It took several hundred loaves of bread, a tonne of ostrich meat and 1,500 chefs to prepare. But Iran's attempt to make the world's largest ostrich sandwich wasn't just to notch up an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. The monster snack was also created to raise the profile of healthy eating - given ostrich meat's reputation as a low-fat, low-cholesterol alternative to chicken.

Oliver Blank is from Aichinger, a German shopfitting firm handling the McCafé roll-out over there, as well as Birds of Derby and Waterfields over here. Richard Hamilton of Agile Space's clients have included Pret A Manger, Lovejuice, Itsu, FooGo and independent coffee and bakery retailers. Franco Costa heads up Costagroup - a cutting-edge Italian shopfitter that has fitted everywhere from McDonald's in Italy to Paul in France.

A long-time destination for anything from gay bondage wear to, well, gay bondage, pockmarked with seedy snaking stairways and haunted by trench-coated gents shuffling into ribbon-stripped doorways, Soho is the scene of many a piquant fancy. Not least of these is Alan Yau's altogether more salubrious fetish: opening eating holes.

We bake our cakes with eggs fresh from the farm, which gives them a really good colour," says Liz Hedges of Bryngwenyn Farm, who hand-collects eggs from her brood of hens daily. "We believe in proper free-range chickens, which can make it a bit harder to locate the eggs!" she adds. But despite the extra trouble tracking down the odd maverick chicken nest, the resulting cakes have proved a popular seller in her on-site shop. "I always baked cakes and, when we opened the shop, it seemed natural that there would be a cakes offering," says Hedges.

At the European Coffee Symposium held in London recently, Paul Ettinger, head of international food and beverages at Caffè Nero, said Britain's coffee shop sector needs to look at new ways of minimising the impact of the recession, including attracting more evening trade, selling more iced drinks and, possibly, selling alcohol.

Advances in flow-wrap technology are set to benefit bakery businesses, providing greater flexibility and ensuring high-quality display packs.

Health may appear to be the driving force in bakery lately, but the main thing bakers are after when it comes to fats and oils is performance. After all, there is little point in producing pastry with an incredibly low fat content if it's going to taste like cardboard.

With the much talked-about credit crunch and economic downturn now setting in and the dreaded 'R' word about to reach our shores, consumers are having to be so much more careful about how they spend their hard-earned cash at lunchtimes, while still demanding to be well-fed and, most importantly, enjoying the same quality of food they did before hard times began to set in.

Student life is all about long sessions in cafés and bars, a frantic social life and minimal studying, right? A captive audience, and a gift to caterers and food-on-the-go brands.

As the yellow Chinese dragon reared its head and the drumming of the band became more frenzied, passers-by stopped to stare at the spectacle threading its way through Manchester's busy streets. Behind the dragon was a formation of British and overseas members of the International Richemont Club, on their way to a special Chinese banquet to kick off a three-day gala, hosted by the British members.

Adding nuts to products can be an expensive business. So while prices escalate, a cheaper option than some of the exotic tree nuts could be using peanuts. Even cheaper than whole nuts, peanut flour was recently launched into the UK with a variety of US-style applications touted. It can be used as a healthy, protein-rich ingredient in a range of goods, including cereal bars, cakes, biscuits and confectionery, diet and nutritional bars. It can also control the fat migration of the high fat centres, as well as enhance flavour and texture. Extracted from the oil of roasted peanut seed, peanut flour normally contains around 50% protein.

Soaring ingredients prices have been one of the talking points of the baking industry this year. With global demand increasing and speculation pushing prices higher, securing a reliable supply route is more challenging than ever for bakers.

The baking industry has always had a large element of indulgence about it - from cream cakes to doughnuts - but consumers are looking for healthier options when it comes to their daily bread. The focus used to be on what can be taken out of bakery products to make them more healthy - lower fat and salt content for example. But now it has shifted to what additional ingredients can go in.

3663 - named because it spells 'food' on a phone (unless you're using a Blackberry, in which case it spells 'rffr') - has fast become one of the UK's foodservice giants since its rebirth out of the ailing Booker in 1999.

Even a tiny slice of the government's estimated £2bn spend on food and catering in the public sector provides a mouth- watering prospect for bakery and ingredients suppliers.

