News from the Grindstone series - 09 Flora Shedden of Aran Bakery and LÒN Store

Flora Shedden, on returning to where she grew up in Dunkeld to open Aran Bakery, followed by LÒN Store, and balancing raising a family alongside her businesses

“I grew up cooking, my mum is an amazing cook”, Flora says of her lifelong interest in food, which is strongly rooted in family. Despite her mum’s well-intentioned advice not to go into food / catering and events, Flora is now the founder of both Aran Bakery and LÒN Store. She studied architecture at university, but felt unsure about the course and its direction. She commenced food blogging on the side, which as she notes, was a popular medium during that time. Off the back of the food blog came her participation on the Great British Bake Off. Aged 19 she was the youngest contestant, and reached the semi-finals. This “opened the door for food styling and recipe writing”, which hadn’t previously been on her radar growing up as something you could do for a living. Her roots in architecture shine through in the beautifully renovated bakery and store she went on to create.

Flora had been recipe testing and food styling for two years following Bake Off, and was missing cooking for people where you would actually see them eat and enjoy the food, where you get “instant feedback”, rather than for shoots. She moved back to Dunkeld and opened Aran Bakery, which in 2027 will celebrate 10 years since its inception. “I was so young and naïve” she reflects, on opening the bakery aged 21. “Had I known, I would have been more cautious going into it. The hardest thing about hospitality is compromise on what you have versus what you can afford. I’ve learnt a lot. Now I work with my partner James, we’ve got two kids, and as well as owning it [the bakery and the store] we have some form of family life. The children have taught me a much better balance”. 

Photo credit Laura Edwards

They lived above the bakery for six years to begin with, before moving to a home a couple of fields away from where she grew up. “We weren’t in a position to outsource help. We were able to survive by doing it ourselves.” They worked hard over those years until they reached a position where they can enjoy having some team members with which to “share the load. James does the spreadsheets, he has a head for all things financial. It’s a real privilege to be able to work a job you enjoy, it’s all consuming.” Flora operates with a positive outlook on how lucky they are to live and work where they do, although notes that bakers’ shifts can be “a lot of hours”. Everything they have achieved, they have created for themselves. They revised their baking schedule to allow them a later 6am start, working out the timings for their sourdoughs to fit around this. The rural location can make “attracting skilled staff hard. We want to make the shifts and hours as appealing as possible”. 

Photo credit Laura Edwards

Flora and James both grew up in Dunkeld, although didn’t know each other back then due to a 10-year age gap. “It was an idyllic childhood. It’s rare in terms of a small village, there’s a huge variety of generations. Younger generations, people are moving back. There’s a real creative community”, paired with a “very independent high street”. When she started Aran Bakery, “city costs were not feasible. Small and rural was the goal.” She received a phone call on her 21st birthday to say she had got the lease.

Photo credit Laura Edwards

For flours, Flora loves using our Shipton Mill white and rye flours amongst others, and blends them with Scotland the Bread’s local heritage and landrace grains as well. Their house sourdough for example, includes Scotland the Bread’s Balcaskie Landrace wholemeal flour blended with Shipton Mill white and rye. She also bakes with seeded flours and spelt. Flora balances heritage grains with stronger flours to achieve the results she wants, and “loves using flours for flavour.” “I bake everything with nuts – I love that flavour in flours, like emmer and rye. We’re doing a rye and hazelnut millionaires shortbread at the moment”. Her “long term dream is to have the store and bakery in one”, as currently they are two separate sites. “There are six stools in the bakery, otherwise it’s takeaway only. The store is an extension of things to buy and use in the kitchen. The long-term goal is to merge the two.” Flora has discovered that the people who like the bakery tend to like the offering she puts together for the Store, and it has proven a successful way for her to expand and grow the business. 

They “signed the lease [for the store] in January 2020, not knowing what was to come”. Covid hit, with its multiple lockdowns and restrictions. By July that year, they had managed to open the store “a couple of days a week. It’s grown and developed – we do a lot of homewares, flowers, pantry staples, with Scottish and British produce”. 

