Loaf.ly

14/09/2023

Let’s find this guy!

At 19:49 on Wednesday 13th September he snuck into our kitchen unit at Caxton Works in Canning Town and stole our chef’s new electric scooter - which he’d only had a matter of days - and other equipment. As he was leaving he knocked into a few items which alerted the guys inside who chased him out and caught up with him, where he threatened to use a knife before scooting off.

Please share and get in touch with us or the police if you have any information or know who this is 🙏🏼

17/01/2023

A little note from the customer service team to me, their unofficial enquiry forward-oner.

I’m just here to help get all your fresh weekly bread, milk, eggs and pastries to your door - but very happy to take questions on sofas, rugs and beds now I’ve got a decent mug to sip from as I hit forward ☕️

Thanks (unofficial) team, Joanne & Zoe!

🛋️ 🥖

16/01/2023

…and counting! 🌳

Across our businesses we’re replanting trees through our partnership with

We plant 1 tree for each .ly_ delivery

We plant 1 tree for every 5 .co coffees

Just one of the ways we’re keeping the environment at the heart of our businesses 🌳❤️

15/11/2022

Back online!

Our new Saturday service starts this week 🎉

Much of all the things you love are still here, and many dozens of prices have been lowered across the whole range 👌🏼

Receive your favourite items every 1, 2, 3 or 4 weeks with our super flexible and no-commitment subscriptions 🗓️

Orders need to be placed by midday Wednesday each week for collection or delivery.

We now plant a tree for every delivery we make with Eden Project reforestation programme 🌳

A small delivery fee of £2.50 applies to orders under £15.

02/11/2022

Promised update for you ☝🏼

Ben and Daniel

25/10/2022

Quick update for those of you not on our mailing list - we’re still here!

Sorry for the silence… things have just been rather busy behind the scenes and no one has yet managed to add more hours to a day.

Thanks for hanging around - we’ll be back on top of the socials in the next few weeks :)

Ben & Daniel

01/07/2022

We’ve changed the name, yet stayed the same!

We’re super excited to announce that the previous Loaf.ly cafe will be reopening under its sister-company - Well Bean!

As we expand the feel-good, do-good Well Bean brand into a second location in Canning Town we also refocus Loaf.ly’s ambitions to bring more fresh groceries to more doors, more often.

We can’t wait to share the new coffee and chocolate shop with you - see you at the opening on the 9th July for the Caxton Works Open Day!

Follow for coffee and chocolate updates, and keep up to date with fresh grocery deliveries by following .ly_

13/06/2022

Sun is shining and the breadmobile is back 🚲☀️🙌🏼

05/06/2022

25/05/2022

Guess who’s back?!

Hint: it’s us! 👋🏼

Loaf.ly 3.0 launches today with our first deliveries coming your way from the 1st June.

This comes with some changes, so those of you who knew us before, please know we’re the same inside at the core but we’ve just done our hair differently.

We deliver to everyone in our delivery zone up to 3 days a week - Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can choose from 3 times a week up to once a fortnight. We still deliver from 4am-midday and are working with more developments to secure early morning access. We’ll still not knock before 8am though unless we have your explicit permission - no early wake-up calls here!

We’ve introduced a new range of more accessible products - Essential.ly Loaf.ly. We’ve not taken our focus away from the environment but are aware of the difficulties facing household budgets. You can still find our amazingly rich and creamy, barista-style milks and our freshly-baked goods though! Perfect to enjoy weekly or as a special treat.

We also have our free-from range - yep, you guessed it - Alternative.ly Loaf.ly offers our range of dairy-free milks, gluten-free bakes and even plant-based honey.

We’ve had to pause our referral scheme and take down our app in the short term as we reallocate our resources to be able to provide a better service to everyone without spreading ourselves too thinly. We’ll also start implementing our no-return charges because it’s a very important part of the service and is the only financially-viable way for us to operate a consistent service to all customers.

Our pick up service isn’t yet available and the coffee shop is getting a revamp - sit tight for announcements on some exciting news on that front next month…

If you find any typos, broken links or have any general feedback on the website please let me know 🙃

We can’t wait to see you all again.

Bounce Back Ben has landed ✌🏼

09/05/2022

Good evening ladies and gentlemen,

On behalf of Loaf.ly it is my pleasure to welcome you back onboard our zero-waste service, non-stop to London’s Royal Docks.

