Former refugees are baking their way to jobs in an industry desperately short of staff. Kim Knight meets The Bread Collective's first graduates.
Security smells like bread.
On shiny stainless steel benches, satiny pillows of dough are being pushed and punched. In four hours, they will be warm, white loaves. In four weeks, their makers will present CVs to potential employees and - fingers crossed - find paid jobs baking bread.
Some of the women in this room have been teachers, doctors or students. Others have never been allowed to go to school. They were born in Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Iran. Every former refugee has a different story, but every story starts in the same place: fear of persecution.
"Before I was a doctor. Gynaecology. Twenty years, I work in hospitals in Afghanistan. Surgeries, tubal ligations, appendectomies . . . "
Hasina adds yeast and salt to a bowl of flour. Then water. Slowly, slowly. She brings it together with her hand and tells me her husband was a doctor too. I can't quite catch what she says next. Taliban? Yes. Her husband was kidnapped by members of the Islamic fundamentalist group. It took her three years to find him; $100,000 to free him. It is too dangerous for them to live in Afghanistan.
"When I come here, I get very high depression. One day, I want to finish my life. Everything here is difficult. No car, no money, my neighbour is drinking and I cannot find another house. Then I thought: No, Hasina. Before you were a doctor; now think about another skill."
She likes to cook. She has been told her baklava is the best. And now she is perfecting bagels and burger buns; sourdough and scones. The aim, she says, is to open her own food business.
The Weekend Herald first visited The Bread Collective in January. Next week, 10 students graduate from its inaugural bread-baking course - a six-week intensive programme tutored by professional bakers who hope they are creating new employees for their short-staffed industry.
The Collective's aim is accessible education for former refugees. It combines the sociability of hospitality with the familiarity of baking. The programme includes English language classes, mental health support and workshops on everything from the impacts of resettlement to employment rights. Each week, students perfect new bread types - ultimately, they will bake almost 100kg of flour into pretzels, bagels and focaccia; muffins, seeded loaves and flatbreads.
"Finding staff has always been a problem," says Andrew Fearnside, founder and owner of artisan bread company Wild Wheat. "There are just not enough local, homegrown bakers around."
And right now? "Worst I've seen it in 23 years. I put an ad on Seek last week and for two days it got no views. Maybe five years ago, I would have been bombarded with applicants, mostly from overseas and the majority of whom wouldn't be suitable, but you'd be sifting through 100 applicants to find three or four good ones. But two days without a single view? If you are good at baking you will never be unemployed."
Fearnside hopes to employ at least one graduate from the Bread Collective - he says he wouldn't invest staff time in a programme that didn't have real outcomes.
"There's nothing worse than giving everyone a cuddle and taking some nice pictures and then once the rubber hits the road everyone is given the shove out the back door . . .
"You can sit here and complain all you like about the lack of staff - but why are you complaining if you're not prepared to try to be part of a solution? You've got to look to other ways to bring staff in and, yeah, it's a feel-good story, but for me, it's also a nice way to look in a slightly different direction for people who are interested in the industry, who might want to work in it long term and who want to start from the ground up."
Late January and, for the first time in weeks, it's raining in Auckland. The air is sauna-steamy and the coolest place in AUT University's premiere patisserie kitchen is up the front. Bread Collective participants assemble under an air-conditioning unit and the giant ceiling mirror that reflects the tutor's bench.
Large commercial bakeries use premixed ingredients and have machines to do the kneading. Here, everything is handmade from scratch. Daniel Ma, bakery manager with Countdown Ponsonby, demonstrates the "windowpane" test. Take a tiny piece of dough, pat it flat and then stre-e-e-e-tch. If the dough tears, the gluten is not properly developed and it's back to the bench.
"If it's too sticky, don't add flour. Just give it more time . . . "
Ma's dough is perfect. "You like more practice?" asks a student. "I give you mine and you give me yours." Sure, he replies. "Give me $20!" The room erupts with laughter.