Winner BB's Coffee & Muffins

Winner Tesco, Meltham Lane,

Winner Leanne Tang

Winner Crantock Bakery

Winner Jacksons the Bakers -

Winner Eurobuns - Skinny

Winner Jane Hatton

Winner WC Rowe

Winner The Village Bakery

Winner Piero Scacco

The British Baker Award for Special Achievement

This year's winner of the British Baker Award for Special Achievement, John Slattery, is in good company, with names such as baker Charles Geary, cereals scientist Stan Cauvain and bakery tutor Jean Grieves.

A very big

Despite an almost non-existent summer, it's nearly back to school time. Among other things, this is a time when mums and dads will be forced to face the issue of what they can put in their children's lunchboxes.

Up to 150,000 sewer blockages each year are caused by fats, oils and grease (FOG) being thrown down sinks and drains. The time and expense involved in unblocking drains and subsequent clean-up operations can have an immediate impact on the bottom line.

The icing on a cake can fulfil a number of requirements. It can be used to make a cake more aesthetically pleasing and can pull together the theme of an occasion. It can be used to keep a cake fresh and help products stand out from their competitors. But icing a cake is not always a sweet success.

Cuisine de France's national account manager, Sharon Carney, says that winning the Customer Focus Award, sponsored by BakeMark, at last year's Baking Industry Awards was a triumph for the business - not to mention a great opportunity to meet Joanna Lumley!

In early June, shortly after becoming chief executive of Greggs, Ken McMeikan went to work at one of the bakery retailers' Leeds shops. Rather than reading reports from the comfort of his new office in Newcastle, McMeikan spent his first week pitching in with shop staff, making sandwiches, baking off savouries and working the till.

You may ask yourselves, "Why should I move to quality coffee?" Compare the coffee industry to the wine industry and think back to when the UK drank very little wine - when our knowledge did not extend past drinking Blue Nun. Now, a lot of UK consumers have a basic understanding of different grape varieties and different wine-producing countries. Coffee has the same complexities and the consumer is becoming increasingly aware of the subtle differences.

They laughed, they clapped and they cheered as retailer Asda's commercial bakery director, Huw Edwards, took to the stage at Birmingham's famous Belfry to host Asda's own internal Bakery of the Year awards.

Subway is set to become the UK's biggest bakery retailer in the New Year if it continues its current rate of growth, pushing Greggs from premier position.

It's a fairly tricky ask, reinventing the wheel - possibly as challenging as reinventing that bakery stalwart, the divider moulder. "There's a lot of old equipment out there that's just brought back with a facelift," is the assessment from Interbake's David Dunne, which would be a somewhat downbeat way to open an article on innovations in this area of the machinery market. Thankfully, he adds that the bits that have been developed in recent times are simple tweaks to make day-to-day operations easier. That can mean anything from safeguarding against manky dough festering around your kit to cutting out the need for multiple machines for different-sized dough pieces.

http://www.benier.co.uk (Milton Keynes, Bucks) | http://www.cater-bake.co.uk (Knowsley, Merseyside) | http://www.equipline.co.uk (Uxbridge, Middlesex) | http://www.jestic.co.uk (Tunbridge Wells, Kent) | Pizza Plus Foodservice chris@pizzaplus.fsnet.co.uk (Preston) | http://www.servequip.co.uk (Croydon, Surrey)

Originally, pizza dough was cooked outdoors on hot flat stones. Not entirely practical or indeed desirable in this HACCP age we live in, but you don't have to brave the British weather to produce excellent pizzas. There are options to suit you, from counter-top to conveyor models. Here are just a small selection:

You don't want to mess with Giuseppe Mascoli's oven. The Neapolitan pizza owner prides himself on his E9,000 (£7,085), handcrafted specimen. "I had it made by an artisan in Naples," he says. "Then put on an industrial trolley and shipped over on a container. It's a very particular oven."

Passionate People, Passionate About Food' is Rotherham-based Maple Leaf Bakery's slogan. This passion, along with a huge pride about what it does and what it has achieved, were the main instigators behind the company's decision to enter last year's Baking Industry Awards and the reasons behind its Bakery Manufacturer Of The Year accolade. Sitting in marketing and innovation director Guy Hall's office, drinking tea out of an 'I love New York bagels' mug, the passion is certainly evident.

In December 2006, Mike Thurlow, miller and tenant of Letheringsett Watermill in north Norfolk, won the UKTV Local Food Hero Award. One of the judges, celebrity chef Gary Rhodes, described him as "the nation's favourite" and thousands of internet voters clearly agreed.

