This year Bermuda Bakery celebrates 80 years of baking bread for the Island. But on Friday, the company, which has its operation on a prime location on Pitts Bay Road, announced it was no longer going to bake bread.

This brings to an end an era for the company and sees the Island's biggest bakery close its doors.

"We have had generations working with us here," said general manager John Massa. "Fathers, sons, uncles, aunts. They have passed skills from generation to generation. It is very sad to see it close."

Mr. Massa, speaking on Friday as the bakery made the announcement that it was to close its bread-making division, said that the market share of the company had dwindled over the years as competition from other bakers and a shrinking market, squeezing profits.

"Not only are there more bakeries, and while each one is not a threat, it adds up," he said. "And then there are changing habits, with less people eating bread and sandwiches with the advent of things like wraps for lunch."

And he said it was with a heavy heart that he had to make the announcement - and tell a third of his staff they would no longer be needed. "The average length of employment in the bakery is 18 years. We would love to offer them jobs elsewhere in the company, but the reality is there is nowhere for them to go. So we will work with them to help them, the union and the Ministry of Labour to find alternative sources of work."

Bermuda Bakery announced on Friday that between 14 and 15 staff will lose their jobs - leaving between 27 and 30 staff working in its offices.

"It is the end of an era," said Mr. Massa yesterday. "There is nothing the staff could have done differently. There are more bakeries, tighter competition and a smaller market."

Mr. Massa said that the bread-making division had been losing money for years - in the past 10 years had lost about 30 percent of its market share.

Net income, or profits, of the company fell by 56 percent or $200,468 for the first six months of 2003, compared to a year earlier.

He said that the bakery was originally designed when there were two bases, a thriving tourism industry and few bakeries. And recently he said that a whole host of smaller bakeries had come on the scene, cutting away at the company's profits and adding that it was just not practicable to keep the bakery open.

There has been speculation for years that the bakery would move from its prime site on Pitts Bay Road - where it lies opposite Waterloo House and is in the heart of the newly developed "Insurance Alley" along Pitts Bay, where ACE, XL, Zurich and Max Re have all recently opened huge offices and PXRE is almost finished a new building.

"We have to look at whether this is the best locale for doing what we are doing," said Mr. Massa about the site. "We have to look at all sides of the operation."

The press release said the move would enable them to "evaluate the long term requirements of the bakery operations and the opportunities for the future utilisation of the Pitts Bay Road property.

When asked if the company would further diversify, Mr. Massa said: "We are diversified in that we do have an office building and we invest in that real estate."

He said that before making any new plans on what to do with the site, the company would hope to establish the remaining bakery site as profitable and to maximise the delivery routes used by the fleet of bakery drivers.

History.

In 1923 by an Act of Parliament, Edward J Thompson, Eugene C Pearman, Edward J Thompson, Cecil Neave, Ormond Loblein and others were granted permission to establish a joint stock company - and Bermuda Bakery was born;

it opened on the present Pitts Bay Road site, and has been one of the few factories on the Island to produce a staple food that is not importe;d

in its heyday the company had over 60 employees working three shifts a day to produce enough bread to supply the Allied forced stationed in Bermuda as well as the general public and the tourists;

the company's main brands Sunbeam and Roman Meal, are by far the most popular in Bermuda, and will continue to be distributed by the company - but could either be made at another Bermuda bakery or made abroad and flown in.