This week, Ma is teaching techniques for scones and white loaves. One is "ugly dough" - lumpy and not overmixed. The latter is smooth enough for students to score with unique patterns. They mark signature cuts into the skin of the dough, brush it with water and scatter their loaves with poppy seed, sesame and homemade za'atar, a citrussy, savoury spice mix fragrant with dried thyme. They compare techniques and flavours. Some have never kneaded directly on to a bench; others are experiencing caramelised onion for the first time.
"At first, I think it is jam?" says Ziba, from Afghanistan. "Maybe date?" suggests Fatma, from Somalia. They both agree: It is very nice.
Warren Goodsir, head of AUT's tourism and hospitality school, says although the programme is not offering formal qualifications, it was a "perfect fit" with the university, which is not receiving any funding for the use of its physical teaching space, or staff expertise.
"It made a lot of sense. We have kitchens and classrooms and spaces and it's about utilising those spaces. Education is about good for society, it's not a business.
"Bringing a community of people together to grow and learn and feel welcomed and a part of society? At the broader philosophical level, that's what tourism and hospitality are about - bringing people in, hosting them and making friends with them rather than enemies . . . it enriches everyone if we flourish together."
New Zealand's annual refugee quota allows for 1500 arrivals annually. Another 600 places are set aside for invitations under the refugee family support programme. Some of the women on this course have arrived under the latter category.
Roghayyeh (pronounced so the "g" almost sounds like a "k") came here in 2015. Her husband was the last of 12 siblings to resettle - an exodus that began when his youngest brother left Iran more than two decades ago.
"My uncle came from the Tampa ship," explains her daughter Zahra, a pharmacy student who has joined this interview to help translate. "My understanding is they didn't know if he was alive or dead for two years."
There are now 60 people in the extended family group. In Iran, Roghayyeh had previously worked as a videographer, filming the women's celebrations of gender-separate Muslim wedding ceremonies. She's been a stay-at-home parent for a long time. Now, with both her children at university, she wants to work again - but retraining in a strange country is a challenge.
"In Iran, we speak Farsi. Here, I have to begin with A-B-C."
Roghayyeh grew up in a small village, watching her mother bake bread in an oven heated with hot-fired rocks. Married and living in the city, she shopped for fresh bakery bread daily - lavosh, sangak and barbari. Most recently, she has bought a tāve, a heavy, concave pan for the traditional Iranian flatbreads she makes in bulk and freezes in her new home in Māngere, Auckland.
"We have bread for breakfast, lunch and dinner," says Zahra. "My Mum has been watching YouTube videos or my dad's mum."
Bread is a fundamental staple; a universal language that crosses any arbitrary human border. Flour-water-yeast-salt-magic. Why does Roghayyeh want to do this for a job?
"She likes how you are able to use a simple ingredient like flour and make hundreds of styles that different people will have for their meal," says Zahra. "It's very special - she's making something that people will enjoy eating."
And, in that making, Roghayyeh might literally earn a crust. The week she speaks to us, she's on 6am work placements (the early start is second nature - every day begins with dawn prayer) and already has a potential job offer.
"My mother has been here seven years and this is the only time she has had an opportunity to be part of a course that could lead to work," says Zahra. "Many jobs require you to study and get a degree. People my mum's age say that it's too late for them to go and learn how to become a doctor, or whatever. She has been able to study English and things like that, but never a short-term course that could be useful for going directly into work."
Last week, there were 92 listings for bakery work on jobs website Seek. Meanwhile, Countdown, the national supermarket chain that employs around 800 bakers, confirmed it had 30 vacancies across its stores. Andrew Baker, talent acquisition manager, says the industry is thriving: "We are always looking for creative ways to recruit and grow our team."
Ansha was born in Ethiopia. Back home, she worked as a hairdresser.
"Cutting, styling . . . but when you come to New Zealand, no one will take you because you have to study again."
When we spoke to her last week, she had just finished a six-hour work placement shift for Wild Wheat, making sourdough and croissants. Ansha, 52, travelled here under the family support programme, invited by her daughter who had arrived earlier. It was 2008 when she left her 10-month-old son with her parents, on the understanding he would join her a few months later, "but the application took five years". He's at high school now, a keen basketballer, with a mum who says she doesn't want to sit at home, bored and lonely.
