Jason’s Sourdough opens £36 million Leicester factory, doubling production capacity

Jason’s Sourdough has moved into full industrial growth mode with the opening of a £36 million custom-built factory in Leicester, a sign that demand for sourdough has outgrown the bakery niche and become a serious supermarket category. The new site is designed to double production capacity, create 380 jobs and lift Geary’s total headcount to 950 by year end.

The Leicester opening is the third facility in Geary’s Bakery’s portfolio and the latest step in a family business that says it has been baking since 1906, when Charles Geary opened the first bakery in Ratby, Leicestershire. Jason Geary, the fourth-generation master baker behind the brand, framed the investment as the next chapter for a company that wants to get more bread into more stores and more homes without losing the craft credentials that helped make Jason’s Sourdough stand out in the first place.

That balance between scale and identity is central to the brand’s rise. Jason’s Sourdough first hit the market five years ago and has since secured listings in more than 4,000 stores nationwide, reached three million homes and become Britain’s fourth biggest bread brand. Geary’s said the brand now accounts for roughly half of its turnover, while value sales have grown 107% over the past 12 months, a pace that helps explain why the business is investing so heavily in new capacity.

Retail demand has been moving just as quickly. Tesco said sourdough demand at the supermarket rose by more than 40% over the last year, and that it now sells more than 40 million sourdough products annually. Jason’s Sourdough has been a key part of that rollout since Geary’s launched it in Tesco in September 2021, helping push a once-specialist loaf further into mainstream weekly shopping.

The Leicester site is coming online in two phases, with phase one already operating and phase two due in September. It will support both Jason’s Sourdough and Geary’s wider own-label bakery business, which already runs from two sites on a 24/7 basis in Glenfield and Barrow upon Soar. Geary’s had already put £15 million into a new Leicester factory in 2018 to keep up with demand, and the latest project shows the same pattern at a bigger scale: sourdough is no longer just an artisan signal, it is a volume business with room to grow.