“Food is the new pornography”
Clive Cobb is a serial entrepreneur with a penchant for getting his hands dirty. Very dirty. He was elbow deep in fish guts for three years when he ran a seafood restaurant on the harbour in Lyme Regis.
At least the money was pristine: £130k over a three-month season. And Clive cooked the slippery buggers too, so it was cash in his pocket.
He upped sticks to the seaside town after becoming disillusioned with life in the capital. “I was a creative director at Saachi’s,” he explains. “But it’s a bit like policemen: marketing directors get younger and younger. And chief executives, rather than live off their instincts, live off the Excel spreadsheet.” The final straw? “Hoxton got an All Bar One,” he shudders, “It was time to move on.”
Now, the advertising mastermind makes his dough from baking. He founded rustic bakery and café Town Mill
Bakery in 2005. On paper, it was destined to fail. Firstly, it’s situated slap bang in the middle of nowhere - Lyme Regis only has 3,000 registered residents. 2,000 of which are second home owners. So how the hell did Town Mill make £112,000 in it’s first year? Not to mention this year, when the bakery will easily do £400,000.
Cobb breaks it down for me: “People travel 50-100 miles to buy bread from us,” he says. “We are the local gem that people ‘discover’. We don’t hide away, but the discovery part is important. Bread is just flour and water. The black magic is advertising.”
Surely this is anti-advertising, I say. You appeal to people’s egos by tucking away your spectacular bakery, they happen upon it and feel clever, with cries of, “what a marvellous find” and hey presto! You’ve a customer for life.
“Exactly,” smirks Cobb. “Traditional advertising is dead. The consumer is fed up of being lied to and manipulated. They just don’t believe anymore.”
He reckons he’s got the answer. Town Mill injects the adrenaline back into food shopping; food as entertainment. Loaves and pastries are baked live and in colour, from scratch. “Our customers don’t turn up because its cheap – Every Little Helps,” laughs Cobb – that’s certainly true, the average Town Mill loaf is £2. “They come in for kicks. Food is the new pornography.”
The whole porn analogy works. Cobb likes to keep his joint dirty, sexy and delicious, Head baker Aidan handles the bump ‘n’ grind, kneading the bread, voyeurs drooling with delectation.
I meant “dirt” literally, fyi. “We don’t use meat so that the environmental agency categorise us as low risk,” he says with a wink. “We don’t get visits every two minutes; we can look rustic. I apply my creative brain to finding ways around the rules without killing people.”
Cobb’s sexy, dirty, messy joint is a nice simple repeatable formula. “Not cloning, but species,” says Cobb. “We’re looking at Winchester, Bristol and Exeter.” And if Cobb pulls off the franchise, he’ll be minted. Margins in this business stand at 80 per cent. One small hitch.
Cobb needs to get his hands on half a mill to fund the expansion. “I’ve got my eye on Dorset Cereal’s investment vehicle,” he says [the firm sold for £50m in March]. “They’re top of my Christmas card list.”
