Frog Bakery
Oliver Costello and Rebecca Spaven pictured at their pop up at The Platform Cafe last summer
Frog Bakery is a brand new Queer owned bakery which will open it’s doors in Camberwell, South London on 1 April 2022. This is their first bricks and mortar site, after a popular pop-up at The Platform Cafe, when word spread about their exceptional baked treats.
Friends and co-owners Rebecca Spaven and Oliver Costello spoke to QFAB’s Rachel about their plans for all things Frog, creating a positive and welcoming environment for staff and the community, and their backgrounds giving up office jobs to find good opportunities in the food industry.
How did Frog bakery come about?
Oliver: So we know each other through a mutual friend, Sophie, who I worked with at Ottolenghi.
Rebecca: I worked with her at my first baking job, we became really good mates. She kept telling us how much we needed to meet because we both love Prefab Sprout! [An 80s English pop band.] We met exactly a year ago last week!
I make a hilarious joke about their business partnership being VERY LESBIAN.
O: We both had the same idea independently where we wanted to open a bakery in an old stable block in Ruskin park [near Camberwell], so we decided to just do it!
R: The problem was that building is derelict and would cost between £800,000 and £1 million to just make the building safe! So we ended up deciding maybe that wasn’t going to work. But we had realised we work well together, because we were doing lots of research and had similar ideas about what we wanted.
O: I had imagined trying to find a business partner and there you were, the perfect person! And it was really important for me to do that with someone queer!
Why did you choose to open Frog bakery up in Camberwell?
O: It was important that it was close to where we both live. We both feel like we have a foundation here.
R: It's really important having friends here, and knowing that you've got a support base to begin with. It's been really helpful for us. Doing our pop up at The Platform Cafe really helped us grow this base community. I don't think we would have been able to do the Crowdfunder so successfully without already having that.
What is your background? Have you always been bakers?
O: I studied computer science, and then started doing graphics and web development with a bit of cheffing in between, before deciding that I didn't want to look at a computer anymore! I've always had it in my head that I wanted to do food business since I was very young.
I quit my job and decided I wanted to change my life and return to being a chef again. I called up loads of places and Hawksmoor got back to me and I lied my way through my interview and I told them I knew how to do everything! And there I am in the middle of service on a Friday night googling how to make shortbread in the toilet. It was so bad, but I did it.
I taught myself everything and was constantly baking at home. That job gave me the opportunity to work for Ottolenghi because I knew that’s where I wanted to be. They’re really inspiring gay chefs and pioneers [Yotam Ottolenghi and business partner Sammi Tammi]. I was desperate to work for them, I even remember reading a Reddit thread on how to work there.
Finally I got a call and I got a trial shift for the next day. The trial went so badly but somehow I got the job and worked there for three years. I learned a lot and moved my way round the kitchen. It was such a nice place to be because other kitchens I had worked in were actually really challenging and sometimes filled with racist and homophobic people. But I felt very at home there, everyone was really nice and it was mostly run by women.
R: So I studied art history and Swedish. I sort of thought that I wanted to do research or be an academic or whatever. I ended up getting an internship in the communications department at the Bartlett, University College London, so I accidentally fell into working in comms for a few years.
But I've always loved baking. I’m half Norwegian and my maternal grandmother was a really big influence on my culinary upbringing, we did a lot of baking together. Being in Scandinavia you are just bombarded with baked stuff at all points of the day. So that was an influence in me becoming interested in baking and bread specifically.
I did a day course in E5 Bakehouse, learning how to make sourdough, and I ended up making sourdough quite a lot at home. I just really enjoy the process of baking bread and spending a day at E5 bakery really made me want to be a baker. The class was held right in the middle of production, and was so busy, frantic and fun. I was really intoxicated by that.
One evening I just googled, “sourdough job, London” and ended up finding a job advert for Bread by Bike, which was only four months old at this point. The owner was looking for a trainee, which is rare in bakeries, especially bread bakeries. I don't know how people get their experience, it’s really hard! So that was so lucky and I worked there for just over a year and learnt so much.
Then I went to Brick House bakery in Dulwich, the wonderful Brick House R.I.P! That was amazing. I joined the most fantastic team ever and made some really incredible friends and learned some amazing stuff.
Me and my partner had planned to go on a six month trip all over Europe, where I had planned to do some stages [the kitchen version of internships] in different bakeries. I made it to Vienna and worked there, but then due to Covid we had to come back! I have been freelancing and moving around, and more recently I have been helping out at Fortitude Bakehouse and the Snapery.
What are your plans for Frog Bakery?
R: We want this to be accessible and welcoming, open and a very positive community. We’re keen to be a community bakery but we haven’t called ourselves a community bakery, because people sometimes misuse that word community to describe their business.
O: Using the best ingredients as well. Working closely with farms for the flour and local producers. A good internal culture that’s a really welcoming safe space for queer people and everyone else, and pay London living wage.
It's not often that you get kitchens that operate like that, they can be super brutal places.That’s one of the main driving forces for me to be able to have a place where someone who wouldn't have been able to thrive and progress in one of those spaces could thrive with us.
R: Eventually, once we're a bit more established and able to train people up who might normally struggle to find somewhere else to work. We're hiring at the moment and we're looking for someone with a bit of experience just because we need help. But when we grow a bit that's going to be quite important to us to give people opportunities.
Ultimately we want to not put people off baking, because you could just end up getting your first job somewhere that is old fashioned with a bad working culture and just be like, well, this isn’t great. But with a bit of careful organisation and a bit of care, I think a bakery can be a really, really fun place to work.
O: Yeah and that kind of fits the layout that we've chosen. You will walk into the bakery and we will all be there right in front of you baking bread, we're not going to be hiding in the basement. The customers will be able to see the end result right there.
R: With the bread I'm keen to make sure that there's something for everyone there, because not everyone can afford to spend £5 on a loaf of bread, but at the same time I still want to produce a £5 loaf because I’m interested in exploring non-conventionally farmed grains. .
We want to use specialist heritage flour that has been grown regeneratively. But we still want to make sure that someone who can’t afford that can come in and buy a really nice sandwich loaf, and we'll just make it cheaper. I’m not a sourdough purist, you can make perfectly good bread that’s going to be better than what you can buy in the supermarket.
Frog? Why frog?
O: This is our most asked question. It comes from a haiku, a really great haiku, that my friends introduced me to they’re artists in Manchester and they had a show and it was called “Frogs shadow reaches the rock before the frog”.
To me that’s all about self determination and, wherever you want to go and whatever you want to achieve, you’re already there and you're heading towards it. But also we both really like frogs and the colour green so that’s the short answer!
Frog bakery are opening on April 1st on 44 Peckham Road, Camberwell, SE5 8PX
They are keen to talk to producers, especially queer ones, so get in touch if you think you could work together. They will also be looking to do wholesale and retail so if you want to stock their bread get in touch.