Picture a small mining village in Yorkshire, in the aftermath years of the Second World War. The Foster family were poor but staunch Methodist Christians. Arthur Foster with his wife Emily and three children, Audrey, Elizabeth and Donald lived a hardworking and respectable life in the tiny industrial village of Mapplewell. Some have likened them to the Yorkshire equivalent of the Waltons.

Emily was always busy. She was the village baker, unpaid other than by the gracious thanks and appreciation of a close-knit community. She had always baked for friends and neighbours, especially during the war years when everyone pooled rations to make the food go further.

But this was post war and the country was set for renewal. So in 1952 Emily Foster loaned a disused blacksmith’s shop from a friendly neighbour and converted it to a transport café.

Baking was the speciality and with one domestic gas oven Emily could bake two loaves at a time. There was no big entrepreneurial dream for Emily, just a desire to bake the best food and serve it with as much friendliness as it was possible to give, an ethos still to be found in the company today.

Her bakers were the members of her family, forced, but not unwilling to work before and after their paid employment elsewhere. For 7 years she baked and served. As her baking became more popular she added a further oven and expanded capacity to near bursting point.

In September 1959 the limited company was founded and a new bakery built on Blacker Road, Mapplewell. One by one family member’s “chores” at the bakery overtook their full time jobs and they joined the firm.

The café was somehow left behind in the focus on baked products.

A baker’s shop was fine but the family had this huge bakery to fill (though today’s bakery office is bigger!) Audrey printed flyers, which they distributed to households in the area and this started the door to door delivery service.

One day shortly after starting delivering a local shop keeper and caterers telephoned the bakery asking if the wholesale accounts were supplied. Deliveryman Donald Foster called the next day. Mr. Jones of Royston, Barnsley became Fosters first commercial account but when Don called to make his first sale Mr Jones bought the entire van full. Don wasn’t very popular when he went back to the bakery and asked everyone ready to leave, to start baking again.

Very shortly the company had a mobile shop, which stood on Barnsley’s famous Market Hill, three days a week. With the acquisition of two other bakeries in Barnsley the company expanded it’s number of shops. Through recommendation the number of commercial accounts increased.

In 1971 the bakery was again bursting at the seams for capacity. That is when the bakery moved to its current location on Towngate, Mapplewell. This bakery was expanded in 1980 and again in 1990.

In 1997 the company was again bursting at the seams and with, at the time, no more expansion land left at Towngate another warehouse was opened at Mapplewell Business Park, some 500 metres away.

The company now operates two manufacturing units and still has a handful of bakers’ shops in Yorkshire. The main business is supplying commercial accounts with fresh and frozen baked goods. Customers include major airlines, well known retail chains and caterers throughout Britain and Europe.

During 1992 the company made its first attempts at exporting with bread products being exported to several European countries. The company now even exports French bread to France.

There was some scepticism about freezing bread when Fosters started trials and in the early days it tasted dry and stale. It took several years to get the freezing of bread just right but eventually some well-known food gourmets failed to tell Fosters Bakery frozen and thawed bread from fresh. In 2003 the company has blast freezer space for over 10,000 loaves and, although the objective is to ship it not store it, there is storage capacity for about 36,000 loaves (or 200,000 bread rolls) on site plus a contract cold store.

In this growth, which sees the company now selling more than 1 million products a week, many of the top people in the company have made it by starting at the bottom. Sales Director William (Bill) Finnerty started at the age of 14 as a van drivers assistant. Directors John Foster and Ian Taylor are both grandparents of Emily Foster.

In the late 1990s the company won no fewer that 5 “golden wheat sheaf” awards. The baking industry “Oscars”

In 1999 the company started it’s first subsidiary. With Janet Woodward, Wellfoods was started to sell specialist baked products.

The story continues . . . . . .