Jason Geary keeps his mother in a locked, temperature-controlled room. Weighing in at four tonnes, she sleeps in a huge covered vat and is fed a strict diet of flour and water every four hours.
She is, Jason cheerfully explains, around 45 years old and answers to the name of ‘Sidney’.
He is, of course, talking about his ‘mother’ dough – the sourdough starter that’s the beating heart of his 119-year-old family bakery in Leicestershire.
Or should that be grandfather dough as Sidney is named after Jason’s late Grandpa, the man from whom he learned his craft, and it is something to behold.
Volcano-like, it’s an oozing, sticky mass of beige-coloured bubbles that seem to be trying to escape the cavernous container holding it all in.
Every day, Jason and his team put aside ‘enough to fill four family cars’ – which they then combine with dough to kick-start fermentation for the next batch of bread. ‘It’s like a real-life Tamagotchi,’ says Jason, 53, with a grin. ‘Remember them? You have to feed it and really look after it, give it some love.
‘If you don’t, it won’t make the right bacteria, which would be a disaster for the bread.’
You may not have heard of Jason, or indeed his mother dough, but you’ll certainly know his bread: one million loaves of it are sold in supermarkets up and down the country every week.
Within a few short years, Jason’s Sourdough has become the fourth-biggest brand in the nation, after Warburtons, Hovis and Kingsmill.
But this is no lowly loaf. Such is the hysteria, it’s become something of a bread-lovers’ obsession – and a status symbol in middle class pantries.
On TikTok, videos abound of empty supermarket shelves, as fans bemoan the bread – which comes in seven varieties – regularly selling out. Some admit to bulk-buying it when they find it in stock and freezing it, so they never run short.
So what makes Jason’s Sourdough so special?
At £2 a pop, it’s a far cry from the artisan breads sold at independent bakeries, with their hole-studded fluffy centres and golden crusts, which retail for between £4 and – if you want a 2kg sourdough from Gail’s bakery in London – £13 apiece.
Nor could it ever be classified as ‘sourfaux’; the name given to budget sourdough breads commonly found in supermarkets, which use artificial yeast, preservatives and sugar to extend shelf life. Rather, Jason is making proper sourdough for the masses: using three basic ingredients to achieve the same tangy flavour but on a much bigger, more accessible scale.
‘My objective was to get a small percentage of the British public moved from everyday bread, full of chemicals and additives, over to proper sourdough,’ he says.
‘I wanted to create sourdough for every day; not just for the odd occasion, an evening meal or a weekend treat.’
As Britain’s sourdough boom – part of the turning tide against ultra-processed foodstuffs and a return to wholesome, nutritious ingredients – continues apace, it’s no surprise to see this speciality bread outselling sandwich loaves.
Sourdough differs from other breads because it uses wild yeast and bacteria – found in the starter – rather than added yeast to make it rise, through a slow, natural process of fermentation.
There are no added ingredients – just flour, water and salt – meaning it’s linked with better heart health and blood sugar management, and the live bacteria is said to make it easier to digest.
The UK sourdough market is expected to reach £230million by 2030, with spending rising 10 per cent year-on-year.
The key to marketing it to the masses, however, as Jason discovered, was making slight adjustments to the product. His first challenge was reducing the size of the holes – a result of bubbles of gas during fermentation – found in sourdough bread.
‘If you’re making toast in the morning and you’re spreading butter on it, the last thing you want is for it to drip through on to your trousers or your dress,’ he says. ‘We tried to minimise those holes by making the bread closer-textured. Some butter might still drip through, but it’s not going to ruin your outfit.’
He was also determined his sourdough would be sold sliced – music to the ears of anyone who’s ever wrestled a bread knife through a stubborn, unbreachable crust. The crust itself was another focus. With supermarkets requiring a five-day shelf life, Jason’s bread has to spend slightly less time in the oven than classic sourdough – making it less likely to dry out, but at the expense of that distinctive outer crunch.
The softer crust doesn’t bother Jason, he insists. He – like many fans – prefers to toast his sourdough anyway, which he says ‘revitalises the ingredients’.
Seeing how big the brand has become, five years after he launched it two weeks before the Covid-19 lockdown, is, he says, ‘very surreal’.
Today, he employs 770 people, 650 of whom are bakers, across two – and soon to be three – multimillion-pound bakeries in the East Midlands, with an annual turnover that exceeds £67million.
But the Geary family’s aspirations weren’t always so grand. The first bakery was founded in 1906 by his great-grandfather, Charles, at the family home in Ratby, a village near Leicester. Jason’s grandfather, Sidney, took over, and his father, Charles, after that. Growing up in the same house, Jason says baking was ‘in the blood’.
‘I used to come home from school every day, drop my bag off, get my whites on and go and work in the bakery.’ For him, the joy of his craft is in the alchemy. ‘There’s something magical and mysterious about it,’ he admits.
‘You take a set of ingredients, mix them up and over several hours you end up with this incredible creation. I still feel that excitement today.’
He took over as Master Baker in 2005 and, with eyes on expansion, moved the family business to a new site in nearby Barrow upon Soar in 2009.
By 2013, Geary’s was making loaves for Aldi and had grown to employ 83 people. In 2017, they invested £15million in a second site in Leicester.
And then, the following year, inspiration struck. ‘I felt there was a gap in the market,’ he says.
‘Sourdough was getting big, but not everyone has the time – or the money – to go to a bakery to get their loaf. I wanted to make it properly, the traditional way, but deliver it at scale.’
The brand quickly grew beyond Jason’s ‘Straight-Up Sourdough’ to rolls, protein-packed bread and the popular ‘Ciabattin’, a mash-up of ciabatta and sourdough designed to fit in a toaster.
Today, on an industrial estate near Leicester, the bakery is busy.
The process starts with Sidney, which Jason acquired from another baker 15 years ago, when it was already 30 years old.
‘The temperature and humidity, and how we ferment the final dough, is one of the secrets of the business,’ he says. ‘Everybody does it in slightly different ways.’
The process ends when the loaves are cooled, sliced, checked over with automatic cameras and fired into the packaging.
It’s an impressively-slick operation, and set to be replicated at a new £35million bakery site in Leicester, which will double production from next month.
As for the man at the helm, he likes to take the train down to London and stroll around bakeries, picking up ideas.
‘I don’t just eat our bread; I buy all kinds of sourdough,’ he says. ‘I love chatting to other bakers, seeing what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.’
Whatever happens next for this family business, it seems set – like Jason’s supermarket sourdough – to rise and rise.