Some smaller bakeries have their production area at the back of the shop. This allows them to bake the bread and immediately put it in the display cabinets. It’s not possible for A Padaria Portuguesa to do this, with more than 50 stores and a production plant that supplies them every day. But we manage.

The vast majority of our small bread products arrive at the shops in the form of fresh dough – there is one exception, but we’ll get to that in a moment. According to our plant’s head of production, José Luis Pocinho, “fresh dough is our way of having bread in the stores that is as fresh as possible. “In Marvila, we knead and prepare the fresh dough, which never goes into the oven. It’s left to rest in the cold until the distributor arrives. It arrives at the stores in the early hours of the morning, to be baked as early as 7am, when the first customers arrive.

This is a process that involves an integrated effort by the various segments of the company: first the bakers in the production plant, who prepare the fresh dough; then the drivers from the logistics centre, who transport it to the stores; and finally the store teams, who bake the fresh dough to make several batches of bread throughout the day. What’s the outcome? More hot and crusty bread.

The padeira roll is the only small bread product that is not made this way. “This is a type of bread that requires two hours of fermentation and doesn’t allow us to opt for fresh dough,” explains José Luis Pocinho. In this case, it is pre-baked in the Marvila ovens and the remaining baking is done in the stores’ ovens, so that it is still sold hot in the store.