At Gail’s, what is the human cost behind a £5 loaf of bread?

The economics and migration behind the Gail’s expansion. Words by Sasha Patel and Ben Jacob. Illustration by Kruttika Susarla.

Oct 20, 2025

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today we have a long-read by Ben Jacob and Sasha Patel about how the British bakery chain Gail’s relies on young Gujarati migrants, driven to migration to drive its expansionist vision. In this piece, the writers investigate the connections to India’s ‘Gujarat Model’ and the precarious working conditions that underpin the bakery’s success.
This article is best read on our website.

They arrive in fours, fanning out along the counter. On the right, a well-heeled older woman leans over the pastry display, extending a finger towards the sourdough stacked against the wall. To her right, an elderly man buys a £5.60 jar of strawberry jam. It’s the weekend, but he’s wearing a full suit: white flannel trousers, blue shirt and grey blazer, topped by a white Panama hat. At the end of the counter, a Deliveroo driver waits, holding out his phone screen to show the order number, barely moving in his thick winter jacket. A man in a red apron emerges from the back of the building, with a tray of sandwiches and pastries. He hands it to someone behind the counter and disappears. The customers embody the narrow diversity of London’s monied class. The workers – the baristas, the baker and the Deliveroo rider – are almost all South Asian. Many come from a single Indian state: Gujarat.

This is a west London branch of Gail’s bakery on a Saturday morning. Two decades on from the opening of its first shop, the bakery chain has become synonymous with England’s rapidly gentrifying urban landscape – particularly in London and its commuter belt, where the majority of its 170 or so branches can be found. Its steeply priced pastries and sleek, white-and-red branding denote a modest affluence, measured by a simple barometer: who can afford a £5 loaf of bread? The food itself is not hugely different from what you find in many other cafe chains. It is the feeling, and not the flavour, of quality that appears to be the most essential Gail’s ingredient. But lurking behind the upmarket veneer of coffee and slickly artisanal cafes is a darker story of corporate expansion, deteriorating labour conditions and precarious migration. One that leads thousands of miles from the company’s heartland in the south-east of England to a private equity firm in Boston, and today, extends to Gujarat.

The origin of Gail’s and the Bain takeover

Yael Mejia was already the founder of a wholesale bakery and a high-end London deli when she met Ran Avidan in 2003. Avidan had arrived in the UK from Israel a few years earlier to work as a consultant at McKinsey, while Mejia was born in north London, but moved as a child to Tel Aviv, before returning to London in the late 1970s to work in the city’s hospitality industry. Together with one of Avidan’s colleagues, Mejia and Avidan set out to expand the bakery business and branch out into retail. What they came up with would combine 21st-century, just-in-time production with an endlessly replicable, faux-artisanal facade.

In 2005, the first Gail’s – using the Anglicised version of Mejia’s first name – opened on Hampstead High Street. Expansion was baked into the blueprint from the beginning: in Mejia’s words, the idea was for a shop ‘multipliable to infinity’. Bread and pastries were mass-produced from a warehouse in Hendon, alongside doughs that could be finished off in small bakeries in carefully selected neighbourhood locations. For the next decade and a half, the brand grew steadily, concentrating its cafes in affluent areas of north and west London, a strategy upheld by hospitality investor – and outspoken Covid sceptic – Luke Johnson, whose private equity firm bought out Mejia and Avidan in 2011.

By the end of the 2010s, Gail’s had more than 60 branches across London and the south-east, and almost £130m in annual revenue. It was enough, in 2021, to entice the Boston-based private equity firm Bain Capital to buy a majority share in Gail’s and the wholesale bakery, in a deal worth £200m. (A veteran of the private equity boom of the 1980s, Bain exemplifies the industry’s ultra-aggressive model, which uses borrowed funds to acquire companies and drastically cut costs before selling them on at a profit a few years later.) Earlier this month, Bain was reported to have put in a bid to buy Costa Coffee, the second-largest coffee chain in the world, valued at £2bn. Soon after the takeover, Gail’s imposed a new system of accounting and incentives to drive growth.

Staff interviewed for this article described how, under this model, profit margins for each branch were measured by calculating the amount spent on wages, and on food ‘bought’ from the company warehouses, and deducting it from the total sales made. If store managers exceeded their monthly target, they were given bonuses. Since there was very little that those managers could do to increase sales – as in other large food chains, Gail’s’ marketing is done at the corporate level – their primary method of boosting profits was to drive down labour costs.