Limited by the trading options allowed under Covid, they set up a subscription box scheme, “pinned around a theme each month. Seed boxes, things for your house, recipes”, with a UK-wide audience. The scheme has remained popular and her colleague Andrea now runs it with her; they plan a couple of months at a time and customers can purchase them through their website. “You can subscribe and cancel at any point.” Covid led them to create a “more interesting postal offering. It was a lifeline.” Each subscription box is the result of a huge amount of work, with careful curation of products from “so many small independent shops. We enjoy it as a way to support smaller places.” 

Photo credit Laura Edwards

In January 2020 they started the renovations for LÒN Store, with the original plan to open in April. When this was scuppered by Covid, they “pared back the renovations due to lack of builders, it became a DIY effort, and we opened with the essentials. People needed the cheer.” They offered mainly fresh produce and pantry items and it evolved from there. At the time, they offered a “Locals Produce Box” which included dairy such as Mellis cheeses, fresh sourdough, Beremeal Orkney flour, eggs, and a mix of fruit and vegetables from local growers. Opening during that time made them “resilient and adaptable”, and it is a testament to their hard work and innovation that the businesses have grown and thrived since then.

Now, Flora and James have a team of 24, split between the bakery site and the store. “We opened with four of us, and James. He did the coffees on the first shift. We enjoy it a lot more now we have help. It was difficult when my son was born, difficult to let go, and taking on board someone else’s input”. 

One of the ways they have adapted is to streamline their offering and to manage waste. “We used to change the menu every two weeks”, Flora remembers. “We change it now every six weeks, apart from the croissants, almond croissants and buns” which they keep as a permanent fixture to avoid a mutiny due to their popularity, along with the key sourdough loaves. 

It's taken them “eight years working out how to record recipes, remembering to write it down”. I ask what her advice would be to micro bakers or people looking to set out on this journey. 

·         On baking - “do it as often as possible.”

·         Get to know your ingredients. “It’s easy to overlook ingredients, especially with sourdough and croissants. Monitor protein levels for doughs” and learn to be aware of and work with “variability. Be mindful of types of butter, they have different fat contents.”

·         Tweak and adapt. “We’re always tweaking, balancing heritage grains with consistency, balancing something looking good.”

·         “Focus on flavour.” Flora notes the “world of Instagram makes everything look so good”, but flavour is what truly matters.

·         “There’s a huge difference when you scale up” in terms of production. You need to be able to adapt to those demands.

Photo credit Kim Grant

Last October, Flora published her fourth Cookbook “Winter in the Highlands”, and this side of her work, writing and styling recipes also helps to spread the word, and enables her audience all over the UK to enjoy her recipes. She worked with an “amazing team of six talented women in a room” to pull the finished shots together, with her baby asleep in a moses basket out of shot while they worked – “maternity leave doesn’t happen when you’re self-employed”. They tested the full Christmas dinner recipe on the hottest day of the year, while she was heavily pregnant. The panettone recipe, which she very kindly shared with us on our Journal here, was something she developed with her colleague Angus, who was with her from the start and to whom this recipe is dedicated in memory. “The panettone police guard their recipes so secretly”, she remembers, “we loved developing this one”.

If you’d like to visit Dunkeld or are planning a trip to the area, Flora recommends also visiting the Taybank Hotel, where they have a fiddle night, good drinks, and a beautiful riverside garden in the summer. Stop by Redwood Wines for their legendary beef sandwiches, followed by one of the many beautiful walks in the area. Something else to look out for later this year is that some of Flora and James’ friends will be reopening Birnam Hotel, home to what they believe is the “largest sprung dance floor in Scotland!”. 

It's incredible to see what Flora, James and their team have achieved over the years, and heading towards their 10-year anniversary of Aran, we can’t wait to see how their evolution continues. 

You can find Aran Bakery at 2 Atholl Street, Dunkeld, Perthshire, PH8 0AR

Website: https://www.aran-bakery.com/

Instagram: @aranbakery

You can find LÒN Store at 4 High Street, Dunkeld, PH8 0AJ.

Website: https://www.lon-store.co.uk/

Instagram: @lonthestore

Flora’s Instagram

Flora’s latest cookbook, “Winter in the Highlands Eating, Drinking and Celebrating in Scotland”, Published by Quadrille, Hardback RRP £26, is available in Waterstones and all good independent bookstores.

Photo credit Laura Edwards