The Lark
£3.00Brown butter, milk and dark chocolate chunks, flaky sea salt. The first cookie we ever sold and still the bestseller.
Contains wheat, milk, egg, soya.
Baked before the lark is up.
The ovens on Tinsmith Yard go on at half four. By six the van is loaded for the workplace machines, and by eight the shop counter is full. Everything you buy from us today was baked this morning.
A Kelham Island bakery that mostly makes cookies
Nell and Sam started Ovenlark with a market stall and a borrowed oven in 2015. There are eighteen of us now, and we still bake nothing but cookies (plus a tray of blondies on Saturdays, because Nell can’t help herself).
Most of each morning’s bake goes out in the van to the vending machines we run in offices, hospital staff rooms, university libraries and gyms around South Yorkshire. Some goes into gift boxes and meeting trays for businesses, some into crates for the cafés and delis we supply, and the rest ends up on the counter in our shop, a few metres from the oven it came out of.
The three we bake most of
There are fourteen cookies on the menu most days, plus whatever the season is doing. These three outsell the rest by a distance.
Oat & Treacle
£2.80Jumbo oats, black treacle and golden raisins. The night shift at one of the hospitals gets through about forty a week.
Contains wheat, oats, milk, egg, sulphites.
Salted Pretzel Caramel
£3.40Brown sugar dough with crushed pretzels and pockets of our own salted caramel. That’s the dough in the photo, before it gets scooped.
Contains wheat, milk, egg, soya.
Swap the crisps machine for a cookie that was baked this morning
Sam got the idea years ago, walking hospital corridors at 3am where the only food was crisps and chocolate bars. Now we have 47 Ovenlark machines in workplaces across Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley and north Derbyshire.
We install them, stock them and fix them. A driver restocks every machine before half nine with that morning’s bake and takes out anything more than two days old. All you need to provide is a plug socket and a bit of floor.
Christmas gift orders are open
Every December we pack a few thousand boxes for Sheffield firms to send to clients and staff. You can have a tin of four, a box of six or a full dozen, with your logo on a printed sleeve if you like. We deliver round the city ourselves and post everywhere else.
To get boxes delivered by Friday 18 December, we need your order by Friday 4 December. Printed sleeves start at 30 boxes.
From a few of our customers
We swapped a snack machine full of crisps for an Ovenlark cabinet in the breakout area. People mention it when they come for interviews, which I did not expect.
The crate is on our doorstep before we unlock at half seven. The Lark is still the first thing to go off our counter most days.
We sent 140 boxes to clients last December, all with our logo on. They turned up on the day Priya said they would, and we got thank-you e-mails into January.
Come to the shop
We’re at the front of the bakehouse on Tinsmith Yard, five minutes’ walk from the Shalesmoor tram stop. Saturdays get busy and trays do sell out, so if you’re after something particular, order it and we’ll keep it aside.
| Monday | Closed (we’re baking for the machines) |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 8am – 4pm |
| Wednesday | 8am – 4pm |
| Thursday | 8am – 4pm |
| Friday | 8am – 4pm |
| Saturday | 9am – 4pm |
| Sunday | 10am – 2pm |
Unit 3, Tinsmith Yard, Kelham Island, Sheffield S3 8RW
0114 496 0372