STORY: Birds’ centenary celebrations continue with bestsellers

To mark 100 years in the business, Birds Bakery is bringing back around 20 discontinued favourites.

As announced back in January, the well-known Derby bakery will sell the items for one month at a time throughout 2019. It’s all part of the company's 100-year celebrations and follows from a poll it ran over Christmas. Birds asked its customers which favourites from the past they would like to see back on the shelves.

One of the latest products from yester-year to make an appearance was a Walnut Cream, made using California walnuts, as part of a Birds recipe from 1910.

The California Walnut Commission (CWC) was delighted to be involved in the project, as it is on a mission to position the California walnut as the nut of choice for bakers in the UK. It says more than 99% of walnuts in the US are grown in California, as the soil types are so favourable for them in the area. California walnuts currently supply two thirds of the world’s walnut trade.

Mike Holling, head of new business development at Birds, says he’s enjoying the process or bringing back the old favourites, but some of them aren’t very practical: “A lot of these items would take three or four days to make – in the modern day people are very time poor.”

He added that it was a challenge to find all the old recipes: “Unfortunately bakers kept it all in their heads. No-one wanted to write their recipes down. So we’ve had to go back to some of the bakers themselves.

“For example, our night bakery manager’s father was the night bakery manager before him, and his father was the manager before him. Luckily we have quite a few families within Birds."