The hotly anticipated The Bread Social Bakery and Cafe at Currumbin Waters, on Queensland’s Gold Coast, has officially opened its doors.

The 25200sqm site with a 1200sq m building is a bakery built for bakers by bakers according to co-founder Sam Saulwick.

“It’s sort of been three or fours years from the time we came across the idea,” Sam said.

“The main space is the production facility. There’s an internal flour silo that helps us move flour through the bakery in a much more efficient and ergonomic manner. There’s no more picking up 20kg flour bags. We partnered really closely with Bakery Combinations to get together what we think is a really innovative and exciting site.”

Sam said care was also taken to remove the pinch points from a bakery that can make it a bit tiresome and uncomfortable.
close attention was also paid to maintaining The Bread Social’s commitment to organic Australian and local produce.

Sam said they really wanted to showcase that and keep it quite open. As a result floor to ceiling glass was put in place that allows consumers to watch the bakers at work, while also opening up the production space.

“That offers a really beautiful viewing window into the inner workings of what essentially is a wholesale bakery,” he said.

“The cafe itself seats around 60 people, while still focusing on all the stuff The Bread Social’s been known for on the Gold Coast – rustic pastries and pies, sausage rolls, and always the number one focus is on sourdough,” he said.

“Bakeries are so sensory. People turn up and they want to smell the bread being baked and watch cakes being finished.

he building, which Sam describes as initially being a shell, required a substantial fit-out with the team building all of the separate rooms, temperature controlled pastry room and mixing room, as well as the freezers.

“It was pretty large scale. But again, being bakers that have worked in those kinds of spaces for so long – they can become very soulless,” Sam said.

“We didn’t want to create that. To open the space up we needed to keep the high roof as much as we could. We worked really close with the Gold Coast City Council to make sure we were adhering to any kind of health and safety legislation.

“If you’re mixing and baking in the mixing room at 2am, you can still feel like there’s a viewing to the outside world and natural light coming in. You’re not just stuck in fluoro lighting.”

The bakery and cafe will also serve as The Bread Social’s new headquarters, with an eye to springboarding into the wholesale market in Brisbane, although Sam said that didn’t mean saturation.

“We’re tied to the Byron Shire. That’s where we’re home-grown from and we’ll always have our roots down there,” he said.