Please ensure items are rinsed and stowed securely in your Loaf.ly bag to expedite the return process.

All internet-enabled devices will soon be able to be put in delivery mode.

Once online, please take a moment to review our in-ride procedures. There are 3 drop offs on this service - one at the start of the week, one in the middle, and one at the tail-end. For those frequent foodies, please take the time to familiarise yourself with the new service as your old delivery days may be behind you.

A copy of our in-service magazine can be found in your digital pocket once you sign up to our mailing list on the Loaf.ly homepage.

Night riders - please prepare the bags, bottles, boxes and bikes for departure and cross check.

09/05/2022

Thank you to everyone who has supported us - financially, physically, mentally and emotionally.

It's exciting to be able to announce our delivery service will soon be back up and running! There will be some changes to the service but once it's finalised I'll of course be letting you all know. We'll keep you posted on the socials and via our mailing list which you can sign up to on the Loaf.ly homepage.

Our coffee shop will remain closed for a little while longer whilst it goes through a makeover of its own. Our insurers are still working through the claim, the police still hunting for one of the named suspects of the break-in, and our landlords still in discussion with us about our security concerns.

We've also been accepted onto an accelerator later this year to turbo charge our eagerly-anticipated delivery expansion. We'll be running a crowd investment fundraiser later this year - I know a number of you were interested so it'll really not be long now...

Looking forward to seeing you all again soon!
..with loaf,
Ben & the Loaf.ly team

Loaf.ly - lovely new business in Caxton Works was forced to close until fu… Paulina Liutkeviciene needs your support for Help Loaf.ly get back on their feet

05/05/2022

B: "Now that I've joined up with Charlie it's starting to feel like a blessing in disguise, though I wish it had been a cheaper life lesson. We'd already been talking about merging our background operations because it's so difficult to run a café by yourself. If you're open for 12 hours, that's 2 shifts. Also, the suppliers we work with, minimal orders are through the roof. But there's strength in numbers. When you're running a cafe, the back-end operations are identical – staff, suppliers, overheads – and if you don't have 2 or 3 locations it's really hard to make a profit.

"We've not merged our businesses, but now we have the same team running both coffee shops. We have very similar values and interact with our staff in a very similar way, and there are synergies. Charlie's fully plant-based, I'm vegetarian, but I have a big plant-based selection, so our suppliers can cross-over. But Charlie has a vision for his company and I have a vision for mine, and there's no reason why we can't still pursue those things with the same operation. I think we're doing it in a really healthy way. Now we've got the chocolate factory, the essentials delivery service and a couple of coffee shops and everything just works. It's also allowed us both to take a little more time off and not neglect ourselves, our families and our friends for a change."

C: "We have each other's backs, and we've both found some great people – Marianna, who's from Argentina, and Vadim – who treat it like it's their own business, which is why we both want to give them actual shares in our companies because people like that are so so rare. Which makes us feel that we've had some really good luck, as well as the bad."

Ben and Charlie, working together at The Well Bean Co. Café in Royal Docks.

The crowd funder for Charlie's business has now closed, but the one for Loaf.ly (which will re-open once security in the area has been tightened up) is still accepting donations to help them rise.

Here's the link again in case you can help:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-loafly-get-back-on-their-feet?fbclid=IwAR0hkNaQjhPykPJXWLGQfImBZotwW9zntTsDQWJWs5pZgHtxK3d39uHD064

05/05/2022

(2/2) "I couldn't believe the devastation from all the water and smoke damage. I felt really angry, like someone I loved had attacked me, or had torched themselves. Disbelief too. We'd worked so hard and got through the lockdowns, and having some bad eggs among the staff. Everything had just come together and now this? I remember thinking 'I know there's no lotus without mud, but really? Just give me a bit more lotus because I've had a lot of mud!' I also thought 'I can't see myself picking this back up again. It's so big that I don't know where to start.' It was all too much. Luckily just the week before I'd done a refurb and fire-proofed everything, so the fire didn't spread. There are people living above the café so that literally saved lives. There's not a lot I'll cry about but I cried that night and the next morning when I woke up too. Oscar just cradled me and said 'I'm so sorry, I don't know what to say'. It still makes me cry now when I think about it.

