Sales surge after Brampton shop asks customers to home bake pies

Customers are now taking the prepared but unbaked pies home to cook in their own ovens

A shop owner has found she is "actually selling more pies" since asking customers to bake them at home in a bid to reduce soaring energy bills.

The electricity bill for Measures Butchers in Brampton, Cambridgeshire, rose from £898 per month to £4,220.

In a Facebook post on 31 December, owner Christine Baughen asked customers if they would be prepared to buy unbaked pies to cook at home.

This has led to an increase in demand which was a "huge relief", she said.

Owner Christine Baughen said the soaring energy bills had made the business "unsustainable"

Ms Baughen said her team were working "very hard to try to keep up".

Measures, which has been in the village near Huntingdon for 38 years, said it cooked "thousands" of pies, with prices ranging from £3.25 to £7.50.

It was running two 11kw ovens for at least nine hours a day to bake the pies, before they were transferred to a blast chiller to cool them down ahead of being put into the refrigerated counter.

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Customers would then reheat them at home, which took the same amount of time as it did to bake them in the first place and was "purely and simply a waste of energy", the shop said.

The move to home baking has had another positive result - Ms Baughen believes her bills have come down by "about a third".

The positive response from customers meant the business is "getting back to where we were before this financial crisis kicked in", she added.