A major fire has left a kosher bakery unable to maintain supplies to supermarkets.
Less than an hour before the start of Shavuot last weekend, fire tore through the Sharon’s Bakery warehouse in Tottenham, North London, gutting the entire building.
Although the bakery’s individual stores, based in Edgware, Hendon, Stamford Hill and Barkingside, were unaffected, its wholesale operation, which was run from the warehouse, had to be halted.
This has left Sainsbury’s in Finchley Road, London, without supplies of kosher bread.
A spokesman for Sharon’s Bakery said the fire services telephoned him at around 7.30pm last Sunday to tell him that the building was on fire, but since it was just before Shavuot he was unable to inspect the damage until Wednesday.
“The whole building collapsed and everything inside it, including machinery, ingredients and packaging, was destroyed. It has caused hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage,” he said.
“For now we are continuing to produce in our bakeries, but the wholesale side of the business has had to be scaled down.”
But he said that from next week he would be renting another warehouse in order to resume the wholesale production.
He added that once fire investigators had finished examining the site, it would probably take around six months to rebuild.
The cause of the fire is still unknown.
A spokeswoman for Sainsbury’s confirmed that the Finchley Road store was not selling kosher bread due to the fire at Sharon’s Bakery, but she hoped that supplies should resume shortly.