The result was a systematic programme of hour-cutting, in which each shop operates with as few employees as possible. Staff told us that if business was quiet, managers would ask workers to go home. (Gail’s workers are paid only for the hours they spend in the shop.) When contacted for comment, Gail’s stated that their company policy gives employees two weeks’ advance notice of their shift rota, but we found multiple employees who reported regularly receiving less work than was written into their contracts. In an email, Sarah Woolley, the head of Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) explained that Gail’s deploys a clause stipulating an average number of hours over multiple weeks, rather than a fixed amount every week. ‘One of our members was awarded a [significant] number of hours in back pay as they had not been receiving their contractual hours’, she said.

A typical Gail’s shopfront. Photo credit: Gail’s

Following the Bain takeover, pay lagged behind the UK’s rising cost of living. One employee who worked at Gail’s both before and after the Bain model came into effect told us that when she first joined the bakery, her salary had been £2 above minimum wage, with a £100 bonus at Christmas. By the time that she left, her pay was barely higher than the new minimum wage, and the Christmas bonus had been reduced to a £20 voucher, redeemable at partner companies whose products cost hundreds of pounds. (In its response to this article, Gail’s stated that it has always paid above minimum wage. At the time of writing, it was advertising jobs 4p per hour above the minimum hourly rate).

Since the takeover, Gail’s has more than doubled its number of branches – and its parent company has almost tripled its annual earnings – while staff in its cafes report ever-worsening working conditions and poor management. In July, a report by Novara alleged understaffing, overwork, union-busting and the use of CCTV to intimidate workers, which Gail’s denied. Even though these allegations are beginning to reach public consciousness, what is still missing from the story is how the company drives expansion through a reliance on recently-arrived migrant workers from South Asia.

Gail’s shifting demographics, and Modi’s Gujarat Model

Zahra, who is British-Asian, joined her local branch of Gail’s just after the Bain takeover, but before the new model was implemented. Back then, all of her colleagues were white. ‘The management was mostly Italian,’ she told us when we spoke in a London park during the summer. ‘There was a Spanish guy who was an actor, an English artist, and an English girl who’d taken a gap year before university.’ Most of these people only worked part-time, unlike Zahra. In these circumstances, employees were willing to look after colleagues on shift, and stand up to management when needed. All of this changed when Bain’s new model came into effect, Zahra said. Within a year of her starting, the shop had become increasingly understaffed, with fewer people doing more work. ‘It was physically debilitating, the sheer exhaustion of the job made you think about other people less’, she recalled.

Things were compounded, she added, when management told staff they could no longer drink water in front of customers – in other words, Zahra and her colleagues had to work eight hours without a glass of water, except for a single 20-minute break. In an email, Gail’s wrote that ‘employees have access to free food and drink from the bakery and are encouraged to take breaks when needed’, but Zahra’s claim of the break’s duration was echoed by other interviewees, and also in testimony from Gail’s employees online.

By 2023, the makeup of the company’s workforce was considerably changed. Brexit and Covid had arrived together, and many European employees who had gone home during the pandemic couldn’t return. Those who remained were increasingly unwilling to deal with the working conditions, and as the older employees left, ‘they started to bring in more brown people,’ Zahra told us. In its early days, Gail’s branches were clustered around west and central London, which remains the heart of its growing empire. While those branches cater to predominantly white neighbourhoods, they are also accessible for workers from areas in north-west London that have longstanding South-Asian communities – especially, in the last few years, young Gujarati migrants. Soon, Zahra added, ‘they realised that these people who came from India were super-hardworking, complained less, didn’t mind the long, shitty hours. They needed the money, and were willing to take the shit that others were not.’

To understand this shift, we need to understand Gujarat itself. In the UK, Gujarati speakers make up around half of the British Indian community, stemming from the 20th-century migration of relatively well-off Gujaratis from the state itself, and from its large East African diaspora. Yet the current entanglement of Britain and Gujarat owes less to this older migration than it does to events at the turn of the millennium. In 2002, a year after the catastrophic Bhuj earthquake killed more than 20,000 Gujaratis, the state witnessed a brutal anti-Muslim pogrom, resulting in the deaths of around 2,000 people. Investigations in the aftermath revealed the complicity of the state government, headed by Narendra Modi, now the prime minister of India. Banned from the US and the UK and shunned by foreign capital, Modi responded to the state’s isolation with the ‘Gujarat Model’, an economic strategy aimed at reviving investment through the deregulation of private business and devastating cuts to social spending.

Back then, the Gujarat Model was hailed by investors as a success story of economic revival, but realities on the ground told a different tale. Growth came without development, exacerbating economic inequality and deepening social divides. Systemic exclusion, already prevalent in Gujarati society, was ingrained in the state’s governance, with Muslims denied access to state schemes, jobs, tenders and subsidies. Gujarat’s labour market became increasingly casualised, with few jobs for Gujarat’s ever-growing numbers of university graduates, while what critics describe as ‘crony capitalism’ cemented the economic dominance of those with political connections to the ruling BJP. In 2025, the model continues: communal violence and other threats to Muslim livelihoods have become increasingly commonplace. Just last month, the Gujarat state government passed a controversial new law enabling 12-hour shifts and expanding night work in factories, designed to attract new investors.