So you've undertaken a green audit, embarked on an energy efficiency plan and explored eco-friendly packaging. How else can you make your business more ethical? Consider looking more closely at the core of your business - at the products you sell.

A combination of the credit crunch, high raw materials price inflation and low business and consumer confidence makes this a testing time for owners looking to finance an early or mature phase of expansion in the food sector.

Bread has been with us since ancient times, but never before has the whole industry been under such scrutiny from consumers concerned with their weight and health. Ancient Britons would probably have given Sid the Slug short shrift, but nowadays, the baking industry cannot afford to turn its back on calls to lower levels of salt and saturated fat and to help people make healthier choices.

Brits are eating less salt. Average daily consumption has fallen by 0.9g to 8.6g since 2000, reports the Food Standards Agency (FSA).

You don't have to be a big-scale operation to take advantage of IT, and a number of smaller bakeries have benefited from a long-established package, tailored to craft businesses, which has recently been upgraded.

People driving SUVs are not the only ones worried about rising oil prices. Its impact is being felt throughout industry, and baking is no different. Add in spiralling costs for wheat and other raw materials, and protecting margins in our business is getting harder and harder.

H alloween is traditionally about dressing up in ridiculously unscary costumes, the implied necessity for everyone - well every child - to be out roaming the streets at night, trick or treating and getting someone else in the family to buy and carve a pumpkin. However it is also emerging as an increasingly profitable event for the bakery sector.

Like many businesses, those in the baking trade often feel that they have little spare time on their hands to dedicate to environmental issues. However, this is an area where a little investment can pay dividends in terms of improved resource efficiency and cost savings.

We have a three-year plan to double the size of our business," says an excited Délifrance MD Ian Dobbie, having just cut the ribbon on a spanking new bake-off plant in Wigston, near Leicester. Having topped the £40m turnover mark at the end of last year, this represents a major kick-on for the business, which has seen around 15-20% year-on-year growth for the past decade. Until now, the firm has been largely perceived as a frozen par-bake specialist, but this is set to change, with a renewed assault on the packaged morning goods category, armed with a new ability to fully bake-off its own products.

Roly's Bistro is a modern rarity: a restaurant that bakes its own bread and confectionery, rather than relying on mixes or pre-baked products. Now it has done something even more rare: it has set up a bakery shop and café to sell the products that were previously the reserve of the restaurant. It is even thinking of franchising the concept - or at least extending it to other outlets.

Such is the pace of change in the spy vs spy world of supermarket buying, that the greatest delight in developing new products comes in creeping up and mugging a competitor with a category first.

OK, so let me confess straight up - I am an accountant and the amount I truly know about baking can be written on a grain of baking powder. The only time I have ever baked was on a 72-foot, 50-tonne yacht in the mid-Atlantic, which was racing for Boston on a 40-degree tilt... and I can assure you that is not good for making bread evenly sliceable!

A recent announcement by the Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA) suggests that the number of foreign workers being exploited is higher than previously thought, particularly in the food processing industry. To tackle the problem of rogue employers, the GLA launched Operation Ajax, an initiative that will see the authority carry out up to 30 raids during the next 18 months.

With many messages on the subject of our economy travelling like wildfire around the baking industry, you won't be blamed for supposing we're about to suffer the first recession this century.

The Bakers' Benevolent Society (BBS) celebrated its 150th anniversary with a family open day on Sunday 15 June at Bakers Villas in Epping.

The dairy sector has seen prices of raw ingredients rocket alongside all the other commodities, and the café and bakery retailing sector is no stranger to this. But aside from cost, what issues do bakery retailers and cafés face when it comes to the dairy products they use? Is it important to them to use locally sourced and/or organic products, and do customers care?

Over the last year, healthy breads such as whole grain have experienced the fastest growth within the bread sector. The same period has also been marked by the widespread cleaning up of ingredients labels. This all amounts to great news for the shelf-life of the people eating the breads, but not so great for the bread itself.

Last month saw the London opening of an Italian coffee chain that harbours ambitions to reassert Italy's easily overlooked status as the godfather of espresso - since its position was usurped around the globe by Starbucks and its bastard (in the nicest possible way) offspring. I know what you're thinking: "Great, that's just what the UK needs, another branded coffee chain."

Matt Scott knew he faced a battle to make flour sexy when he bought Bacheldre Watermill seven years ago. After all, producing organic and traditional flours from a 16th century Welsh water-powered mill in Powys was, literally, miles away from his former life as a postman in Gosport.

