Bretzel Bakery, best known for its base in Portobello, recorded a profit of €180,000 in 2024, amid “steady growth” emerging from the pandemic.
After a loss in 2021 of €47,000, profits have widened at the bakery, which recorded a profit of €301,000 in 2022, €236,000 in 2023 and €180,456 last year, new filings show. Revenues at the bakery have grown beyond their pandemic levels, to about €6 million in 2024.
More than 90 per cent of its sales were driven by business-to-business supply, it said.
William Despard acquired the bakery in 2000, financing it with a loan against his family home. He said the acquisition was his “way out of corporate engineering”.
READ MORE
[ Bretzel Bakery owner: ‘The Irish have been dumbed down to just want white pan’Opens in new window ]
“The original plan,” Mr Despard said, “was to buy the bakery for five years and see if I could put in a management team. At the time, I was naive enough to think I might even go back to engineering.”
Mr Despard is still involved in the day-to-day operation of the business, currently managing its storefront bakery and cafe in Portobello.
The company celebrated a disputed 150th anniversary in 2020 – with local historians and experts yet to land on a specific year for the founding of the bakery, saying it was either in 1870s or in the 1880s.
Bretzel’s owner acquired fellow Dublin-based bakery Le Levain at the end of 2019, just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, integrating its production into their Harold’s Cross Bakery.
The bakery was hit heavily by the pandemic, with sales dipping by “more than 70 per cent” in the first few weeks of lockdowns. Many of the multinational corporations the bakery supplied shut their offices and the vast majority of Le Levain’s customer base shuttered their doors too.
Bretzel expanded its supply to SuperValu stores in response. “Suddenly we had no hospitality business, and we had been very focused on workplace campaigns, so we had to pivot,” Mr Despard said, crediting his management staff for facilitating the move. The bakery grew from supplying one SuperValu store pre-pandemic to supplying nine by 2020.
It benefited as well from the growing popularity of sourdough bread, with Mr Despard saying that “Ray D’Arcy publicising his failed stories of making sourdough [ ...] did more for the real bread movement in Ireland than probably anything else.”
Bretzel Bakery recovered its pre-Covid turnover levels after the “rollercoaster” pandemic, and has been “growing steadily since”. Turnover in 2024 was in the region of €6 million. “More than 90 per cent of the business is supplying to other businesses, and if you take bread sales alone it would be above 95 per cent.”
During the year, the company acquired Cork-based bakery Arbutus Bread and its 18 staff from a friend of Mr Despard, the retiring Michelin Star-winning baker Declan Ryan, who was “extremely generous” in guidance and training in the early days of his ownership.
Despard is hopeful for the future, with the multi-award winning bakery – which employed 50 people in 2024 – standing to benefit from developments in Portobello, with a growing professional clientele “in bicycle-delivery range of the shop”.
