The Story
Well Kneaded, founded in Battersea in 2011, is a social enterprise headed up by husband and wife team Laurence and Bridget, which champions sustainability- check out the blog for more details on that. It combines an obsession with the sustainable creation of a sourdough pizza centred menu, with a vision to bring transformation to local young folk who have faced disadvantage.
From street food markets with Kerb, to private parties for the rich and famous, Wendy the Wagon (sketch on right) saw it all, but she had her limits! We opened our fist bricks n mortar site in Earlsfield, in December 2018 in order that we could keep developing our vision.
We are really proud to have won an urban food award for 'Women in Food', 2019 and been recognised by the Sustainable Restaurant Association as a sustainable food business, Sept 2019. In 2021, our founder Bridget won Entrepreneur of the year at the Wandsworth Women's Enterprise Awards 2022.
At Well Kneaded we make great food, to enable great people to be employed, for a greater planet. Big claims? Let us explain.
Great food means that not only does our pizza and all of our food, taste great, but it is created with ingredients that are carefully- sustainably- sourced. That means organic ingredients from smaller farms,
building relationships with suppliers, and an exciting and tasty menu of pizza, sides, salads and desserts. It means making more and more of our food from scratch. In 2020, we bought a mill, and so our pizza dough now includes house milled ancient grains.
We believe in partnering with suppliers that are doing the hard work to grow well and grow sustainably and restoratively. Paradise Cooperative in Wandsworth & Sutton Community Farm provide a lot of our veg and are located just a stones throw from our pizzeria in Earlsfield. Tempus Foods supplies the majority of our meat and we use a mix of flours/grains from Duchess Farm, Shipton Mill & Scotland the Bread
to name a few.
The final component of ‘great food’ is that it is served in a way that is warm, welcoming and intuitive so that anyone who comes into contact with us is left feeling a little bit greater than when they arrived.
It can’t end with great food and food service though.
Our mission is to give confidence, through employment, to young people who feel they have been a little (or a lot) overlooked. Our hope is that by working with us, these young people are sustained and see a bit more of their greatness. The dream is that they begin to share our vision for a sustainable planet with their family and friends and so the love and care for our planet through great food spreads through local inner-city communities- this is the legacy we want to leave.
When people realise their greatness, they have a greater capacity to make other things great.
Our team are an extension of our family, and anyone who has ever worked at Well Kneaded is considered as such. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see some of the pizza loving hero's that are part of Team Kneaded.
For us innovation and sustainability come hand in hand. We are pumped to be making food in a way that supports and not scuppers the planet and that tastes and looks great. However, we recognise that to be sustainable, we need to innovate, through creativity, and take the longer way most times.
If we can make it from scratch, from ingredients in their whole form- we will. We want to excite more people about that. We take time and effort to track down high welfare, low intervention, local producers and suppliers, but where someone isn’t doing it really well, we might just start to do it ourselves.
Here are some ways we are putting the planet first:
0% waste to landfill
100% organic cotton uniforms
We are powered by green energy (Ecotricity)
No nasty chemicals
Over two thirds of our menu is sourced with the intention of repairing broken food systems. Of this, at least 50% is farmed/grown/produced with truly regenerative, radically sustainable methods by people we know.