Greener packaging - it's straightforward, right? Plastics are "bad", while paper and cardboard are "good". Well actually, it's not quite that simple, and even the experts don't agree. Landfill, where most of the UK's waste ends up, is under huge pressure. Space is due to run out within the next five to 10 years, according to Defra. And with conventional plastics taking between 200 and 500 years to break down in landfill, it's obvious that we cannot keep burying it underground, then burying our heads in the sand about the environmental impact.

For some, looking for government support - whether in grants, tax incentives or simply advice and training opportunities - has something of a stigma about it. That is, until they see who else is already benefiting from this type of support.

I must respond to your News Insight item 'Crunch time for training' (27 June), to address what seems to be a lack of understanding regarding the important and entirely positive developments currently underway in bakery training in the UK.

Courgettes, also known as zucchini, are a very versatile vegetable with a delicate flavour. Courgettes were not widely eaten in Europe before the 20th century, but have been cultivated in Central America for 5,000 years and are related to watermelons, gherkins and cucumbers. They are plentiful in the summer months and anyone who has ever grown courgettes will know that they seem to turn into marrows before your eyes and are best when picked young, as they have more flavour and less water.

Tom Herbert a fifth-generation baker and director of Hobbs House Bakery, a multi award-winning craft bakery based in south Gloucestershire

The Whole Grain Stamp - a nifty little black and yellow food packaging label that has done wonders for the bowels of our American cousins - was launched recently into the UK, in a move that would have our back-page dietician Dr Allinson rolling around joyfully in his grave.

It seems fitting that Asda's Boldon Colliery got the gong for best in-store bakery at BIA07 - gongs being something of a recurring theme at Asda's in-stores. Remember the advertising campaign earlier this year, featuring Victoria Wood ringing a bell to tell customers that freshly baked bread was on-shelf - part of Asda's novel approach to promoting its scratch baking? Well that was filmed in Boldon, Asda's flagship bakery, and deemed the best in-store in the UK by the BIA judges.

W ith increasing consumer awareness about what they are eating, the current trend is the use of natural fresh ingredients. It's easier for small craft bakers who sell locally to use more fresh fruit pieces in their toppings, as many have a relatively short shelf-life and are made for immediate consumption. "The biggest trend, though, is that people want premium products and they are actually willing to pay for them," says Stuart Allan, operations and development director of Indulgence Patisserie.

Manufacturers and bakers will be able to get free advice on automating their plants from CenFRA, a newly-formed body whose vision is to to provide independent, affordable automation solutions.

Düsseldorf's giant exhibition halls swallowed up more than 179,000 visitors over the seven days of Interpack, a monster, triennial processes and packaging bash. More than 2,700 exhibitors, including packaging and processing equipment manufacturers, used the event to launch their very latest models, boasting improved efficiency and sophisticated technology. Both traditional and "eco-friendly" packaging manufacturers also used Interpack as a springboard for their launches.

With landfill tax now costing £32 a tonne and set to rise by £8/tonne every year until 2012, business is facing an inflation-busting bill for its waste.

A lot of time is spent here at the SoHo Sandwich Co working with both our chefs and numerous bread suppliers to create interesting combinations of fillings with the right bread to bring out the flavour. We need to use a perfectly balanced selection of flavours and textures to make the customers keep coming back.

Employers are obliged to provide information to, and consult with, trade union or other appropriate representatives where they propose to make 20 or more employees redundant at one establishment within 90 days or less.

The importance of investing in the future of the industry emerged as a key theme at this year's SAMB (Scottish Association of Master Bakers) Technical Sessions, which were held at the Peebles Hydro Hotel. Guest speaker Pat Smyth, who is president of the Irish Association of Master Bakers and managing director of AB Mauri company Yeast Products, stressed the need to address the industry's "low skills base", adding that "educational support is becoming an issue". He also identified a problem with retaining people in the industry.

How do we solve a problem like organics? Once the hills were alive with the sound of ringing cash tills, as the organic market continued its decade-long steady growth. But the organic idyll was recently upset by an ominous rumbling in the form of new data, which showed that the organics market suffered the first year-on-year downturn in sales this year in April (source TNS Global).

There have been, I admit, quite a few occasions when I've made a decision that didn't really work out as planned, such as the location for a shop. Then, through a stroke of good fortune, someone has come along and made me an offer for the site that gave me a good profit - and I always took the credit for being so far-sighted.