"Residents round here set up a crowdfunder for us the next day, and a lovely policeman who was there on the night of the fire managed it. But it took a good few months for me to get over it, physically and mentally. I paid everybody (except myself, as usual) until the money ran out. Then the insurance finally came through, although they only covered a small fraction of the losses. Eventually my dimmed Olympic torch got brighter again, and I got a creative vision about how to rebuild and redesign it to be even better. But, even after scrubbing literally everything, from floor to ceiling, it still took 9 coats of white paint to cover all the smoke-damage infused into the walls. We were quoted 20 grand for that, so we did it ourselves for about a grand. We had to learn how to use a scissor-lift for the ceiling and Oscar has a fear of heights. So he was up there with me going 'I hate you, but I love you and this is why I'm doing it'. Then Ben and I decided to join forces. (See earlier & following posts.) We'd both experienced challenges, we both wanted support and had knowledge and have a really good work ethic. So we thought 'why don't we work together?'

Charlie, at his Well Bean Co Café, Royal Docks.

05/05/2022

(1/2) "Like Ben, I used to work in the financial world and I was terribly bored. I'd struggled with my mental health from a very young age, which meant that I came out of school with nothing. Then I got into a self-destructive space with drugs and alcohol which obviously made my mental health deteriorate even more. I was really suffering from anxiety which developed into depression. I managed to get a job at a bank, despite having no qualifications, and worked my way up, but I was still miserable. Then I discovered that eating only plant-based food was drastically healing a lot of my anxiety, and I started to understand the connection between the gut and the brain and how we feel. In my spare time, I'd set up this website – mymentalhealth.org.uk – to share my experiences and allow others to share theirs, and I was going into schools talking about mental health. But I also really missed chocolate, so I built a shed in the garden of the house I was sharing in the Isle of Dogs and became a nutty professor, working late into the night constructing my own mad little machines to make the best vegan chocolate. It took me a couple of years to perfect it, then I was taking it into work and people were like 'Mate, you could sell this!' I realised that making plant-based chocolate, which is all about food and mood, could become a fun business. That's how, 5 years ago, The Well Bean Co. was born.

"It started off as a chocolate factory, then evolved into a plant-based café, thanks to Bow Arts who own all the commercial spaces down here and were my guardian angels. We'd gone from 2 staff to 8. I'd met my partner Oscar, who'd started working in the café alongside Marianna, my chocolate goddess, and we had this really cool production plan and all our ducks in a row. I was like 'This is it guys! This is the dream. Everything's perfect!' Then, in October of last year, this brand new tiny stone-grinding chocolate-making machine, which we needed to do small test batches and had arrived just the day before, shorted out during the night and set our café on fire."

Charlie, at The Well Bean Co. Café in the Royal Docks (1/2)

04/05/2022

"I'm known as 'Bad-luck Ben'. I was working in finance and had been about to start a new job in April 2020 when the pandemic hit and the job disappeared overnight. So instead I started helping to deliver local food boxes for a café, and thought 'There's a business model here!' A friend had some cash so we started a business delivering the basics with zero waste – fresh bread in cotton bags, glass-bottled milk (including alternatives like oat or almond) and eggs in reusable cartons – to all the apartment buildings here in the Royal Docks. We launched in July-August 2020 and called it Loaf.ly – because I love puns, I use a lot of them, and I wanted it to be fun and personal. It took off really quickly. Everyone seemed to love it. But the day after I received my new cargo bike, I snapped my Achilles tendon and was told it would be 12 weeks before I could walk again. Then, on Valentines Day 2021, some kids broke into my unit by smashing a window and stole my bike, which felt so disheartening and invasive. After that, because the landlord of the unit we use up in Canning Town said it had to be a café too, we opened a little coffee and pastries shop alongside the delivered-basics and Loaf.ly became non-stop and all-consuming. I was working 7 days a week and only getting 3 to 4 hours sleep a night, but everything was lovely and going really well. Then, on March 12th this year there was another break-in and this time everything was either stolen or trashed. I cried so hard it was ugly, and I thought 'I don't know if I can pick myself up again from this'. It almost felt like a family member had died. 2 years of blood, sweat and tears, and it was just in pieces all over the floor.

"But the local community were amazing - they started up a crowd funder for us the very next day, and my friends and family rallied round to help too - even though I'd barely had time to speak to them for the past 2 years. I've still got Vadim, who's half-Ukrainian, half Bela-Russian, and is an amazing help, and I've teamed up with Charlie who owns the The Well Bean Co. and had his own disaster. So now I'm feeling lucky too."

Ben, in the Well Bean Café in Royal Docks.