Bakery wins three golds at Best Loaf Awards

"I don't like to call myself a baker. I like to say that I am the head chef."

Tonatiuh Erreguin ran a fine-dining restaurant in Mexico before she relocated to South Oxfordshire and opened Imma The Bakery, in Stoke Row, three years ago.

Her bakery has now been recognised at the 2025 Britain's Best Loaf competition, which awarded their produce three golds and two silvers medals.

"I believe the most important institutions in the world are the markets, are the bakeries," she said. "Because those are the bits we can't live without.

"Food has to come before doing anything else."

In 2024 Imma The Bakery was awarded the top prize, when their plain sourdough was named Britain's Best Loaf by the judges.

"We are obsessive, we have gone crazy… we play around with science. We have charts and charts of temperatures" Mrs Erreguin said.

"It's really fun how connected you become to your work"

The bakery only employs 10 people in total, but they hand make between 250 and 400 loaves a day.

Tonatiuh Erreguin previously ran a fine-dining restaurant in Mexico

As well as all the local customers, Mrs Erreguin said there were also a lot of what she calls pilgrims.

"We have people that come from Oxford once a week, from Abingdon, from Windsor," she said.

She said they saw lots of customers who leaving London for the weekend and stopped in at Imma on the way.

"To be a baker back in the day used to mean that you were going to pledge an oath so that no one in your village was going to be hungry because of the baker not baking," Mrs Erreguin said.

"I stand against the idea that bread should be expensive. Bread should be always affordable.

"Bread has sustained western societies for at least 10,000 years… which mean we owe ourselves to bread."