Daily Bread began in the Northampton parish of St. Peter's, Weston Favell. A group of nine friends - four married couples and a bachelor - formed the idea of taking their Christian beliefs and values into the business environment. Since Daily Bread was founded on the basis of Christian beliefs, the name chosen comes from a line in the Lord's Prayer. One of the founder members, Michael Jones, owned a family firm of jewellers in Northampton. He had been involved in the co-operative model of doing business, and to that end he converted his enterprise into a workers' co-operative. Daily Bread Co-operative was registered as a limited company in March 1976, the first business of its kind to adopt a new set of Model Rules for Common Ownership. It was a further four years before trading started, on 1 October 1980, in what was once the laundry of St. Andrew's Hospital, reputedly the largest privately owned psychiatric hospital in the country. The members of the co-operative were faced with challenges, including how to generate wealth without compromising the beliefs to which they adhered, how to provide work for those who might not be able to find it elsewhere, and how to balance individual freedom and creativity with the collective responsibility to care for the business, each other and the community.
Social aims
The co-operative has a range of social aims on top of the basic task of providing healthy food to the local and wider community at a fair price. The social aims include:
providing employment to mentally handicapped or disabled people and those rehabilitating into society, who would often find it difficult to obtain and maintain occupation.
a commitment to running the business in an ecologically friendly manner.
donating a proportion of all income to the local and global communities, locally through their Community Fund and globally through their charitable arm, Strive Ltd.
The workforce stands at around 25, including members and non-members, full- and part-time, and the annual turnover stands at around £1.3 million. Daily Bread as a workers' co-operative, in common with other co-operatives, runs the business on the democratic principle of "one person, one vote", meaning that all the members have an equal say in how the business should be run, in contrast to the standard business model where a company is owned by individuals or by a group of shareholders. Daily Bread is different in other ways, such as a wage structure where each worker is paid equally regardless of length of tenure or seeming superiority, with only a slight increase for members over non-members in recognition of extra duties and responsibilities, and possible extra allowances for workers with dependents.
Product range
Daily Bread's product range of wholefoods has increased from about twelve lines in the first few months to over 5,500 different products, and as well as wholefoods the co-operative stocks environmentally friendly cleaning materials, ethical body care products and energy saving gadgets. No products that contain any ingredient derived from an animal are stocked. As well as vegetarians and vegans, Daily Bread also caters to those with other special dietary requirements, including wheat or gluten intolerance and diabetes. While no bread is baked on the premises, Daily Bread does carry a range of its own, cooked-on-site cereals and snacks.
Daily Bread, Cambridge
Daily Bread has served as a model for other co-operatives and wholefood sellers, including the Unicorn Grocery. Daily Bread in Cambridge opened in 1992 with a staff of five, one ex-member from Northampton and four other full-time members. Its structure is similar to Daily Bread in Northampton, and the Cambridge enterprise was given permission to trade under the original name and to use the co-operative's logo.
