British shop hopes to keep baking up success with Kingston location

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It’s five days to a soft launch opening of Kingston’s British Pride Bakery and owner and founder Tony Armstrong is like a kid in a proverbial candy shop.  

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“This is number nine, this is my last one,” Armstrong vows of the Kingston location, the ninth in his chain of British-themed bakeries. “They’re all threatening me, they’re going to leave me,” Armstrong said in his strong British accent, while only half kidding that his family may disown him if he opens any more locations.  

Armstrong, 60 years in age but with the energy and drive of a man 30 years his junior, gushes as he discusses his newest location, in the King’s Crossing plaza along Dalton Avenue next to Hwy. 401. Armstrong himself is in town, along with his fiancee Leanne, overseeing final preparations for the soft-launch opening on Oct. 29.  

Armstrong, who hails from Plymouth, southwest of England, in the United Kingdom, said he moved to Canada in 2010 after semi-retiring from his bakery career across the pond. The retirement, however, didn’t stick. Soon after arriving, he decided to open a British-themed bakery in Cambridge, Ontario, his new home away from home.  

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Quickly, however, Armstrong discovered that buying genuine British supplies from importers was going to put him in the poor house. There was, he noted, an understanding among customers that when shopping at a British specialty store, prices could be expected to be higher.  

“It soon became really evident to us that we needed to be competitive,” Armstrong said. “When people visit British stores, it’s a bit of a treat. It’s expensive.”  

So Armstrong set out to solve that issue, exploring the idea of importing products himself from his homeland, where he’d developed all kinds of business relationships with manufacturers and suppliers while operating his bakery  

“By importing, we needed more stores,” Armstrong said, which necessitated the opening of more British Pride Bakery locations. So the Cambridge location became the hub for the British Pride fleet, and continues to act as its head office and main production facility. Armstrong has subsequently opened locations in Burlington, Hamilton, Niagara Falls, London, Mississauga, Stittsville, Halifax and now Kingston.  

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“Now British Pride has become everyday affordable shopping,” Armstrong said. “Now, it’s just as cheap to come in here as it is your local (grocery) store.”  

Take the world renowned British brown sauce known simply as HP Sauce. The sauce, named after London’s Houses of Parliament, is an icon of British culture and available wherever food is sold pretty much everywhere. Including at British Pride Bakery.  

“It’s actually cheaper than the Canadian HP Sauce, for the same weight, and we’ve had to buy it, ship it, pay Customs, duties, taxes on it, ship it from Halifax down to Cambridge, Cambridge out to whatever location, and we’re still more competitive,” Armstrong said. “It’s just crazy.”  

The bakery offers all kinds of treats, foods, snacks, even a few British collectibles here and there, including the wildly popular Paddington bears at Christmas time (they’ll sell out in a hurry, Armstrong said), but its, ahem, bread and butter is its baked goods.   

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“We realized the quality of British food (in Canada) was pretty poor,” Armstrong said. “It was just maybe four or five big Scottish bakeries, and it didn’t really resemble good, quality Scottish food. I lived in Scotland for 14 years. So we started making more Scottish food and as we expanded, we realized that we were onto something big here, that’s why we’ve strategically put our locations all throughout Ontario.”  

By we, he means himself, his fiancee and their staff.   

“I drag them all along,” he joked.   

That Kingston is getting a British Pride Bakery shouldn’t come as a surprise, given its long ties with Britain and its rich history. But it was actually during a helicopter ride in Gananoque following COVID that Armstrong was introduced to the Limestone City, which set the wheels in motion.   

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The pilot that day was a French gentleman who spent much of the flight educating Armstrong on Kingston’s ties to Britain.   

“(He) was telling me about Kingston being the first settlement and about the British people here. He told me a story about the penitentiary, about how they brought prison guards from the U.K. because traditionally they were the poorest paid in the world. He told me this long story, which I was intrigued with, and I thought ‘It’s got to be Kingston.’ It made sense.”  

The more he researched Kingston and its British roots, the more intrigued he became. Then, after opening his location in Stittsville, near Ottawa, last year, he began seeing more and more traffic in the store who’d travelled from Kingston and Belleville to shop at British Pride, it was settled.  

