In Whitehall, St Michael the surname Worrell is synonymous with baking.
Neville Worrell wanted to supplement the income he was earning at a well-known bakery and started his own on a much smaller scale. Salt bread was the product of choice.
Forty years later the patriarch has passed on but his legacy remains strong, with sons Mark and David determined to keep the business alive.
These days they are making a variety of bread, cakes and pastries and are preparing to expand product and plant.
Mark, who has been managing the business following his father’s death a year and a half ago, often has a 20-hour work “day”, sometimes sleeping on a mattress in his office to ensure customer orders are met.
His older sibling spent the last 20 years as a communications practitioner in the United States, but has given that life up and returned to Barbados to help ease his brother’s load while taking the business “to another level”, including the opening of another facility.
“Daddy started the bakery and he didn’t want anything too big, he just wanted to make a little bit of money and take care of the family and it grew from where he was using five pounds of flour to when I left Barbados 30 years ago and he was probably using about 1 000 pounds of flour a day,” David told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY.
“For me it’s very important. When I left here 30 years ago I didn’t think that I would be coming back to flour. My career has taken me into communications and I have been doing that for the last 20 years, but we have got to build a foundation so that our young ones can come and take it on and keep the product alive.”
This is a view Mark shares. From school days he was intent on pursuing a career in baking, although admittedly his mother’s wish was for him was certification and public sector employment.
“From my perspective what I have tried to do is ensure that regardless of what the children get into that they learn to bake. From my youngest at 11 can come and make something, she has a recipe in her head even if it is just muffins. At age 16 I said ‘[mum] here are your certificates, daddy where is my apron?’ because I saw the benefit in learning to bake,” he recalled.
“It wasn’t a question of whether I was going to be a baker, economically it made sense, and I intend for my kids to learn the same thing in the event that there is another recession 30 to 40 years from now, they should be able to jump in and say ‘here I am’.”
With Worrell’s Bakery having establisheditself as a household name in and out of Whitehall, David and Mark are focused on expanding the company and generally improving its operations. This included baking all the bread at theexisting location and making the pastries and cakes at the new facility, something that will “free up a lot of space”.
The company employs eight people and Mark said even though the current times were “really challenging”, including the substantial increase in production costs in the past five years, Worrell’s Bakery was undaunted.
“You have to keep on top of everything, you can’t slip for a minute because you can make a profit this week and lose it all next week. So what we try to do is make sure we limit spoilage and make use of every piece of material that we produce. We don’t bake and try to sell it, basically we sell it and then make it,” he said.
