Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

bread flour raw ship UK
Distance and price
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The further food travels, the more it should cost. Logically, yes, but the full story may not be quite so simple. With ingredients travelling literally half way round the world, it is no simple matter to differentiate one proposition from another. Take the example of 1925 loaf of bread, in the  previous post. The starting point is 20-stone sack of flour that anyone could visualise for themselves, suppposedly costing 42 shillings and a halfpenny. There was, in those days, total silence from the millers concerning where their wheat came from, let alone what it might have cost. Since millers earn a living from making flour,  their reticence is understandable.

By creating a synthetic starting point for the journey that would put a loaf of bread on the table, millers were able to influence the British public’s notion of what bread ought to cost. The 42 shilling sack was not a hard sell, it was a working  price point for those years. However, the Linlithgow committee, to a man, refused to make any comment on the prices of wheat, wherever it might have come from. In one sense, wheat and bread pass through very different markets, yet the two are joined at the hip for some purposes, notably if supplies fail: no wheat, no flour, no bread. It is that simple,

All through the latter years of the nineteenth century. British ports were unloading grain from every corner of the known world. For most people, grain imports were a permanent fixture and this would somehow continue. The U-boat attacks, which started in 1916, jolted Britain into protecting inbound shipments of any description. While not entirely successful, British corvettes scored a number of successful actions.

bread flour
Four frameworks
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The Linlithgow committee provided four business snapshots based on live data (1923 figures..) to illustrate how the sector operated. There may have been more evidence initially, there is no way of telling, but the ones they published cast some light on the baking sector. Only theWar Office refused to share any data.  The most detailed is based on figures from the National Association of Master Bakers’ and a number of local associations. The Industrial Co-operative group gave a terse rendering of the Co-op’s pricing structure, which differs in small but significant ways from retail rivals. Third is a glimpse of the War Office bakery, in Aldershot. It went to extraordinary lengths to say nothing.  For the time being, I cannot locate where Butler Brothers traded, but the firm operated a number of branches from a central bakery.

Get ready to work in farthings for a while, since this small, fiddly coin was the lowest common denominator of the day.

The Master Bakers give a fairly thorough view of the additional inputs needed to make a batch of bread from a sack of flour, bearing in mind that it consolidates data supplied by 26 local firms and 63 local associations.

National Association of Master Bakers

All the figures that follow are the additional costs for a batch of bread.. The dry ingredients added to the 20 stone sack of flour were valued at 161 farthings or 3s/4d and a farthing. Upstream expenses for converting the flour totalled 112d, that is 9s/4d, ignoring a stray halfpenny. Downstream expenses including distribution for the resultant bread was 11 shillings. Total cost to convert a sack of flour left change out of £2/4 shillings. Stables accounted for just over three shillings to the costs  of each batch, while depreciation on the capital for automotive vehicles was just a third of that.

Butler Bros.

bread City life crunchy numbers flour food production UK economy weights and measures
The pricing of daily bread
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https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Industry_during_the_First_World_War-_Flour_Mill_Q28276.jpg

This female factory hand was photographed at work in Birkenhead during September 1918. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Logistics contractors refer to it as the final mile, but many of us would settle for “delivering the goods.” It is potentially a complex stage in a product’s journey to meet the end user.

In December 1924, the LinLithgow Committee supplied the Royal Commission with four sets of operational models and an outwardly robust methodology to analyse the cost of bread.  It was based on the bakers’ key ingredient, the 20-stone (127 kg) sack of flour at the heart of every batch of bread baked across the land in those days. In its day, this was a Known Value Item, to borrow a modern term. It traded at forty two shillings and a farthing, according to popular belief, not moving from one year to the next. Every baker who ever bought a sack of flour from a miller in those days  paid 42s and one farthing, the story goes. Did anyone ever query the extra farthing? Where did it come from? Where did it go?

 

 

bread flour retail weights and measures
Horsepower finds a new balance
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There is no shortage of examples of horses travelling to WWI battlefields, only to be shipped out as carrion within a month, if that. The British army had been working on mechanised replacements to haul heavy artillery pieces, for the best part of a decade. It would only be fair to give the military engineers credit for their efforts to minimise internal rows, and soldier on to modify the original design through two or three iterations by the end of the first world war. Thousands of horses still died in the process, but there was an end in sight to mass equine butchery.

This could not come too soon, as inter-war businesses set about restoring their delivery systems. When trying to track the development of value in the pricing of bread and bakery goods, the editor of Industrial Peace, Major W Melville, conceded that the public grasp of the price structure was “little understood”. The only accessible estimates came from the Linlithgow Report and started outside bakeries with the purchase of sacks of flour. From the plains of north America, the vast expanses of Australia,  to the more modest arable holdings of England, Linlithgow collects the entire growing stage of breadmaking flour into a single undifferentiated lump.

The disadvantages of average returns are there for all to see. Melville put it like this: “No evidence offered in respect of price structure of flour. My inquiry begins at the point at which the baker buys his flour from the miller.” The opening price of breadmaking flour in January 1923 was 42 shillings and a penny. There is no indication of whether this should be taken as an “asking” price or a “taking” price, as given in a trade paper, meaning that flat pricing goes out of the window, speeded on its way by discounts applied at strategic order volumes. The figures discussed in the Linlithgow report were fixed during a time when flour prices were starting to fall, leaving a number of question marks over the validity of 42 shillings and a penny as a credible price for a sack of flour at this time.

more follows later…