In Ethiopia, Ansha's parents ran a tea shop, "a small cafeteria selling food - I learned from them many things". She put those skills to use working with the Wise Collective, a catering company staffed by migrant and former refugee women but, when Covid hit, demand diminished. The Bread Collective, she hopes, will lead to new opportunities. Why does she want to work in a bakery?
"To live! To get money. I like to bake and cook, but this is very real - if you have some experience, you can get a job." There's another reason she signed up to the Collective: "Happiness. Every day, we make a friend. Every day, we have somewhere to go. This is very nice for the mind."
The reluctant hero of this story is Ana Djokovic. The Bread Collective's founder was born in Yugoslavia and emigrated here as a child in 1995. Her mum was a doctor; her dad an engineer and her older sister a high school student.
"We all came here with no English. My parents had to find their feet. Study again and start from scratch. They lost their friends and our family didn't move here. They had no status here, no one who knew them professionally. It was a two-year period of retraining, while having different jobs, like cleaning."
She says there may be parallels between resettlement experiences, "but the journey is still very different - we didn't have trauma, my parents chose this country, and were able to get here as skilled migrants at a time when New Zealand was looking for immigrants".
By contrast: "Former refugees are people who have been born somewhere where the environment meant they had to migrate without any choice and quickly."
Djokovic, 32, works in human resources at the University of Auckland. It has taken her four years to establish The Bread Collective, including volunteer stints at a similar organisation in Australia and the bakery companies who have provided tutors for the programme.
"I wanted to get a sense of what it would take to be a baker, but also to understand if these were okay workspaces. I've started with two potential employers, but have had others contact me - there is such a skills shortage."
A $20,000 TSB Good Stuff grant has funded the cohort's first collective. AUT has provided classrooms and mentors, The Warehouse has donated money for clothing, shoes and bags, preloved mobile phones have come from KPMG and the university has supplied secondhand laptops. Djokovic, meanwhile, is using her entire annual leave allowance to run the programme.
Future funding (and a second intake) is likely to be contingent on the success of this first group, which is all-female by coincidence, rather than design - Djokovic simply interviewed the first 10 applicants."
"At the start, some people were hesitant, they were worried and apprehensive about how to even get to class, what public transport would be like. I've learned that if I can get one foot through the door, the other will follow through the experience and cohesiveness the group provides. The security, the friendship. Sometimes I think they show up more for one another than themselves."
Consider that, for some, even travelling across Auckland city as an unaccompanied woman, was a challenge. Face masks, a minor inconvenience for most, triggered an anxiety attack for one student because the face-covering reminded her of the burkha she was once made to wear.
"The reason why a former refugee may not transition straight into employment is that it might be too overwhelming," says Djokovic. "If they have an anxiety attack at work, for example, it may not be accepted. This is an intermediate step to help build confidence; to reassure them they have someone to support them entering the workforce."
Is there anything more reassuring than bread?
"Every culture has a variety of bread," agrees Djokovic. "I wanted to create employment through something the community would be familiar with and this decision was reinforced by the industry skills shortage."
But, she says, there are other benefits to basing an employment scheme on baking.
"You don't need extremely good comprehension or understanding of English. It's very repetitive . . . once you've done it once, you're just perfecting the skill. And everybody is capable of doing this. It's not so difficult or foreign - it's not learning to drive a forklift!"
Djokovic says she's driven by her belief in the power of employment to improve people's lives.
"Having a job creates a sense of belonging. It rebuilds self-esteem and helps people find a purpose. When a person has to flee their home it's accompanied by loss and destruction. They lose family, friends, and professional networks overnight. Work is a key component in self-esteem. We all recognise that when we've had a good day at work, we feel accomplished, we feel satisfied and it's rewarding.
"Where the students are from, they may not have worked or it may not have been normal for a woman to have a job and they have just been focused on raising their children, but in New Zealand, our culture is different. And a way to integrate and find your place in New Zealand, is through employment."
