Owner of historic butcher can’t afford to cook award-winning pies after bills surge 400%

The owner of a 120-year-old butcher shop cannot afford to oven-bake her award-winning meat pies after their monthly energy bills jumped by over 400 per cent.

Christine Baughen, 71, from Measures Butchers, has been forced to ask customers to cook their own pastries after their electricity price leapt from £898 to £4,220.

The grandmother, who purchased the business with husband Peter in 1984, thought she was being “scammed” when her energy provider first revealed the hike in December.

And when her family dug into the firm’s finances, they realised the shop now wouldn’t be able to keep its two 11-kilowatt furnaces fired up for nine hours each day.

But Christine said her grandson had a “lightbulb moment” when he proposed that customers cook the meat-filled treats at home, and later shared the idea on Facebook.

And following a huge response from loyal locals, emotional Christine said her pie sales had increased by 10 per cent, meaning they could keep their business afloat.

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She said: “I thought we may get a hundred or a couple of hundred comments if we were lucky. But in the space of two hours, we had 900, all positive, and others wrote emails.

“They are handmade pies, and we have won lots and lots and lots of awards for them. So to get the response that we did, it actually made me cry.

“In the end, we have sold more pies – not a great deal more as we are working at capacity – but probably five to ten per cent more.

She added: “We are still struggling, and we’re not making a fortune, but we’re just about getting by now. And it did stop us from going under.”

Christine purchased the butchers in Brampton, Cambridgeshire, by selling everything they owned, including their kitchen fridge.

And after Peter passed away seven years ago, she continued running the business with her dedicated family.

But Christine had a shock when she got a phone call out of the blue in December from her energy provider, asking for a huge rise in monthly payments.

She said: “I had a phone call from our electricity provider saying that our payments would be going up £4,220. I first thought it was a scam.

“They were asking me to pay it to them by card. Then, of course, I got emails saying that’s what I would have to pay, and they did just change the direct debit.

“We were expecting an increase in the price. We’d obviously seen it in the press for months and months, but we weren’t expecting that level of increase, and we hadn’t planned for it.

“We are a small business, and we knew from our turnover at the time it would be unsustainable, we wouldn’t be able to carry on.”

Christine spoke with her family about how to raise the funds they needed to keep going, adding she was reluctant to pass the price rise on to her customers.

She said: “Really, it was my grandson who came with the suggestion.

“He said, ‘Why are we baking the pies when people are going to take them home and heat them up in an oven again?’ It was a lightbulb moment.”

Christine said they had introduced the new bake-at-home concept on 24 January, and apart from a few teething problems, it had gone without a hitch.

She added: “One lady tried to bake it in a halogen cooker, and that didn’t work. And other people put it in an air fryer, and they can’t heat them in those.”

And despite making it through most of the winter, she said the government needed to cap energy prices at a lower rate if more businesses were to survive.

She said: “For small businesses using a lot of energy, I don’t see how they are going to survive without changes.”

“As far as the government is concerned, the price cap on energy should be much lower, at least until inflation is under control.

“Then the energy companies can take their profit and re-invest it. But I don’t think we are expecting a government handout.”