Walk into a supermarket in south Wales and the Brace’s loaf is still there, sitting alongside the national brands. It’s a small thing, but it matters. Regional food producers that have survived long enough to earn shelf space at Tesco are rarer than they should be, and the ones that disappear tend not to come back.
Brace’s is not disappearing yet. But the last two years have been brutal.
The Newport-based bakery, which operates out of its Croespenmaen site in Caerphilly, has watched the market it was built around — standard sliced bread — continue its long structural decline. Volumes fell more than 15% in a single year. Costs kept rising: labour and energy alone added £2.5m to the bill over two years. The business swung from a healthy profit in 2023 to a significant loss, with more losses following in 2025. The auditors were clear about what that means. There is, in their words, a material uncertainty about whether the company can continue as a going concern.
The Pen-Y-Fan site in Oakdale has already closed. Fewer than 20 jobs were lost in that consolidation, with most staff transferring to Croespenmaen, but the direction of travel is visible. A two-site business became a one-site business. A business that once employed over 300 people is smaller than it was.
Boparan Private Office, the investment vehicle of food industry veteran Ranjit Boparan, has since taken over.
The Sourdough Bet
Before the takeover, Brace’s made a decision: they launched a sourdough brand.
Ernest 100% — four varieties, premium positioning, long-fermentation process — landed on shelves at Tesco and Asda across south Wales, and subsequently secured a national listing with Sainsbury’s. The company spent close to £1m converting part of the Croespenmaen bakery for sourdough production: temperature-controlled fermentation rooms, a redesigned production line.
This was not a cautious move. At the time, the business had £52,000 in cash and was heading toward a covenant breach with its lenders. Spending £1m on new capability in that context is either bold or reckless, depending on whether it works.
The strategic logic is hard to fault. Sourdough has grown 58% year-on-year in recent market data. Jason’s Sourdough barely existed a few years ago and is now the UK’s fourth-biggest bakery brand, threatening to overtake Kingsmill. The category is real, it’s growing, and it rewards brands that establish themselves early with major retailers.
A national Sainsbury’s listing for a Welsh regional bakery is genuinely significant. Retailers don’t hand those out freely. The launch did not go perfectly however, with a packaging redesign required within months of launch — not the impression you want to make when your entire pitch to a new retail partner rests on the credibility of a craft brand. The product is competing in a category where Jason’s already has scale, where the major national bakeries have NPD programmes running, and where the window for a regional challenger to stake out meaningful territory is narrowing.
The Sainsbury’s listing may be the most valuable thing Brace’s brings to BPO. Whether it survives the transition remains to be seen.
What Brace’s means for the wider Welsh economy
Wales has a food and drink manufacturing sector worth around £2bn annually, and it punches below its weight. The map of large-scale food processing operations in Wales has been contracting for years: factory closures, consolidations into English facilities, brands absorbed by national groups with no particular reason to maintain Welsh production.
Brace’s at Croespenmaen is not a massive operation by national standards — roughly 280 jobs, £34m in turnover. But in the communities around Caerphilly and the Valleys, alternatives for skilled food manufacturing employment in that geography are limited. Suppliers from flour, packaging, ingredients and logistics anchor locally to customers of that scale. When the anchor goes, the chain adjusts, and not in ways that are easy to reverse.
The question BPO will be asking is whether Croespenmaen can generate a return. BPO’s history in food manufacturing is not sentimental: sites that don’t perform get closed, capacity gets consolidated, brands get licensed or sold. Businesses will make decisions based on the thin-margins of food economics, but now Brace’s is no longer run from Wales by Welsh businesspeople. Its survival will be decided based on a spreadsheet in Birmingham.
The sourdough move, for all its financial recklessness in timing, may have changed that calculus. A business with a live national supermarket listing, a growing premium category, and an invested production capability at a recently consolidated single site is a more interesting acquisition than a declining wrapped-bread manufacturer. BPO has something to work with.
The staff at Croespenmaen have been through a site closure, a going concern qualification, a change of ownership, and a product launch that stumbled at the start. They deserve a chance to preserve food and industrial heritage in south east Wales.
