Consider an excellent recipe for a bakery: you begin by making dough, with love in the art of making bread, join a proficient and dedicated staff, and finally take it to the oven with a dash of confection secrets. The result is the unrivaled bread from Padaria do Souto, located at door nº 107, at Rua da Liberdade, in São João da Madeira.
This business, with almost a century of existence, continues to be a reference in São João da Madeira, in large part, by the effort of the current partners who run the business with wisdom and entrepreneurship. When the bakery was opened in 1939, it was a family business. Nowadays it can be said that, although the staff and owners do not have degrees of kinship, they function as a family and this fact is notorious in the sympathy and warmth in the treatment of each other and with the clientele. Staff turnover is quite common in catering, but Souto Bakery goes against this trend. Employees are already an integral part of the house.

The three current members – Rui Calisto, Armindo Pereira and João Costa – have always seen themselves as heirs to the tradition built by this renowned house. They want to continue to expand their business, something that is evident in their entrepreneurship. Nowadays, Souto Bakery distributes bread to more than 20 schools and groups, as well as its usual customers, stores and points of sale.
In the less commercial point of view, we should also mention the workshops held in-house, aimed at the younger ones, to instil the pleasure and aroma of the traditional flavor of this millennial product.

The three partners also perceive, through contact with the public, the evolution of their product: in the information society, Portuguese citizens are more knowledgeable about what’s in their table, but this knowledge does not always translate into better habits of consumption.

According to João Costa, what is most sought is the comfortable article, that is, the article that does not deteriorate, which is always at hand, which means that sometimes bread is even replaced by other foods.
However, in the face of these trends, Souto Bakery contrasts with artisanal production and differentiated offerings: they sell Italian recipe bread, single french toast buns, puff pastry croissants and, pastry-wise, work a lot with chocolate instead of American dough, thereby achieving unique and more desirable products.

The Italian bread recipe also entails an interesting story: Mr. Augusto, the founder of the house and the previous owner of the establishment, had worked in a bakery in Brazil, where he had contact with the recipe for this type of bread, however, he forgot it when he returned to Portugal. It was the year 1939 and airplane travel was not exactly accessible, but in the hopes of making the aromatic flavor of this bread known, he ended up traveling on purpose to Brazil to retrieve it.
Only by knowing Bakery Souto can we say with certainty ‘the taste was worth the effort’ of the ‘blessed recipe’!