames in the business name, let it be known that the husband and wife and business partners are equally as delightful to speak with, which may contribute to the way their customers gravitate back to the little Marrickville bakery day-after-day—along with what’s coming out of the oven.

A lot of first-time business owners find themselves surprised, and often not pleasantly, by the process of opening, but Alex says that with their combined backgrounds working in other high-profile bakeries, she and Jamie had seen it all done before, knew what they were in for in terms of hours of work, and anticipated potential issues before they arose.

However, she says they were taken by surprise by the outpouring of support from locals, which started from day one. The enthusiasm may be partly owed to the fact they cut the metaphorical ribbon to open Goodwood around two weeks before the end of Sydney’s four-month Delta wave COVID-19 lockdown, giving locals something new and exciting to look forward to when they were finally free.

“It was a very pleasant surprise. We knew Marrickville was a very community-minded area, which is why we wanted to be a part of it,” Alex says.

“The community support, honestly, it has blown us away—we were just floored.

“We had one beautiful customer [who] came in every single day we were open for, I think, the first month. We have regulars and people we know by name [now] but we were saying, ‘thank you for coming’, and they were saying, ‘thank you for opening’!”

Every superhero has an origin story worthy of a movie, and this baking super-duo has one of their own. Although Alex can’t remember on the spot whether they got married three or four years ago, that’s a minor detail for the couple who met working at Sydney’s famous Bourke Street Bakery in 2010.

Jamie was a baker, and Alex, then in her early 30s, had decided to ditch the corporate life and become a baker, doing some training with Le Cordon Bleu and the San Francisco Baking Institute before Bourke Street Bakery “very kindly” gave her a shot.

“We met on my first day of work, quickly became fast friends and fell in love over a shared love of all things baked. And then it just kind of went from there,” she explains.

The 12-or-so years between their early days at Bourke Street and then opening Goodwood Bakeshop were spent gathering even more experience from some of the biggest names in the industry. Between them, Jamie and Alex have worked—both together and separately—at the likes of Brickfield’s, Black Star Pastry, Staple Bread & Necessities and The Bread & Butter Project. The 20-years of combined experience they accumulated served as a solid foundation for turning their dream of owning their own bakery into the reality that is Goodwood Bakehouse.

“We’ve just kind of been furiously baking up a storm for the last 10-12 years, then it got to a point where we were just like, ‘right, it’s time!’,” Alex says.

The pair married, and dove straight into the search for the perfect spot soon after returning from their honeymoon. However, it didn’t happen right away.

“I want to say it took much longer than we expected [to find a place], but having worked at so many fantastic bakeries and having so many great bosses and seeing businesses set up, we had this kind of massive checklist of what we wanted from a place,” Alex explains.

“We knew we were never going to find everything, but we were going for as close as we could. We saw a lot of spots and got close with a couple of them, but we did something completely different in the end, [buying] an existing business and basically revamping it.

Conveniently, the shop they nabbed on Marrickville Road was already an Italian bakery, so the “bones” were already there to build upon.

Both were sweet on the Marrickville area, with Alex having grown up in the inner-west of Sydney and Kiwi-expat Jamie living there for some time. In fact, Alex made a bold offer to the original shop’s owner early in their search.

“When we first started looking, I did come into the bakery. I walked in off the street and said, ‘Hey, can I buy your business?’ and they said, ‘No’ and I walked off,” Alex laughs.

But six months later, things lined up, and with a bit of persistence, the Goodwood duo took over the space and started making it theirs. It already had the required three-phase power and a huge four-deck Polin oven in the front, but there was no refrigeration and no cool room.

“it was set up to be sort of a quick time bakery, not really a sourdough bakery,” Alex says.

“Actually, a huge chunk of the space they weren’t actually using. It needed a lot of revamping and took us about two-and-a-half months to get it to where we wanted it to be, but now it is! There are a few tweaks still happening along the way.”

Alex and Jamie have big personalities, but we can’t ignore the star of the show: the food they’re making each day which results in hastily scribbled, ‘sorry, we’ve sold out’ signs in the window. Although customers want more, Alex says at this stage increasing production just isn’t possible.

“We’re pretty much making as much as we can possibly do at the moment. We’re open four days a week, but that doesn’t mean we’re here four days a week—even with that, we’re still here six! It’s tricky at the moment, but we’re making it work the best we can and we’re lucky we’ve got such lovely and understanding customers,” Alex says.

And for the small team of Jamie, Alex, two part-timers and then the front of house staff, they manage to pump out a decent amount—100kg-200kg of sourdough on Thursdays and Fridays and up to 170kg on weekends are the main show, but there are also croissants including pain au chocolat and ham and Gruyere, and a few specials like scones and cookies.

“In the future, we’d love to be able to do sandwiches, but that’s a staff thing—you need to be able to put some time and dedication and thought behind it. We don’t want to just do things thinking we can do them and people will buy them; we really want to make sure the things we are producing is stuff we want to eat as well,” Alex says.

Part of that philosophy is using the best possible ingredients, sourced locally where possible. Suppliers include the larger All Grain Milling for flour, as well as a smaller husband-and-wife mill, Whispering Pines.

“That allows us to us something that comes from a bigger mill and a bit more readily available, and then we use a smaller one so we can support some of the little guys as well,” Alex explains.

“Marrickville is also full of really fantastic breweries, so we get our malted barley from a brewery here and we bring it in and mill it ourselves.”

The beer malt adds flavour and colour to the doughs as well as giving it “a bit of an extra perk without using anything synthetic like improvers.”

Jamie makes a vanilla slice now too, or “the famous snot block” as Alex calls it.

“When he first started at a bakery over in New Zealand, they used to make huge amounts of it so he sort of picked it up there and over the years he’s refined it a little bit. The puff pastry we use has a little bit of triticale grain in it which gives it a really nice flavour, and it’s a wholegrain milled flour as well—we don’t just use white, refined flour to make our puff—so that makes it look really beautiful and dark and gives it an unusual colour,” she explains.

“He also went a little bit ‘out there’ in sourcing the vanilla that he really, really likes. We get these really juicy, fat vanilla beans from a company called the Slow Food Co? and they’re really nice and flavourful. We make a custard out of those that’s quite rich and creamy with the eggs, which we also get from a lady who operates out of Port Stephens called Egg Lady Deliveries. What can be classed as ‘free-rage’ can be actually up to a really large amount of chickens, but she has a really low chicken-per-hectare count.

“We actually retail some of her eggs as well because they’re so nice, and there are so many people that are becoming so much more aware of this stuff. So, we thought we’d give it a shot and put some in the shop, and sure enough we’ve got people coming back going, ‘I’ve never had an egg this good before’.

“We try to keep our prices as low as possible because we want our stuff to be accessible to as many people as we can, but we don’t want to use cage eggs or just any old flour where we don’t know where it came from. That sort of thing is important to us.”

Like many small business owners, Alex and Jamie are feeling the pinch of the price of fuel etc. trickling down, whether through companies no longer offering free delivery where they did before, or requiring order quotas.

Of course, we chat about plans for the future, but if you’re hoping to see a Goodwood Bakeshop outpost pop up elsewhere, you’re going to be disappointed.

“Future plans will only ever involve this place,” Alex insists.

“It’s a combination of just wanting to do something in a small community, and also just keeping it sustainable for us and have a connection with our customers and our staff, because we don’t work on the business, we work in the business. We’re here every day, in the trenches, so I don’t want to get to that point of stepping away and not being hands on.

“Not only are we running a bakery, but we’re learning to run a business, so there’s more than enough challenges to keep us interested busy.”