Gail’s: ‘We’re at the point of growing up the business’

Gail’s managing director Nick Ayerst has revealed that the rapidly expanding bakery chain has ambitions to eventually grow to 300 sites.

Ayerst, who joined the group in March having previously served as CEO at Comptoir Group, set out the aim while speaking at MCA’s Innovation Conference last week.

“We’re at the point of growing up the business,” he said. “We’ve got ambitions to get to 300 bakeries from the 180-odd it is today.”

It comes after CEO Tom Molnar said back in January that Gail’s is targeting 30-40 new openings across the UK in 2025.

“We’re opening more bakeries; more people are buying from those bakeries; and more people are buying in our existing bakeries,” Ayerst added.

Disrupting the food system

As Gail’s continues to grow its footprint, Ayerst said the brand would look to put greater emphasis on its craft-style approach, which includes a mission to eliminate food waste and an emphasis on using natural and regenerative ingredients.

“It’s fundamental to the brand,” he explained. “Our purpose is to disrupt the food system.

“We work very closely with farmers in terms of what they grow and how they grow it, and innovative in how we take those products and incorporate them into our range. We’re probably not quite as good as we should be at telling people about that. 

“We’ve undoubtedly got people who come to us because we’re sourcing our coffee in a certain way and the work we do with the farming population, but there’s also a lot of people coming in just for the quality of product and experience and our next stage is an educational piece that talks more about what we do.

“If we’re serious about disrupting the food system by creating a market that’s big enough for more farmers to do more good with the land then we’ve got to grow and get more customers that buy into that.”

He added that part of this challenge involves a frank discussion about food costs.

“Making sourdough bread with no nasties in it is more expensive than making white sliced mass-produced bread. And so, there’s that education of people asking: ‘why would I want to spend that money’.

“Over the last 20 to 30 years, the amount that people spend on food as a percentage of income has dropped remarkably and there’s still a strong drive to buy everything at the cheaper price.”

BreadGPT

As part of its focus on innovation, Gail’s is also looking to better harness the opportunities available to it through AI.

The group already uses an AI algorithm for identifying ideal new site locations and is preparing to launch a new tool called BreadGPT to help with staff training.

“Part of growing the value of the business is to have some proprietary systems that are ours rather than always going external.

“BreadGPT will use agentic AI to scan our internal data, how to cards, training, the lot. It will be available on mobile and mean new staff can type in any question related to the business and get immediate answer without having to log on somewhere.”