The Scottish Association of Master Bakers (SAMB) conference, from 24-27 May, saw George Stevenson, MD of of Mathiesons of Falkirk, with 32 shops and mall cafés, and a growing wholesale business, take over as new president.

Combis, the multi-purpose workhorses of the oven world, can be used to roast, steam or bake food. When used in combination, the various heating methods within each oven speed up the cooking process, maximising efficiency and saving time.

As summer is almost upon us - or at least as much of a summer as Britain normally gets - most of us like to have a barbecue in the garden when the opportunity strikes, and salad is nowhere to be seen in shops by Sunday afternoon. But does this hot weather affect the sales of hot savoury food? Do consumers, who are out shopping in a busy high street on a hot summer's day, choose to grab a pasty-on-the-go, or a sandwich?

Where do you go for the taste of authentic Parisian artisanal bread? Middlesex would not be many people's number-two destination on this front. But in Upminster, you will find a self-proclaimed sourdough "mini revolution" under way. (Any sightings of Frenchmen roaming the countryside wielding their baguettes in an aggressive manner are purely coincidental.)

Italy is renowned worldwide for its gastronomy and that gastronomy is part of our history, culture and tradition," says Davide Nardini, vice-president of the Council for the Province of Ferrara. "Here in Italy, food is an expression of our cultural heritage," adds Carlo Alberto Roncarati, president of the Chamber of Commerce. "Each area has its own history and intrinsic character. You can see that even in our bread and, if you don't protect it, you lose your identity, you lose what sets you apart."

For bakery owners, buying a new vehicle to transport perishable goods can be an expensive business, particularly when looking for specialist vehicles such as refrigerated vans. Many fledgling firms opt for used vehicles when attempting to build up a small business or start-up on a tight budget. Most will be aware of the used commercial van dealerships. But there is an alternative option that offers a wide variety of vehicles and potential to unearth a bargain - the auction.

Where the Telegraph article does fall down is in its failure to recognise that UK bakers have already mastered the art of making large-volumed, fine-structured and soft-eating wholemeal bread products; but then I doubt that there were any bakers in the audience for the talk to make this practical observation.

When eating bread, most of us probably don't think about the empty space in it, but rather whether we like its texture and flavour. Yet both of these are driven by bubbles. This is because one of the key aims when mixing is to ensure that air is trapped in the dough and, for sandwich and toast bread, we want the air to be evenly dispersed.

Bubbles could be the answer to encouraging more children to eat sandwiches made out of healthier brown bread, proclaimed The Daily Telegraph in a recent article (tinyurl.com/5oxs96). In it, the article suggested that there is a basic problem encouraging people to eat more brown bread because of its inferior texture to white bread.

Making plaques, rolls loaves, pastries and decorating cakes - all against the clock - is challenging enough in a real working environment.

What was your route into the milling industry?

Best of times

John Foster - Fosters Bakery Fosters Bakery, based in Barnsley, south Yorkshire, supplies fresh and frozen products to major retailers, airlines and caterers

The phrase "real men don't eat quiche" emerged in the early 1980s as the title of a book on stereotypes about masculinity. It could perhaps be rewritten as a tagline for Giles Foods as "real bakers don't bake quiche". Or, at a stretch, "real bakers don't make any money from supplying quiches to supermarkets". But then we're getting silly.

1 I am a small independent sandwich shop operator with limited kitchen space. I buy in mostly bake-off products, so I require a deck oven that is well-suited to baking-off baguettes and making pizzas, but it has to be simple to use.

The UK cakes market has enjoyed positive, though slowing, growth over the past five years, but the shape of the market is changing.

When new MD Paul May talks about an "aggressive" growth strategy for Patisserie Valerie (PV), the word jars somewhat with one's perceptions of the shops. Original owner Madame Valerie was quite happy with one store thank-you-very-much, and it took over 60 years before PV opened its second store. Since 1987, the business has been quietly nurtured by the Scalzo brothers, who took the original Old Compton St shop and added eight more over 20 years. While the one remaining Scalzo in the business, Victor, carries a frame you wouldn't mess with, this ain't the kind of aggressive retail expansion form that gets the big high street players running for mummy.

Premium cakes have enjoyed juicy growth over the last two years, but with food inflation, house price fears and financial instability, will the top-end market hit the skids? When it comes to tightening the belt, it helps if you don't eat luxurious cakes. But that's enough of the diet tips. How do you sell premium cakes when people have less money to spend?

