From 21 February to 1 March 2026, Real Bread Week returns for a seventeenth outing. The annual, international celebration is when the Real Bread Campaign turns its year-round megaphone up a notch, encouraging people to:
- BAKE their own Real Bread at home.
- BUY Real Bread, ideally from a local, indie bakery.
- BOOST the charity’s work.
Real Bread Week gives a big shoutout to wholemeal and flour milled from agroecologically grown grain, produced as locally as possible.
Each year, bakeries, small mills, schools, care homes, caterers, community groups and other organisations around the world take the opportunity to add specials to menus / product lists; or organise Real Bread classes, tastings, talks, pizza evenings and more.
Bake
The easiest way that everyone of all ages, backgrounds, identities and circumstances can join the fun is by making Real Bread, by hand or by dusting off an under-used bread machine. The Campaign has published umpteen free recipes on its website, and more in its book Slow Dough: Real Bread.
For people wanting to share seed to sandwich journeys of discovery with children, Bake Your Lawn is the Campaign’s grow-a-loaf guidebook.
Buy
If you’re fortunate to have a local, independent, Real Bread (micro)bakery at the heart of your neighbourhood, do yourself (and your local community) a favour – grab some of their Real Bread! As well as crafting delicious, nutritious food, these small businesses help to support more jobs per loaf than an industrial dough fabricator and to keep more money circulating in your local economy.
You can search the Real Bread Map for places to buy additive-free bread from hundreds of bakeries that have added their details. While out shopping, look for The Real Bread Loaf Mark, your at-a-glance assurance from the bakery that a product is additive-free.
Boost
Love Real Bread? JOIN the Campaign! Other ways that people can help to ensure that the food and farming charity Sustain can continue running the Campaign include: making a doughnation and buying Real Bread gifts, including a limited edition design t-shirt, apron and mug. The Campaign has great plans for future work but needs the dough to do it.
Real Bread Week for everyone
The Campaign defines Real Bread as made without chemical raising agents, so-called processing aids or any other additives. This includes (but is not limited to) genuine sourdough bread, and encompasses every type and style of leavened and unleavened bread of every culture and cuisine around the world.
The Campaign believes that everyone should have the chance to choose Real Bread, rather than feel that additive-laden, UPF industrial dough products are their only option. The Campaign produced the Bread For All guide to inform and inspire bakeries to find ways of bridging the gap between what it costs them to produce and what people in their communities on the tightest budgets can realistically afford.
Read more latest industry news and developments in our free to download magazine.
Never miss a story… Follow us on:
LinkedIn: International Bakery
X: @int_bakery
YouTube: @Bakery-TV
Media contact
Joseph Clarke
Editor, International Bakery
Tel: +44 (0) 1622 823 920
Email: [email protected]
