The secret sauce behind Gail’s Bakery

It’s been a mixed journey for Tom Molnar, the chief executive of Gail’s Bakery. Brought up in Florida, he studied aquatic ecology at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, before spending almost a decade energy trading for the food giant Cargill. He left in 1998 to take an MBA at the French business school, INSEAD, and joined management consultancy McKinsey.

In 2005, Molnar and colleague Ran Avidan decided to start a bakery. They joined forces with Gail Mejia at the Bread Factory, which supplied top chefs, to open the first Gail’s Artisan Bakery on Hampstead High Street, northwest London in 2006. Today the chain has more than 100 outlets and turns over £135m a year, according to its most recent accounts.

What’s your secret sauce?

Every business has something it leans on. That’s what I think of as a secret sauce. Nothing’s really secret, you can see us trying to do it every day. We’re a craft bakery and the fundamental thing about this is that people care a lot about what they’re doing. When I first met Gail and started getting involved in the bakery, that’s what I fell in love with – the focus on just caring about what came in, what you do every day and what the output is. And every day you have to do it again.

How do you keep that going?

We’re makers more than sellers. That means we focus on caring, improving, and embracing complexity. You accept that to do something well is complex, from figuring out the best tomato, the best flour to use, or the right fermentation time. You have to accept that those are complicated choices if you’re going to get something that’s out of the ordinary.

How much do people matter?

One of the most difficult things we’ve found in growing is making sure we’re teaching people along the way. The selection process is rigorous, but we give a lot of room for people to make mistakes, and to make changes and make things better. I don’t believe in rule books.

Instead, I believe in a culture that says: ‘You’re a human being, you care, you have an education, you have a breadth of experiences, apply them to your every day to what you do every day’.

How do you connect with the community around your outlets?

We’re a bakery that is very ‘neighbour-hoody’; you don’t send a loaf of bread around the world. You have to care about the community. We bake fresh every day and if we have products left over, we have a partner that we donate that food to, so it goes to people who are having a tough time. There’s no reason to have good, healthy food go to waste. Everybody’s had a hard time in their past, so we should be there to help people going through that. It’s really fundamental.