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“There’d be people coming maybe once every three, four, five, six months maybe, so we realized that Kingston would be a great location,” Armstrong said.  

With just days until its soft launch, workers are bustling through the sprawling location, finishing up final renovation work, while others are stocking shelves and making everything just perfect.   

Meanwhile, a smiling Armstrong shows off a red telephone booth, which he calls a telephone box, positioned perfectly in the front corner inside the entrance. He purchased it, he said, from a couple whose parents had commissioned it when they were married for photographs. The woman was from Gloucester, U.K., while her fiance was from Guelph.   

“They had this thing commissioned, it cost them several thousand dollars,” Armstrong said. After the wedding, the couple put it up for sale and it came to Armstrong’s attention.   

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“I turn up to buy it, not knowing she was a customer of British Pride,” he said with a laugh.  

Armstrong bought the keepsake from the couple with the promise that it would find a permanent home inside one of his locations. The only problem is, the phone booth is massive, both tall and wide, and hasn’t fit through any of the doors at existing locations. That problem, Armstrong said, has been solved in Kingston, where he had extra wide doors cut so he could see through on his promise.   

Soon, Armstrong said, the couple will visit Kingston for a photo op with their former phone booth in its permanent home.  

Hungry patrons looking for some home cooking or to expand their palettes won’t have to wait much longer to sample the wares at British Pride Bakery, items from a selection of more than 30 different meat pies, pasties, cakes, scones, breads and more.  

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“I spoke to a guy yesterday, he’s from Bristol, (England), he’s been here 10 years, and he said ‘God, what I’ve give for a pasty.’” Armstrong said. “A pasty is a traditional product from our part of the world, it’s very specific to the southwest. I’ve actually brought him a sample box,” he said, noting that the future customer runs a local football club here in Kingston.   

Football or soccer, the journalist asked.  

“We don’t call it soccer,” Armstrong answered quickly. “It’s football. We invented the bloody game,” he added with a chuckle.  

Armstrong promises that the British Pride Bakery experience will be one like no other for customers.  

“Everything we make is pretty unique because no one else in this country really makes what we make,” he said. “We have a lot of people tell us that when they go back home, they’ll go and get Marks and Spencer’s steak and kidney pie and they come back and they say ours is way better,” he said, adding that following a recession in 2008, many products stopped being made fresh and went to machine made. “Ours is all handmade. We’ve gone backward in that sort of sense, where we don’t use machinery.”  

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Another specialty at British Pride is its haggis, the famous yet rare Scottish pudding.  

“We make haggis almost on a weekly basis,” Armstrong said, adding that he took ownership of Crawford’s, a Niagara Falls based Scottish butcher that was family run from the 1970s until he acquired it in 2020. “I think the customer gets a really nice experience coming to British Pride because it reminds them of home.”  

“Hi there, how are you today,” one staff member belts out to the journalist, prompting Armstrong to recall how when the staffer joined the company many years back, he struggled with even talking to customers.  

“I tell my staff, ‘You’ve got to remember, even if you’re having a really bad day, when someone walks in that door, it’s like a kid going into a candy shop, it’s like remembering the past,’” he said. “It’s important that the staff are cheery for people.”  

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The company itself employs 84 staff with the Kingston opening, eight of whom will be at the Kingston location, and all of whom will have completed their food handling safety course, which is mandatory within the company.   

“We actually got a couple of British people, too, which helps,” Armstrong said with excitement. “It’s nice to have the accent.”  

He’ll bring experienced staff from other locations to Kingston for the next couple of weeks to help with the opening, which he expects will be busy. Regular hours haven’t been officially set yet, but Armstrong said the location will be open seven days a week at 10 a.m. daily. Tuesday’s soft launch opening will see the doors open at 9.   

“We try to do a soft launch because the staff get overwhelmed,” he said. “We haven’t opened a store yet where they haven’t been 40, 50 deep all day long.”  

And the first customers will be greeted by when they step through the doors of Kingston’s newest business will be the British gentleman holding it for them: Armstrong himself.  

“I like to make sure I’m here to greet everyone,” he said. 

Janmurphy@postmedia.com 

x.com/Jan_Murphy 

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