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The Healthy Loaf 100% Gluten Free’s, Master Artisan Baker, Graham Gardner grew up in a large family where everyone pitched in to help keep the family, the household and their business running. As a teenager Graham began his apprenticeship at 14.5yrs, in 1976 with his father. After 6 years learning the craft of Baking in the family bakery, Graham began relief baking in 1982 and worked throughout Victoria, from Alexandria to Rye, from Melbourne to Apollo Bay and just about everywhere in between. Graham and his wife Deirdre opened their first successful business in South Melbourne in 1988. As a young family they were overwhelmed by the success and busyness of the business and after two years they sold it to focus on raising their family. Graham and Deirdre moved with their three children to Colac, in western Victoria. In 1992 Graham and Deirdre opened the Winchelsea bakery after the community had been without a local bread shop for twelve years and were welcomed by the township with open arms.

Deirdre and graham raised their family juggling business commitments and building their skills and expertise as small business owners and developing professionals. In his early forty’s, Graham took the opportunity to formalise his experience and studied Business Sales and Marketing. Whilst Deirdre had trained as a Remedial Massage Therapist in the late 1990’s and enjoyed exploring a lifelong dream of working in the health field. Nevertheless, as their circumstances changed and their children grew older and left the nest they found themselves settled in Geelong, where Deirdre had spent much of her childhood, and they saw an opportunity for an exciting new type of bakery, one that helped people improve their health, by selling them an excellent product they could not get anywhere else in the area, in 2012 the Health Loaf 100% Gluten Free, was born.

In 1945, at age 14.5 years Robert ‘Bob’ Gardner started working in the local bakery in Warragul, VIC when the owner needed help because all the bakers had gone off to fight in WWII. In that late 1940’s to the early 1950’s Bob travelled, via pushbike and train, working as a relief baker around south Australia, New South Whales and Victoria to build his experience as a craftsman.

In 1952 he started his first bakery in Cockatoo in the Dandenong Ranges. It was a small bakery, he started on his own from scratch, retailing to the township and wholesaling into Gembrook, Emerald and surrounding towns. Over the next 25 years Bob built his experience, ran several successful small businesses in regional Victoria and eventually settled in Dandenong. This is where he started the local bakery in Doveton which has been running continuously since 1976 (though the family sold the business in 1988). This was the business where The Healthy Loaf 100% Gluten Free’s, Master Artisan Baker, Graham Gardner, began his official apprenticeship to become a Baker back in 1976.

Graham remembers his Dad being passionate about quality, a trait they share Graham says that “bringing out an excellent product depends on how much you care about getting your processes right” and they both knew that when it comes to excellent bread, near enough is never good enough. Having said this, he hilariously recalls his Dad’s lack of customer service but thankfully his Mum ran the shop and built fond relationships with their regular customers, just as you would imagine a small-town business owner would do.

Trail blazing and innovation within not only their baking but the industry at the time was a corner stone of their multigenerational success. Just a few examples of this include:

• Taking animal fats out of their breads in the later 1970’s and replaced them in vegetable oils. The logic of using an oil, which wouldn’t set, meant they could keep the bread fresher for longer—thanks to the Gardner’s, this is the norm in modern bread making today.
• Even in those early days Graham just wanted to make bread healthier, so they adapted their recipes to remove sugar, reduce salt and created a ‘softie loaf’ which used more soya flour, to create a really soft loaf but avoided adding any chemical mould inhibitors—which is what the ‘big fellas’ used from the 1960’s—to achieve the same result (that stuff is nasty!).
• They also made creative changes to their baking techniques, including a new step they coined as ‘Cross graining’, which reduced holes in the final product, made the bread easier to slice and kept it fresher for longer.

The Healthy Loaf 100% Gluten Free is proud to have a connection to baking in Victoria that goes back more than sixty-five years. Graham’s own forty years of experience mean he has very conservatively spent around 165,600 hours learning the idiosyncrasies of flours, doughs, baking and business.