Missing bakery baskets ‘serious issue in NI’

Every year, several million pounds worth of specialist bakery equipment goes missing, often misappropriated by third parties or used for other purposes.

Created by Bakers Basco Limited, the Omega basket has become the industry standard – widely recognised as the equipment of choice for transporting bread for bakeries, shops and a host of other catering facilities and events.

Designed as a one-stop merchandising solution, Bakers Basco brought together a team of experts including bakers, logistics companies, retailers, equipment manufacturers and materials scientists, to ensure the baskets were not only sturdy, but could be used as a merchandising unit. Cost-effective for retailers, while also being sustainable and environmentally friendly, the baskets last approximately eight years.

Bakers Basco was established in 2006, a joint venture between five of the UK’s biggest bakeries – Allied Bakeries, Hovis, Fine Lady Bakeries, Frank Roberts & Sons and Warburtons. Their aim was to create a new bread basket they could all use to deliver products to their customers.

Starting off as a small idea, Bakers Basco’s original mission was to design, source and manage a new bread basket which would allow for significant cost savings in terms of the design, raw material procurement and production of both the basket and the dolly.

It has since grown to become a huge operation, with a pool of five million baskets and 0.5 million dollies, the kit of choice for bakeries right across the UK.

At the same time, a recovery team was set up to collect the equipment that had ended up in the wrong places, which hadn’t been returned to the rightful sites. Such is the scale of this issue, the recovery team is now a fully-fledged investigations team, dedicated to locating and recovering lost, stolen or discarded Omega baskets.

Not a unique problem for England, Bakers Basco set up a dedicated investigations team for Northern Ireland in early 2024. Earlier this month it was revealed that over 2900 pieces of this essential bakery equipment was subsequently recovered in Northern Ireland last year.

As National Investigations Manager at Bakers Basco, Stacey Brown told NR, the issue is one they take very seriously.

“I head up a team of officers who investigate a very broad, wide-ranging spectrum of issues,” said Stacey.

“It’s not just one channel we are seeking equipment via, we visit bakeries, shops, we go to events, festivals, markets, Christmas markets, sporting events, anywhere you can have food and any premises with food or catering. We have thousands of locations and data.

“There is that much equipment out there, it can really end up anywhere. We have also been to film sets and tv sets.”

With anonymous leads coming through to them, Stacey said they have carried out briefings with drivers to see what information they are getting and so they can understand the importance of getting the equipment back to where it should be.

“Trying to convey the seriousness of the issue is quite difficult sometimes,” said Stacey.

“Everybody buys bread, but nobody thinks about how the bread gets to the shops you are buying it from. If you lose thousands and thousands of pounds worth of equipment, that is eventually going to push the price of bread up.

“We do not want to lose that equipment, we want to get it back to bakeries and keep the costs down for customers.”

TO READ THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH STACEY BROWN IN THE 2025 NEIGHBOURHOOD RETAILER YEARBOOK AND MARKETING GUIDE, CLICK HERE