Spiralling fuel prices have forced an award-winning Perthshire business to cut jobs for the first time in their history.
Bakery firms have been hit hard by the ever-increasing cost of filling up at the pumps and Perth’s Tower Bakery is no exception.
They’ve seen the price of most basic ingredients rise by at least 10% in recent months as suppliers compensate for their own increased spend.
It’s a double whammy for the firm, run by husband and wife team Angela and Sandy McKinnon, who finance a fleet of 10 vans that deliver the Tower Bakery’s products daily throughout Scotland.
This week Mrs McKinnon was happy to back The Courier’s campaign to see a fuel duty regulator established in a bid to cut fuel prices.
While there have only been a handful of redundancies to date, she admitted that a reduction in fuel prices would release a little of the pressure upon the firm and other bakers across Scotland.
Tower Bakery was established in Abernethy in 1981, but soon outgrew its home, expanding into a new bakery on Shore Road in Perth.
It now has 11 shops in Perthshire, Angus and Clackmannanshire, offering more than 200 handmade products, and supplying stores and supermarkets throughout central Scotland.
Over the years, it has won a number of awards most recently a gold for its vegetarian pie at the World Scotch Pie Championships in Dunfermline this month.’Extremely hard’Fuel prices have hit businesses throughout the industry, however, and while Tower Bakery has so far resisted passing rises onto its customers, Mrs McKinnon admitted the government needs to act.
She said, “The rising fuel prices have affected us as much as everyone else.
“We have 10 delivery vans out on the road, delivering our products to Stirling and Brechin and all the places in between.”
She added, “The rise in prices means that costs us ever more, but it’s a price we have to absorb, as we can’t pass it on to the customer.
“The price of everything is going up and our suppliers are blaming the cost of fuel for the increases they are passing on to us.”
Mrs McKinnon admitted that had forced the business to make some very tough choices.
She said, “As a business, for the first time ever, we have had to cut back hours and put people on four-day weeks and make redundancies.
“We’ve been in business for 30 years and this is the first time we’ve had to take such drastic action.”
She added, “It’s been extremely hard to let people go. We need to see petrol prices come down and a fuel duty regulator would certainly be a start.”