Production Facility – Hackney Wick, London (E3 2NT)
Full-Time | Permanent
£32,000 – £42,000 depending on experience
5 days per week including one weekend day
Fantail is a growing group of antipodean cafés and catering operations with a central production facility based in East London, supplying multiple café sites and catering operations daily.
We’re building a modern antipodean bakery programme focused on high-quality café baking, operational consistency, and scalable production systems — inspired by the café cultures of New Zealand, Australia, California, and London.
Our food is comfort-driven, generous, café-focused, and designed to feel abundant and familiar rather than overly refined or restaurant-led. Think oversized muffins, nostalgic tray bakes, caramel slice, school cake, NYC cookies, coconut banana bread, rough puff pastries, morning buns, and elevated home-style baking made properly and at scale.
We’re looking for a Senior Baker / Bakery Production Lead to help shape and scale the bakery department as we continue to grow.
This is a hands-on production role for someone who enjoys organised production, modern café baking, and building systems that improve consistency, quality, and output.
This role would suit someone excited by helping build and shape a growing bakery operation rather than stepping into a fully finished one. It’s an opportunity to apply everything you’ve learned so far into a new challenge with real ownership, progression, and influence over the direction of the bakery programme.
We’re a collaborative team that works hard, moves quickly, and takes pride in producing great food consistently every day.
What You'll Be Doing
- Leading day-to-day bakery production within the wider central kitchen operation
- Managing and training a Junior Production Baker
- Taking ownership of bakery quality, consistency, and standards
- Expanding and improving our bakery range across café and catering operations
- Developing freeze-and-finish bakery products for café sites
- Improving bakery workflow, systems, and organisation
- Managing bakery inventory and ordering
- Working closely with the founder on product development and category growth
- Supporting savoury production with laminated or rough puff doughs where required
You’ll work with modern production equipment including Rational ovens, sheeters, planetary mixers, blast chillers, and vac pack systems.
What We're Looking For
You should be:
- Highly organised and systems-minded
- Calm, efficient, and able to maintain quality and pace in a structured production environment
- Detail-oriented with strong baking instinct
- Collaborative, adaptable, and team-oriented
- Comfortable taking ownership and leading by example in a hands-on production environment
You’ll likely have experience in:
- Bakery production within a café, wholesale, or central kitchen environment
- Modern antipodean or café-style baking
- Leading a section, small team, or production operation
Formal pastry qualifications are less important to us than strong operational capability, organisation, consistency, and attention to detail.
We’re looking for someone who genuinely enjoys being part of a collaborative kitchen culture, shares knowledge openly, notices problems before they become issues, and gets excited by improving systems and products over time.
What Success Looks Like
- Improved bakery consistency and production standards
- Expanded internal bakery production while reducing reliance on bought-in products
- Stronger bakery systems, workflow, and freeze-and-finish processes to support growth
- Growth across core categories while maintaining quality and operational simplicity
What We Offer
- Daytime-focused shifts
- Real ownership and autonomy
- Direct involvement in shaping a growing bakery programme
- Collaborative, calm, and ambitious production environment
- Modern production equipment
- Progression opportunities as the business grows
- Opportunity to grow into a future Head Baker / Bakery leadership role
Schedule
- Full-time permanent role
- 5 days per week including one weekend day
- Flexibility required as the business continues to grow
If you’re excited by modern antipodean café baking and want the opportunity to help build something ambitious, collaborative, and quality-driven from the ground up, we’d love to hear from you.
Pay: £32,000.00-£42,000.00 per year
Work Location: In person
