Kennedy & Rhind 'join the dots' to relaunch artisan bagel brand

The Heaton based bakery, Dot Bagel saw its doors close in October of last year only to be bought out by Kennedy & Rhind in December. Now well into January, I decided to catch up with Kennedy & Rhind’s owner Stuart Young, to find out what’s in store for the two companies.

Asking how business has been since Dot Bagel reopened its doors, Suart said, “we’re lucky that we have interests largely in busy outlets, both through our joint ventures, and also through our two core pubs. But we, like the rest of the industry are facing this tailwind coming in our direction of rising prices, spiralling utilities, rising wages, and we seem to be on a daily basis, looking at the acute balance between what we can charge to recover some of those increased costs and what we can’t… Where’s the point where you charge a bit more, and you end up taking quite a lot less because you become too expensive?”

In spite of the economic landscape, during our interview, I gathered that there is an optimistic outlook for the brand’s future, however, under new ownership, it seems likely that Dot Bagel will be cautious in its strides for growth.

Discussing the company’s rapid expansion under its previous ownership, I asked if Kennedy and Rhind had hopes of expanding in a similar fashion. Stuart said: “we want to get everything proven and running smoothly. Of course, we’re integrating it into the existing Kennedy & Rhind business. And, we’re starting to introduce other Kennedy & Rhind goodies to sell alongside the bagels.

“So a lot of it’s about proving the existing products whilst trialling new Kennedy & Rhind ones. As we feel there is more to be had there. From a delivery point of view, although they were delivering from Acorn road, and Chillingham Road, we’re covering the same area of just from Chillingham road.”

As the two companies have very distinct identities, I had to ask how the two teams were integrating. Stuart answered that, “It’s been relatively seamless, Kennedy & Rhind is going through a few changes, as we stand at the moment anyway, we’re actually vacating the cafe in Jesmond to concentrate more on supplying through Dot Bagel and through other outlets that we have.

“Unfortunately, that was one thing we’ve done that hasn’t proven to be profitable and has never really managed to hit the critical mass in terms of turnover. But we have an exciting new project, which we’ll be talking about soon, where a lot of the team from there will be going so everybody will be staying with us. They’re just moving on.”

Thus far, Kennedy & Rhind has taken a relatively hands off approach in the running of Dot Bagel with Stuart adding: “we were fortunate in securing a couple of the key employees and team members who did the hard work for Dot Bagel. Our connection came initially as we looked into expanding our capacity for baking. I quickly realised that that wasn’t going to work.

“we felt that we could acquire what were the key assets (of Dot Bagel) which were the equipment to bake, the trade name and the following on social media which has been great. Because this is very much a brand about social media and the social media generation.”

I was keen to find out if the company had aspirations to revitalise and rescue other distressed brands and bakeries across the North East. Stuart answered, “We’re always keeping an eye out on what may well be available. We have looked at others in the last year, none have been the right fit in terms of what we were looking for.

“But certainly, yes, we would consider it if the right opportunity came along, it’s certainly something we would happily look at. We feel there’s a lot more legs, particularly to Kennedy & Rhind and the produce. But we are a little limited by our production kitchen at the moment, and feel that if we had somewhere a little bigger, we could do a great deal more.”

By Mark Adair – Correspondent, Bdaily