Gail’s new artisan magazine explores the art of breaking bread and beyond

For two decades, Gail’s has been synonymous with craft: slow-fermented sourdough, hand-shaped pastries, and a commitment to baking with integrity. But beyond the dough, there’s a bigger story of food, history, design, and human connection. That’s where Companion comes in.

Launched this year as a biannual magazine, Companion is Gail’s way of expanding the conversation around baking. More than a bread journal, it’s an exploration of food culture in all its complexity, diving into history, ethics, agriculture, and the creative disciplines that shape our world. The first issue, for example, is anchored by the theme Bread and unpicks the vast networks (natural, economic, and cultural) that determine how we interact with, grow and consume this fundamental part of so many cultures. Within its pages, Companion covers everything from the industrialisation of bread post-WWII to the role of baking in prison rehabilitation. There’s even an essay on whether wheat can have terroir (like wine), as well as practical recipes on how to use leftover bread. It’s a pleasing mix of visual essays, photography, poetry, and research-driven articles that stretch far beyond the walls of a bakery.

For Gail’s creative director Roy Levy, this expansion was inevitable. “We break bread for a living, but in many ways, our bread shapes us,” Roy says. “It informs how we think about everything: nature, justice, economics, our food system, our communities. Just as baking requires patience and precision, so too does publishing.” While a loaf must be made the same way every day, a magazine like Companion allows for fluidity in creative and intellectual exploration. In that sense, it's an extension of Gail’s philosophy: a belief that food is never just about sustenance, but about culture and storytelling too.

What also draws us to Companion the visual design of the magazine itself. The pages embraces a slow, thoughtful approach to publishing, a counterbalance to the fleeting digital world. It invites readers to pause, to engage with deep research, and to appreciate the tactile nature of print through delicate artisanal visual language, mainly achieved through in illustration. Roy describes this as an act of curation: “Gail’s is shaped by an entire ecosystem of restless human beings with lots of wonderful emotions, making endless decisions and full of knowledge and opinions,” he tells us. “The world is overburdened with content, [and] we have to edit that noise. Companion is a beautiful expression of just that.”

Companion is ultimately a space where ideas about food, art, and design can breathe, and where the aesthetics of baking are considered alongside its deeper cultural significance. In fact, there’s even a through-line to be drawn between the act of baking and the making of Companion. As Roy reflects, “baking in the context of Gail’s is about reassurance and finding comfort in consistency and repetition. But with a magazine, there’s an opportunity to forget all the things you know and find beauty in unexpected places.”

This balance between discipline and creative freedom is what makes Companion so interesting. It’s not a marketing piece, instead it’s a statement of values and a love letter to the slowness of good craft, whether in bread, words, or design. As Gail’s reaches its 20th year, Companion marks a new chapter for the bakery brand, not simply a reflection on what’s come before but a commitment to pushing conversations around food forward. “We didn’t need to make a magazine, but not having one would make life a little less beautiful,” Roy says. For bakers, artists, designers, and thinkers, Companion is an invitation to go deeper – to question, explore, and create.

This photographic essay by Kane Hulse is taken from an article included in Companion, entitled Left Bread. While recovering from a serious concussion, editor-in-chief Katy Severson began seeing bread abandoned on the streets of her East London neighbourhood. A desperate search for the origins of this bread unfolds into an exploration of the fascinating connection between bread and the human brain.

Companion is available in all Gail’s bakeries, as well as online (gails.com), and in select independent newsagents. Issue 2 launches in Autumn 2025.