Two decades of the Gujarat Model have seen a surge in emigration, particularly among financially precarious middle-class Hindus, who lack the security of wealth and mobility of the British middle classes. While most host countries do not record Indian immigration statistics by state, 2023 US government data showed Gujaratis making up more than 60% of asylum claims from undocumented Indians (Gujarat represents less than 5% of India’s total population). For many of them, migration is now less a matter of aspiration than survival, dominated by students and young workers willing to accept any job abroad.

Meanwhile, the loss of more than 200,000 overseas hospitality workers since Brexit in 2020 has pushed corporate chains – from bakeries to coffee shops to delivery platforms – to recruit from South Asia. Today, Indian workers make up over 4% of hospitality staff, and South Asians overall 16%, despite representing just 1.7% of the national workforce, evidence of a strategic and growing reliance by hospitality companies on this newer labour source. (Gail’s said via email that 11% of its total employees nationwide are from South Asian backgrounds, of whom 71% are Indian.) In cities including Leicester, Birmingham and London, it is now common to find recent arrivals from Gujarat serving in fast-food franchises or coffee shops, often on temporary visas tied to their employers. Hospitality in Britain has long relied on South Asian labour, but profound shifts in the British and Indian economies during the past decade have transformed migration to the UK.

Ramesh, the son of a middle-class family in Ahmedabad, has been working at Gail’s for two years. He arrived in the UK in early 2023 on a student visa, renting a room in West London from a Gujarati landlord, which he shared with two other men, each paying £330 a month. Through a community WhatsApp group, he secured a job at a small cafe nearby. It was just after finishing a shift that he noticed the nearby Gail’s. ‘I thought: “Oh wow, this is a beautiful cafe”,’ he recalled. A few days later, he went back to the Gail’s with a friend. The two of them were chatting to each other when the barista cut into their conversation in Gujarati, encouraging him to apply for a job.

West London remains the heart of the Gail’s empire. Kensington Arcade. Photo credit: Gail’s

His early impression of the cafe didn’t last long. Gail’s is ‘super hectic’, Ramesh said. Tasks appear hourly on an iPad, of which photographs have to be taken and uploaded to the company’s cloud system. In the kitchen, recipes are drummed into employee’s heads via instructional videos. Staff are under pressure to manage transactions as swiftly as possible. (As Novara reported earlier this year, every Gail’s store receives a ‘coffee efficiency’ report from head office, with any store that takes more than two minutes on over 30% of transactions highlighted in red.) And always, lurking on every shift, is the possibility of being sent home if business is slow and the branch isn’t making enough money. This all came as a shock to Ramesh when he started. ‘The management was so poor,’ he said. ‘Nobody was happy with their job, no one wanted to come to work.’

Sanjana started working at Gail’s in the winter of 2022, two weeks after arriving in London. Her experience has been no different to that of Ramesh. Despite Gail’s insistence that it always gives employees their rotas two weeks in advance, Sanjana told us that ‘there’s no schedule, no fixed hours for when I’m eating or sleeping.’ For a 5.30am shift, she wakes at 3am, and needs to sit down after eating, so she waits until the end of her shift before eating her first meal of the day. ‘It’s affecting my body’, she said.

From the Gail’s employees interviewed for this article, we learned that those who speak out about conditions are singled out, with hour-cutting used as punishment for people who stand up to management. (Gail’s denies that it cuts hours in response to what it calls ‘employment issues’.) Employees also told us that if someone calls in sick, they are told by management to come into work and prove it. According to Zahra, the paranoia is sharply racialised against South Asian employees. ‘They see Indians hanging out in groups and that makes them uncomfortable. If you’re smoking as a pair, or if you’re hanging out together, they freak out,’ she said, recalling if workers spoke in Gujarati on shift, they were told off by managers for being disrespectful, while Italian employees could easily speak their language in front of management. She added that white staff members would complain about Muslims fasting during Ramadan, while Ramesh mentioned that when one employee at his branch complained about the working conditions, the manager retaliated by refusing to give her the day off for Eid.

To most of its Gujarati workforce, Gail’s is little more than a stop-gap. But employment opportunities are tightly constrained for Indians in the UK. Prakash, a baker at Ramesh’s branch, has no intention of remaining at Gail’s, but he sees little hope of finding work beyond the food and hospitality sector, despite his training as a software engineer. His qualifications are rarely valued, people in Britain see Indians on a ‘very low level’, Prakash said. With the UK government now making it harder to employ people on student visas, international student workers and their families are being pushed into ever more precarious work, with little alternative. The result is a hospitality sector increasingly underpinned by the low-paid labour of a legally and financially insecure workforce. ‘I’m working here for now, to make a living,’ Ramesh says. ‘If I get something better, I’ll leave.’

