What began as a tiny grocery store in Castle is now making a bread winning three-and-a-quarter million loaves a week.

These days, the smaller stores of Northwich are still as important as ever. But the firm's bakers are also rising to the challenge of competing with the French baguette and the Greek pitta.

Against this backdrop of the big break into Europe, I decided to visit the vast Gadbrook bakery which is now as much a part of Northwich as Town Bridge.

Managing director, Stephen Greenfield, explained the success of the British buttie as I explored the sweet-smelling factory.

"English bread like ours is designed for bread and toast," he said.

"And our sarnies have blossomed in Europe because people don't want to sit at their desk with a crumbly baguette!"

The life of a Roberts' loaf begins when the big silos - which you can see as you flash past on the Northwich bypass - deliver flour straight into two high speed mixers.

Into the mix goes liquid yeast from refrigerated tanks, and other smaller ingredients, which are added by hand. The mixture is then tipped into a divider, where it's cut into portions and moulded into a neat little ball to stop it going gooey.

The ball is then squashed into a pancake shape, rolled up like a sausage, cut into four pieces and put in a tin.

The tin moves along a conveyor belt in a prover so the mixture can rise before travelling through a long, thin oven. The three and a half hour process comes to and end when the loaf is cooled and bagged. It sounds simple - but it can be a disaster if things go wrong.

"You can't stop anything when you're making bread," explained Stephen. "And customers want their bread on time, every day."

After leaving the factory, loaves appear on shelves the next day.

But you'll rarely see a Roberts' loaf in a supermarket. The firm uses traditional vans to visit smaller customers each day - as far north as Yorkshire and down to the Midlands.

The bakery also provides a lot of bread for milk floats.

But not everyone is a bread head. If your yearning is for buns, you should know that the main bakery also makes between one and two million of the little treats each week.

Then there's the craft bakery, which now concentrates on scones and muffins, but used to make everything from sausage rolls to wedding cakes, and the Pastry Case which provides puff pastry for bakers and caterers.

It's been said man cannot live by bread alone. But after spending half a day looking at Robert Roberts' legacy, I could give it a pretty good go.

Converted for the new archive on 13 March 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.