The popular artisan bakery is celebrating its first decade by opening a seventh shop and cafe, this time in Woodbridge...and they haven't stopped yet
Ten years ago Rebecca Bishop fell in love with the baking world and opened the first Two Magpies artisan bakery in Southwold. Rebecca and then-husband Jim Bishop had searched the country for a suitable location - an upmarket town where there was a high-quality butcher and greengrocer but, crucially, no bakery.
They had little experience of the Suffolk coast, apart from a visit Rebecca had made to Southwold many years before, so they decided to take a look. They liked what they saw and Two Magpies quickly became part of the town. Rebecca named the shop after her love of collecting things. “It was this idea of taking a little bit of this and that from around us, and bringing it all together. So many recipe writers come with heritage that is their calling card. I’m just a very ordinary person who's grown up around the world, and that has informed my food.
"What I wanted was to sell great products and to have a great customer experience. We’re now giving that experience, doing what I wanted to do, but in a lot more locations.” Indeed, Two Magpies has flourished. In 2018, they opened a second site in Aldeburgh, followed by another in Darsham, where Rebecca realised her dream of a bake school.
Four years later, Rebecca, co-owner Steve Magnall, and new managing director Carl Stock, have opened Two Magpies branches in Southwold, Holt, Norwich and Blakeney, and have just launched their seventh in Woodbridge. The business now employs 150 people, has been feted by the food press, and has won numerous World Bread Awards. It's quite an achievement, especially as Rebecca claims she was once renowned for her rubbish birthday cakes.
Now Rebecca and Steve are on the hunt for new sites - Rebecca says Steve's ambition is 20 sites - seeking “substantial investment” to help that growth. “Bury St Edmunds is somewhere we’d really like to be,” she says. “We’re looking at nice, regional town centre locations.” She cites Sudbury, possibly Hadleigh, maybe Dedham as possible new spots for the expanding chain.
They've just taken on the 11,000sq ft former Marybelle Dairy site in Walpole which will become their main production site. "We thought Darsham would be big enough, but we outgrew that over a year ago. Then we took on a production site in Halesworth six months ago and it still wasn’t enough space.”
Two Magpies satisfies a growing appetite for 'real' food with provenance and traceability, which Rebecca says is key to everything she and her team do, baking from scratch and working with small, local suppliers who share their ethos - the likes of Hodmedods, Fen Farm Dairy, Clarkes of Bramfield and Nurtured in Norfolk.
“I think people appreciate, especially since Covid, the pleasure of little treats in life. Rather than going out on Saturday, hitting the shops and spending loads of money, more people want an experience, and I like to think we’re part of that. They come to us for a lovely lunch and go home, maybe, with a bag of pastries. We’re not the cheapest, but I do think people are prepared to pay for quality.”
As with all food businesses, Covid proved a difficult time. At the Darsham site, employees worked on a furlough rotation, with six key staff kept on to manage the task of keeping the brand alive. It was, says Rebecca, a huge learning curve, rebuilding the website, changing it from a marketing to a sales tool, and working out how to become a click and collect outlet. Everyone chipped in, including Rebecca. Today she’s less hands-on, her role focused on testing, trying and signing-off recipes, teaching in the bake school, and, excitingly, writing her first book, due to be finished by the end of March.
"It’s going to be a Two Magpies love story. How we started and how it’s developed, how my own confidence has grown, with recipes interspersed.” Rebecca's writing it for fellow cookery book lovers - she spends a lot of her spare time devouring food books, although she wasn't always a foodie. She comes from an Army family and moved around a lot, so didn’t spend a great deal of time in a kitchen learning from older relatives. Most of her childhood memories of food involve domestic science classes at boarding school.
“I really started to think more about food when I was in Hong Kong. I lived there from when I was 13 to 21. Everyone ate out all the time. The culture there turned me on to really good food - that you could eat out cheaply and well.” Unsure what to do after school, she went to university in Staffordshire to do a degree in sport and recreation management. “I lived in a house with two other girls, both vegetarian. I’d not made vegetarian food before, and we did a lot of fun cooking."
She married and brought up three children, a period in her life when she says she did a lot of ‘mum cooking’. “My children will tell you I was rubbish at birthday cakes. They were always bad. They’d hold up the cake and a picture of it in the book to compare." Later on, after gaining an art degree, and going on to teach, Rebecca found herself spending more and more time in the kitchen.
“I bought a Jane Grigson book and have this fond memory of falling in love with her Tunisian orange cake with semolina. I just started to get more and more into cooking, especially after my first marriage broke up." She took a School of Artisan Food three-day course where she learnt to make sourdough bread, then a food smoking course, learning how to smoke cheese. As her curiosity and passion for cooking and baking grew, she found herself peeking into the engine room of cake shops and bakeries, longing to be there, caught up in the action of a professional kitchen.
She's especially proud of the bake school at Darsham where she’s taken on chef Emma Crowhurst to teach more of the pastry and cake courses, while Rebecca will focus on classes showing people how to make bread, particularly sourdough. “So many people come on the course who’ve had a go and can’t do it. They find their bread is inconsistent. That’s so relatable to me because I still remember myself in that situation." They key, she says, is the temperature of the water and the dough. “Our bakers take the temperature of everything they’re working with and treat the dough as a living thing. There’s no one magic formula in a book.”
Two Magpies has two starter yeasts, or ‘mothers’, for its sourdough loaves, one rye and one wheat. The latter, named RB, was given to Rebecca by a friend of a friend who had a bakery. It’s 100 years old and still going strong. Inside the bakery Rebecca has a lot of favourites to choose from. She adores the signature Magpie Sourdough, a blend of grains, and rye, wholewheat and white flour, and enjoys it either buttered, or topped with avocado, poached egg and a peanut and chilli hot sauce she was given as a gift.
Then there are the bakery’s cheese straws, speckled with caraway seeds, and the Marmite and Cheddar swirls, which she says, are "too good”. She's also fond of Two Magpies' Amaretti biscuits. "When we were really trying to hit the vegan market I spent a long time experimenting with those. They’re made with aquafaba (chickpea liquid) but have that fantastic chewiness and real almond taste – you'd never know they were vegan.”
Nearly all Two Magpies Bakery locations have a café, serving breakfast through to lunch, as well as pizza at Holt, Darsham and Southwold. Rebecca pays homage to the employees who work hard to make all facets of the company a success. “I’ve been so lucky to have people come into this business, bringing their skills and passion – like our Italian baker who shared his brilliant way to make pizzas. I’m forever grateful for what he brought to Southwold and how that idea has progressed.
“At Darsham we have some amazing pastry chefs who work on our wedding cakes and retail offering. Our celebration cakes are a big part of what we do. And on the retail side we’re now making all our own jams. That’s been amazing to have and I can’t take the credit for any of that. It’s people coming in and really wanting to bring what they know and love to our business, and make it special.
“I never could have dreamed Two Magpies would be where it is today. There’s so much opportunity to develop and push further. It’s amazing.”
