A popular Liverpool bakery has shut its doors after 12 years with staff suddenly facing job losses. Baltic Bakehouse has officially closed its doors and its future remains uncertain.
One former staff member said she found out via a phone call. The former staff member, who asked to remain anonymous, told the ECHO she received a phone call from Samuel Henley, one of the business owners, to tell her that she no longer had a job at the Allerton Road branch.
According to the ECHO, the business has been closed since Thursday, April 10 but no update has been issued on whether the closure is permanent, and Mr Henley said he did not wish to comment.
The former staff member told the ECHO: “Basically the Allerton Road café closed last Thursday for a day and then our shifts were cancelled.
“Then we got a call in the afternoon saying ‘it’s Sam, the owner’, which was bizarre. Then he said it was closed with immediate effect.”
She claimed Mr Henley told her the sudden closure was due to “staffing and management issues”.
The ECHO contacted Mr Henley, who declined to comment on the closure and whether it was permanent.
On Instagram, the Baltic Bakehouse page does not feature any updates on the future of the stores and the company’s online shop page states “Sorry, this store is currently unavailable.”
The business opened in 2013 and offered loaves of bread, pastries, buns and other baked goods across Liverpool.
It had branches on Allerton Road and Bridgewater Street, as well as a bakery site in Wavertree which supplied wholesale baked goods to a number of businesses in Liverpool’s hospitality industry.
On its website, it reads: “Bread. It’s simple stuff made difficult. Most of us can knock up a half-decent loaf with a bit of practice. But, lately, bread’s been given a make-over, as celebrity chefs and boutique bakeries have been trying to reinvent it, rebrand it and repackage it – and as a result, try to turn it into something it’s not. Something fancy, elite and brought out for ‘special occasions’. Bread as a social statement.
“We wanted to do something different. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We wanted to give the people of Liverpool a daily loaf that they could rely on.”