Island Bakery Organics

Only in its third year, Tesco's latest 'Enjoy the Taste of Scotland' has already become the biggest Scotland-only food and drink show in the UK and probably the world, says its initiator and Tesco's senior buyer for Scotland, Sarah Mackie.

Tom Herbert - Hobbs House Bakery

A new Italian-style bakery, Il Valen-tino's, in Dublin, has been trading since early this year. Owner Owen Doorly spent 13 years in Italy, working mainly on coffee roasting, and returned home to start up this bakery.

Walking into a room full of baked goods - rolls, Viennoiserie, Granary and Hovis loaves, exquisitely decorated cakes and yes, the occasional bread which looks a bit lopsided or lacks spring - is quite a moving a experience. Especially when everything has been created by keen and competitive students.

At the annual National Association of Master Bakers conference in Blackpool members heard that the decline in membership that has taken place over recent years has been halted.

The cost of basic ingredients used in bakery has risen extraordinarily over the past year.

One exhibit stood head and shoulders above the others at BIE - literally.

Caffè Culture 2008, with its wide range of exhibitors, food demonstrations and extensive programme of seminars, is less than three weeks away. The show, taking place at London's Olympia on 21 and 22 May, features the latest products and services from international and UK-based suppliers, from bakery and café design through to kitchen equipment and training.

Larger bakers - we're talking business size not belt girths here - have long recognised the benefits of automatic roll plant. But what about the smaller guys - again, not the vertically challenged - who are thinking of improving efficiencies by automating?

No doubt fuelled by the likes of poo-obsessed TV nutritionist Gillian McKeith, healthy breads and, specifically, whole grains, have seen a revival over the last five years, with the focus being on maintaining a healthy gut. Heart health, on the other hand, has fallen somewhat off the radar. As one industry insider stated, during the course of researching this feature, "The health claims are amazing, yet the Brits seem to concentrate on bowels!"

I f the major multiples are to be believed, their attitudes to local sourcing have shifted dramatically over recent years. Gone is the emphasis on size and scale. Gone are the uncomfortable trade-offs between volume and margin. Or so we are told.

As more and more celebrities popularise wheat-free diets, it is not surprising that people find difficulty in having coeliac disease taken seriously when they ask for gluten-free food.

Change and produce new products: we know we have to do both. Yet when I look at our end-of-year figures, what do I find? Yes, you guessed it, all our top sellers are the old lines and the vast majority of our cash comes from those.

Job history: Young joined BB's in 2005, during which time the number of cafés has grown from 90 to 179. Prior to that, she spent 12 years working in foodservice and retail marketing and international brand development, 10 as marketing manager (Europe and the Middle East) for Burger King, and, latterly, two as marketing director for Greggs.

B B's Coffee and Muffins may be best known for its handmade and fresh-baked muffins, but the expanding franchise operation now sells a whole lot more besides - and its doors are wide open to suppliers.

A few years ago, while digging up the M1, workmen dozily pierced the pipeline taking water to Coca-Cola's biggest factory in Wakefield, Yorkshire.

John Montague (1718-1792), the fourth Earl of Sandwich, often gets the credit for inventing the sandwich.

Back in 2005, McCambridge's chairman, Michael McCambridge, was quoted in the Irish Times as saying: "McCambridge is linked almost exclusively with brown bread and we want to keep it that way." Two years later, it acquired the second-biggest cake manufacturer in the UK, in the shape of Inter Link Foods. But they'd already picked up three UK businesses by that point, en route to the 10 in total that they've accrued in the UK and Ireland since 1999.

With summer just around the corner, outdoor parties are promising to be in full swing - and you don't need to be an events organiser to cash in.

With a trained chef as a mother to teach her cookery from an early age and a father who worked for Lloyds Bank providing commercial nous, it's perhaps not surprising that Gemma Parker has ended up running an increasingly successful cake-making business in Norfolk.

One small step for bakers (or a few steps upstairs to the conference rooms at Baking Industry Exhibition), one giant leap for baking kind. What last year appeared a challenge at one time as unlikely as putting a man on the moon - getting the baking industry to speak with once voice - last week came a significant stride nearer.

What service do you sell?

How did your career progress before joining Costa Coffee?

Bakers and confectioners are advised to get their skates on if they want to take part in this year's Baking Industry Awards, as the deadline, Friday 16 May, is fast approaching. The Awards have a category to suit everyone, so there's no excuse not to have a go.