Cdt Sidoli (Welshpool) Ltd

Over 65 years ago my father had a bakery in the centre of Shrewsbury. It was locally famous for its wonderful artisan breads, morning goods and speciality cream cakes. Ahead of his time he invited bakers to demonstrate their skills to his staff from both Switzerland and Denmark. These amazing cakes were made in the bakery at the rear of the shop and sold fresh from the oven to his customers.

I started my training as a chef and then went to work for my father and carried out my training under these skilled bakers. I had a passion for making desserts and wanted to use these skills to make only high quality products but on a larger scale. Over 35 years ago my opportunity came up as a small run down factory unit came to the market. It was on a very large green-field site, in a beautiful mid Wales valley with views to Long Mountain and the world renowned National Trust Powis Castle. After much hard work to get the factory up to a good standard our first in line pie machine was installed. The engineer suggested altering the recipes to suit the machine. He was told in no uncertain terms that his machine had to work with our recipes and not the other way around! That principle has now remained in place for over 35 years!

My wife originally set up and ran the laboratory, testing our ingredients coming in and our products going out with this attention to detail being almost unheard of at the time for a factory of that size. Again a principal we have maintained to this very day!

Over these years we have remained at the forefront of development, only using the highest quality ingredients and using the best traditional production methods to achieve the high standard of products for our very discerning customers.

I firmly believe it is the confidence our customers have had in our ability to produce high quality hand finished products combined with the fantastic team that we have developed over the years that has enabled us to grow to the size we are today