Rising together

Rising together

With two ailing ovens threatening to derail her business, Daisy Terry of London bakery The Dusty Knuckle needed a swift, bespoke solution. She tells Sam Noble how MONO Equipment delivered the brief.

In autumn 2024, The Dusty Knuckle bakery in Dalston, an area of East London, UK, found itself in a business-critical situation. “Our two ovens were failing – and no ovens mean no bakery,” says Daisy Terry, operations director. “We’d had to beg, borrow and steal equipment when we started out, so everything was sort of second hand.” On the hunt for a possible replacement, Terry reached out to the Craft Bakers Association, which recommended she take a look at MONO’s range of energy-saving convected deck ovens. The company was already familiar to Terry: “We got our first MONO oven, a small pastry one, in 2017, and it’s always been really great.”

A tailored solution

All in all, The Dusty Knuckle was in the market for three large deck ovens, a pastry sheeter, a second static rack oven and a large spiral mixer. “This was a sizeable investment for Dusty Knuckle,” says Simon Moon, sales director at MONO, “so we invited them down to do some test baking with us in our onsite test bakery in Swansea,” he adds. “The test bakes produced great results and we were confident that the programs we created could achieve the quality of crust and depth of color Dusty Knuckle needed,” he says.

Terry was impressed with what she saw: “I’m quite an analog kind of person. I like buttons. But the technology on these new ovens just makes everything so much easier.” MONO’s convected deck oven also solved one of Terry’s biggest pain points, having to turn the bread mid-bake for even results. “The beauty of our fan-assisted deck ovens is that the airflow technology produces a perfectly even bake without having to turn the product mid-bake. You load the oven, shut the door, press start, and everything is set up,” says Moon.

There was one more thing on Terry’s wish list – some kind of mechanized loading system. “It’s back-breaking work if you don’t have that,” she says, drawing on “years and years and years” of hands-on experience she gathered before assuming her current role. MONO took on the challenge, partnering with a supplier to design what Moon describes as a “semi-automatic” loading and unloading system. Terry is thrilled with the results. “That new loader means we can have the doors closed while we’re loading a different lane in, with minimal loss of heat,” she says. “We make sourdough and we make it quite dark, so the heat in the oven is really important to us.”