Why We Started Iris
We're Tom Edwards and Betty Milner, life and business partners who recently became the proud parents of our daughter, Iris. Our other baby, Iris the Bakery, is a culmination of many years of learning, experience, and a sustained passion for simple food that nourishes our customers and the Earth. After some time spent living and working in Copenhagen, we moved back to Australia in 2020 and decided to make Melbourne home. With the arrival of our daughter, it feels important now more than ever to contribute something special to this world, and we cannot think of any better way than by creating a bakery with purpose for our community.
Our Goals
We have a lot of big dreams for our small bakery. Some we are already achieving, like building relationships with quality local producers and knowing exactly where our ingredients come from.
Others, like our goals in sustainability, are a journey, and what we are doing now is different from what we'll be doing next year or in five years. For this, we need to consider that most food businesses are set up fairly unidirectionally: produce comes in, gets treated or prepared in some way and goes out as sold products. Generally, significant resources are used in the process, and considerable waste is produced. Can we do better? Definitely. Can we close the loop entirely? Probably not, but we'd like to try. Rather than plastering labels on our food, we think that the best approach is to treat each ingredient or product on its merit by looking at where it comes from, how it is produced, how much of it we need and whether we even need it.
It's also really important for us that Iris is a space for the community, and we have many ideas on how to use our four walls in ways that go beyond serving bread and coffee.
We're at the very start of what we want to achieve with Iris, and we’re looking forward to sharing this journey with you.