Background
Owned by mother and son team, Joe and Maria Granville, Rogue Welsh Cakes produces handmade Welsh cakes with a twist in flavours like chocolate and salted caramel and sundried tomato and feta.
Established in 2020, Rogue Welsh Cakes sells its products at their recently opened stall at Newport Market as well as farmers markets across south Wales. Joe can regularly be seen wearing traditional Welsh costume whilst running the stall.
A former healthcare support worker, Joe is a passionate foodie and had always wanted to set up his own food business. During lockdown in 2020 he teamed up with his mum Maria, a mental health nurse who’s also a keen baker, and Rogue Welsh Cakes was born.
Rogue Welsh Cakes contacted ZERO2FIVE In August 2021 when they were looking for help with reviewing their current manufacturing practices to make them more efficient, improve product quality and make it easier to upscale production volumes.
Support from ZERO2FIVE
Rogue Welsh Cakes spent a day with ZERO2FIVE’s bakery experts at their state-of-the-art pilot factory. Together, they reviewed the company’s existing recipe and looked at alternative ingredients which would deliver an improvement in product quality.
Mentoring was also provided to review Rogue’s production processes and look at pieces of equipment which could be introduced to make it more efficient.
Joe Granville, owner of Rogue Welsh Cakes, said: “ZERO2FIVE provided us with an amazing opportunity to try all the best equipment a baker could ever need. We also played around with the recipe to find out what levels of ingredients made the best texture Welsh cakes.”
Benefits of the support
With an improved recipe agreed upon, production trials were carried out in ZERO2FIVE’s bakery using a larger mixer. As a result, Rogue Welsh Cakes implemented the changes to their recipe and purchased new mixing equipment which resulted in significant time and cost savings.
Joe said: “We found that using a large mixer made brilliant Welsh cake dough, and in a much, much quicker time. This has saved us hundreds of hours of hand mixing, in turn saving us a lot of money, and helping keep the quality of our product at its high standard.
“We would recommend any business to just get in contact with ZERO2FIVE; you never know where they could help you. It can be quite a lonely place when running your own food business, but ZERO2FIVE was super friendly and amazingly helpful. We will certainly be back in touch whenever we feel stuck and could do with a helping hand.”
