“She's only 20 and she's running the show,” Sophia says of her youngest child.
The award-winning talent is on the verge of finishing her apprenticeship, and is ably assisted at the well-known bakery and café her family purchased a year ago by bakers with decades more experience than her.
What Olivia offers is a fresh perspective.
“I’ve always sort of been that leader, even in the family I’ve always sort of taken control and called the shots,” Olivia says.
She has no trouble bossing her dad about, and after a few stints in the commercial kitchen, George has discovered a hidden talent for baking doughnuts - not bad for a former dairy farmer.
“He doesn’t cook or clean at home, but he comes in here and makes the best looking doughnuts,” Sophia says of her husband.
The Wells family moved from a farm in Cobram to Tatura for the venture, and for the past 12 months they’ve been on a mission to get to know their new community.
Being country folk, they understand you don’t become a local overnight.
But slowly, surely, they’re finding their place by building relationships with Tatura suppliers, baking their hearts out for school pie drives, donating vouchers to local fundraisers and, importantly, showing their faces in the bakery every single day.
“We’re very hands on,” Sophia says, before Olivia finishes her sentence, “there’s always one of us here”.
On the rare occasion Sophia, George, or their young baker can’t be there, Olivia’s siblings Chloe, 22, and Josh, 24, step up and help out.
“Liv is sleep deprived, but other than that it’s going pretty well,” Sophia says.
George is “the big boss” when it comes to the business side of things, and looking at the books he says each lockdown takes a bigger toll than the last.
But the dedicated trio is happy to put in the hard yards.
“We're always thinking - even at night when you're not really meant to be thinking about work,” Sophia says.
Having worked since she left school at age 16, Olivia is now a proud homeowner and says having her own place is an important way to create just a little bit of distance from her parents.
Still, Sophia and George do everything they can to ease the burden of Olivia’s punishing early starts.
Not many bakers can say their colleagues sneak into their house while they’re catching up on sleep to do a load of washing, feed the dogs and cook dinner - but last week Sophia did all of the above for her protégé.
A qualified chef, Sophia helps Olivia with recipe development and in some ways she has been training her daughter for this role her whole life.
“She’s been groomed from a young age . . . She was the only one in the family that really cottoned on like a little sponge with me,” Sophia says.
“I was growing up in the kitchen, I helped Mum cook dinner pretty much every night on the farm,” Olivia says.
Try their prized Mexican-inspired pie for a taste of what the close-knit pair can achieve together.
Do you know a family business in the Goulburn Valley worthy of a story? Let us know by emailing rosa.ritchie@mmg.com.au
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