The mobile bakery story begins…

From the Swiss army to a back yard of a bakery in a small coastal town in southern Ukraine - the Bake for Ukraine mobile bakery journey begins.

Our first look at the mobile bakery

This began as a dream. A dream of empowering Ukrainian bakers not just to feed people in need, but to bake the best quality hand made sourdough bread, the kind of bread Ukrainian families always used to enjoy, before the grey uniformity of Soviet mass production stamped out any vestiges of nationhood and tradition.

Day one of Russia’s full scale invasion - and millions of Ukrainians rushed to defend their country. Some with weapons, others with whatever their best skills and ingenuity had to offer. For Maria, Olena, Mykola and Olga, it was the deep knowledge and expertise which came from decades working in the Ukrainian food industry. Even from abroad, their energy was immediately directed to helping Ukraine. And so it began - the tireless effort to raise money to help small bakeries give away free bread to people who’d been driven from their homes, who’d fled occupation, lost jobs and farms and livelihoods. And beyond that - to help educate the wider world about Ukrainian bread culture, sharing recipes and putting on workshops and getting bakeries to make and sell the traditional palyanytsya sourdough around the world - including Germany, France, Denmark and the UK.

Palyanytsya sourdough at DOU Odesa

The team soon found bakeries in Odesa, Kyiv, Bucha, Kherson and Kharkiv to support with regular monthly donations - offering them the chance to buy ingredients and fuel, pay salaries and running costs. But the energy crisis and months of blackouts in the winter of 2022 presented yet another challenge - how to get fresh bread to people who were suddenly without any of the usual facilities of everyday life - after the relentless Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure cut power and water supplies to millions, and plunged Ukrainian towns and cities into darkness. The electricity cuts affected the bakeries too, unable to power ovens and fridges.

Generators in Odesa, December 2022

As streets slowly filled with the hum of a myriad generators and the acrid smell of diesel in the air, the Bake for Ukraine team searched for an even more flexible solution to future food supply. The answer lay in Berlin - where baker and stalwart supporter Florian Domberger operated out of a large mobile bakery which dated back several decades. A thousand of them were built by the Swiss Army in the 1970s - and once Maria began researching them, she found out that around a hundred of these bakeries had been donated to Ukraine by a Swiss charity around 20 years ago. Most of them were stripped out and no longer fit for baking, but Maria felt sure there must be at least one, which was still in decent working order. She scoured the internet as often as she could: at one point she thought she had located one in Kyiv, but then it turned out to need too many repairs to be viable - it was so disappointing. The very next day - as Maria typed the search terms into Google yet again - an advert popped up from a baker in Izmail, putting one up for sale, just three hours from Maria and Olena’s home city of Odesa. It was clearly meant to be.

I decided to try and raise some money for it, after seeing how successful fundraising efforts for Ukraine on Twitter seemed to be. I didn’t think we would get anything like the full £15,000 which it would cost to buy and repair the Izmail vehicle - so I posted what I felt was a modest but ambitious target of £5,000 to raise on Just Giving. It was going quite well when suddenly, just two days after putting the page up, donations suddenly flooded in, emails popping up almost every few minutes ‘someone donated to your Just Giving’ - it was absolutely incredible. I knew someone well known must have linked to it but I couldn’t work out who - until later that night, when we were already almost at £15,000, someone told me Jay Rayner - columnist and restaurant critic at the Observer - had posted a link in his Sunday newspaper review, after seeing my post about the fundraiser on Instagram. It was one of the many acts of incredible kindness which we have witnessed on our bakery journey - kindness for which we are all eternally grateful.

I had already been on several trips to Ukraine, taking equipment for bakeries as well as combat medical supplies and some other help for charity groups - and I had met Maria and our fantastic Odesa bakers in October of ‘22. I managed to get permission to take a month off work to help purchase the mobile bakery and get it started on its journey - stay tuned here to find out what happens next.