Beyond the Dough Table | How The Dusty Knuckle is Using Baking to Build Futures
Words by Christina Dean
London really is the land of great bakeries but few have quite the story the Dusty Knuckle does
It began life when founders Max, Daisy and Becca started making bread and sandwiches out of a shipping container in the Dalston car park of the Bootstrap offices. It has since expanded into one of those former offices, with a bakery, cafe, and a terrace where they run pizza nights in the summer and regular guest chef Dusty Dinners, and a second cafe and pizza restaurant in Haringey.
There’s also a bakery school operating out of that original container, where you can take classes on bread, pasta, pastry and fermentation, and then there’s the legendary Dusty Knuckle milk float. This lockdown invention, basically a mini mobile third site on a 1984 milk float, had people (writer included) chasing it around different neighbourhoods in the hopes of bagging one of the bakery’s doorstop sandwiches.
Though the operation has expanded and the quantities have increased, the quality of the product – everything is still made by hand – hasn’t changed. But there’s more to the Dusty Knuckle than potato bread, feta & honey swirls and cult sandwiches. It’s a purpose-driven business that’s working to change lives as well as feed people through a training and mentoring programme for at-risk youth.
Working with young people who are coming out of custody, attached to the justice system, involved in youth offending and support services, are care leavers or asylum seekers, is something that’s been baked into the Dusty Knuckle since its inception and is what really sets them apart.
Co-founder Max Tobias came from a background working in the third sector, including in schools, charities and prisons, and though he was passionate, he “felt like there was very limited impact you could have with somebody if you weren’t really moving the dial on the bigger picture, structural components of their lifestyles, i.e employment and the prospects of legitimate earnings in the future. I felt like a work environment where they could spend more time and give more of themselves back in return, rather than me giving advice, would do it so the vision was a reciprocal relationship in which we both collaborate towards a common goal.” An obsession with bread-making, which he shared with childhood friend and chef Rebecca Oliver, led to the foundation of a bakery as the means to achieve that goal.
“it’s about helping young people to become self-sustaining adults and how to function in society”
Not only was focusing on trade and creating profit for purpose rather than fundraising the more obvious route to take from a financial perspective, it also better aligned with the business’s overall mission. “Given that we’re trying to promote the message for young people that they can be enterprising, they can become financially self-sustaining, they can have a positive future, they can learn skills, it just seemed to me that having a buzzing, entrepreneurial, exciting, busy commercial business environment in which they could partake would be a much more profound way of displaying those values and putting our money where our mouth is than in a charity,” he explains.
A busy bakery with high demand for labour is the perfect place to teach young people all the skills they need to succeed in the workplace – communication, collaboration, attendance, punctuality, working in a hierarchy, respecting authority – as well as showing them what it means to feed people, introducing them to people from different backgrounds, helping them gain self-worth and giving them the chance to think optimistically about their prospects. As Max says, “it’s about helping young people to become self-sustaining adults and how to function in society. Often the ones who come to us, by the time they have come to us, they’ve perhaps written themselves off slightly and hopefully we help them to believe that there’s a future and it’s an exciting one.”
The training programme consists of three phases. It begins with introductory shifts in either the bakery, the kitchen or front of house to help the trainees acclimatise to a workplace environment, meet colleagues, interact with customers and build a professional identity. The second phase includes regular shifts on the London Living Wage, where they are taught more technical skills relevant to the section they’re on, like more knife skills in the kitchen or barista training for front of house, with support and regular mentoring sessions from trained members of the Dusty Knuckle team. The third phase is the onward movement of those who have completed the programme into the wider world.
As much as Dusty Knuckle is a business and they need to keep customers coming through the door and money through the tills, it’s not just about the balance sheet. The programme as a whole, but particularly that final phase – not just the number of young people passing through but what happens to them after they leave and whether there has been improvements in things like communication skills and mental wellbeing – is one of the key metrics that the Dusty Knuckle uses to define its success and measure whether it is achieving its purpose. In 2022, 66% of their trainees, around ⅘ of whom came to the bakery directly from custody, ended up in either work training or volunteering elsewhere. Max says, “if you compare that to the national average for young people coming out of prison and how many of them are in work or training six months after, which is pretty depressingly low, we’ve been pretty successful with that and hope to continue that this year.”
The progress of that success directly depends on the amount of resources available, which is why as well as having the Dusty Knuckle bakery functioning as a training environment that can accommodate more people as it grows, the team also incorporated a Community Interest Company this year, to work in tandem with the bakery but to also “put into place support structures beyond just what happens on shift and at the dough table and in the kitchens.” As Max explains, “It’s difficult for any business to exist in food at the moment but if you start to tell that business that they have to become experts in the field of adult education and the housing system and the universal credit system and the probation system and the school system, it starts to feel a lot for a bakery to deliver acting in isolation, which also has to worry about customers and flours and hydrating the dough properly and all the rest of it.” Ultimately the CIC allows the Dusty Knuckle to leverage resources from beyond what the bakery alone can generate to propel the training programme forward. And there’s nothing like a global pandemic to make you realise that financial diversification is the key to security.
“[we want to] put into place support structures beyond just what happens on shift and at the dough table and in the kitchens”
To that end, the Dusty Knuckle held a huge fundraising party in the summer, featuring a performance from Jessie Ware, an auction hosted by Suggs, and a panel talk with Ashley Walters and some of the DK trainees, to celebrate all their achievements so far, get some starting balance in the CIC and publicly declare “to other organisations and potential donors that Dusty Knuckle is pledging support to this organisation both as a training facility and as a funder, and using that as leverage to encourage others to follow suit.”
Not only is it not feasible for the Dusty Knuckle to provide full-time paid positions to the hundred or so trainees that pass through their doors each year, even if they expanded with additional retail sites, it’s never been the goal to do so. “Dusty Knuckle is not intended to be a long-term employer of young people who have come from hardship. What we are is an incubation period, a stepping stone, between a past that for many different reasons, they’re trying to kind of make progress away from towards a more positive and healthy feeling future,” explains Max. ”But that long term future is something we have got limited control over so our modus operandi is really to get them as best set and prepared as possible, and crucially, to look after the next step in the chain, which is what happens to them after they leave here.”
That next link in the chain requires employment and training partners interested in taking on trainees from the Dusty Knuckle, who would come with a support worker to help facilitate the transition, so Max is actively “looking for organisations from all different sectors who are interested in partaking in that and developing that next step of the pathway with us.“ Though the focus and energy is being directed into building this healthy onward network, Max is also acutely aware of what it took to get to this point. The pandemic pushed the team right to the wire and he’s keen not to be so close to burnout again.
“There’s a pressure on twenty- and thirty-somethings in the age of social media and enterprise and technology, I suppose it’s always been there to a point, but probably now more so than ever. Everyone’s expected to go gym four times a week, read all these self-help and business books every evening, become something, achieve something, be your own boss, own your own brand, become an influencer, do this, do that, and people sort of forget that it’s nice to just have hobbies and see your mates not constantly be reaching for something you haven’t achieved yet,” he reflects. “We’ve got it pretty good. We’re really lucky and we try to remind ourselves of that as well as much as we can and we’re super thankful. Like coming here on a Friday afternoon and seeing it busy, staff chatting, it’s a vibe man. It feels good.”
LOTI Heroes is where we big up the people, small businesses and neighbourhood spots that make London great, you can see more from our series here.