Bottled Baking Co: Leeds business scoops prestigious Gift of the Year award for best-selling baking mixes

The Bottled Baking Co, which found amazing success during lockdown, has won the ‘My Gift At All Time’ category at the Gift of the Year Award 2023. The company’s baking mixes in a bottle were recognised as the ‘halo gift’ – a retailer’s best seller over the years.

Judges praised the baking kits as “handmade, beautiful, eye-catching and scrumptious” and a “wonderful gift and activity for the whole family”. The baking mixes are layered inside reusable glass bottles, with all the dry ingredients required to make delicious cakes, cookies and muffins.

Founder Greg Fraser developed the idea in his kitchen at his Leeds home in 2016, while baking with his then two-year-old son. He found that baking together was a great way for them to spend quality time together, but it became messy. He decided to create an easier way for all the family to get stuck into baking.

Greg said: “I found I spent way too much time individually measuring out and weighing each ingredient, I thought to myself that it has to be easier than this.”

To save himself time and ensure his son didn’t make anymore mess, Greg decided to put all of the dry ingredients needed for their bakes into a glass carafe. He noticed that what he had created, with each ingredient layered carefully on top of one another, was an aesthetically pleasing product - and so, The Bottled Baking Co was born.

Greg first started to sell his creations at Kirkstall Deli Market. The business is now stocked in John Lewis, Oliver Bonas, Anthropologie, Ocado and Fenwicks, as well as hundreds of independent retailers.

The entrepreneur said that lockdowns were an "amazing success" for his business, with orders rocketing by more than 200%. The Bottled Baking Co team are already Gift of the Year winners, after winning in 2021 in the ‘Food & Drink’ category, and all products are still handmade in Yorkshire.

Best selling baking mixes include the ‘seriously smart cookie’, ‘extravagant gingerbread brownie’ and ‘fabulous unicorn cake’. The Bottled Baking Co has also partnered with M&S to produce Percy Pig and Colin the Caterpillar baking mixes.

Bottled Baking Co has now launched a sister company, Doggy Baking Co, which originally started off as an April Fools Prank. Doggy Baking Co was also nominated for 2022’s Gift Of The Year Awards in two categories.

Speaking on the new award win, Greg said: “To be recognised for the ‘Gift of All Time’ award speaks volumes of how hard my team have worked all these years. The past year has seen us create some amazing new products, like our Percy Pig and Colin the Caterpillar mixes, as well as our brand new Wallace and Gromit mix to celebrate 30 years of the iconic film The Wrong Trousers.

‘We can’t thank our loyal base of customers enough and that includes everyone from retail buyers to you, picking up one of our mixes off the shelves.”