‘A more sinister reality’

Gail’s growth since the Bain takeover has been dramatic. Capitalising on the post-pandemic spate of empty commercial sites, the chain has expanded beyond its base in wealthy areas of central London towards poorer neighbourhoods undergoing waves of gentrification and property speculation. Pushed on his company’s role in these transformations, Gail’s CEO Tom Molnar told The Grocer earlier this year, ‘We’re just a bakery, you know?’, and suggested that Gail’s’ expansionist vision was reviving the small-scale neighbourhood bakeries that have been ‘decimated’ in recent times. Not everyone agrees. Woolley told us that Gail’s ‘sees itself as a great employer. But the reality we have gathered from conversations [with employees] is that they don’t listen, [and] profit is put first.’

One of three Gail’s in Bristol. Photo: Gail’s

Gail’s management remains confident in the country’s appetite for even more of its branches. In the last couple of years, stores have opened in Bristol, the north-west of England and inside train stations, as well as London’s sprawling commuter belt. As of December 2024, its directors are targeting £300m in annual revenues, and believe that there’s scope for up to 500 stores in the UK – as many as the ubiquitous Pret. The company is adamant that the image on which its business has been built – affluence, exclusivity and craft – will not be undermined by its relentless drive to expand.

Since 2024, a backlash against the chain has been brewing, fuelled by communities fed up with the gentrification and asset-stripping of their high streets. But there is a more sinister reality unfolding in the shadow of a hostile nation-state. Britain today is caught between the desire for Indian trade and labour, and the naked racism of anti-immigrant sentiment. Just as companies are ever more willing to hire Indian workers to mask sluggish productivity and deteriorating working conditions, government policy continues to constrain migrants’ basic freedoms and economic security. As migrant hospitality workers are attacked in the streets and surveilled at work, the question arises: is this the world we want to live in, for the sake of little more than a £4.95 sourdough or a cinnamon bun on the way to work?

In recent months, Britain’s Labour government has cracked down on South Asian workers, conducting immigration raids against delivery drivers and working with gig platforms to identify and target asylum seekers (just last month, an Indian man was the first person to be deported under the UK’s new deportation treaty with France). For employers, there is little contradiction here. Hospitality businesses are often more than happy to work with authorities to monitor their own employees, while keeping them ever more dependent on precarious and casualised work.

In Gujarat, meanwhile, as the decimation of the economy persists and India descends into authoritarianism, emigration remains the horizon for many. Funding their costly visas and foreign university applications by mortgaging their possessions, young Gujaratis continue to risk loan sharks and fraudsters in the pursuit of their dreams abroad. ‘So many people [from back home] call me,’ Sanjana said, ‘asking how to get here, if the only way is the student visa, if there is any other way they can apply.’

At Gail’s, workers can be sponsored for skilled worker visas. This is Sanjana’s goal. But her target is constantly receding. When she started at the bakery, the salary threshold for a skilled worker visa was £26,200, less than the amount earned by a head baker or head barista at Gail’s. But this year, the government raised the threshold to £38,700, a salary which only managers can earn. Staying at Gail’s and hoping for a promotion is, for Sanjana, the only option. Like thousands of other workers in Britain’s ever-deepening hostile environment, her life is bound to her employer.

And so she remains, journeying in from the outer reaches of west London and counting down the hours to closing time, when the unsold bread will be taken down from the display counter, put in black bin bags and thrown out with the kitchen rubbish. Off shift, she will finally speak Gujarati with her colleagues, as they get on the bus for the long journey back to Wembley, Neasden, Harrow, Stonebridge. As questions begin to be asked about the company’s carefully cultivated image of quality and respectability, it is the workers at Gail’s who are caught between a resurgent far right both in Gujarat and Great Britain, and a decaying model of economic growth built on profit alone. For the unlucky, their alarms will ring seven hours later for the morning shift, and it will all begin again.

Credits

Sasha Patel is a researcher, filmmaker, and artist. She has worked on the Leicester Inquiry at SOAS and on documentary and cultural projects across India and London. She is an ESRC-funded Doctoral Researcher in Anthropology at the University of Sussex, and holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a BA from SOAS, University of London. You can find out more on her website here.
Ben Jacob writes about the politics of labour, technology and the environment, past and present. He is based between London and New Jersey, where he is a PhD student at Rutgers University in the Department of History. You can find out more about his work his work on his website here.
Kruttika Susarla is an illustrator and cartoonist from Andhra Pradesh, India. You can find her on Instagram.
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