The bakery and pastry market - France

The bakery-pastry shop is a local business offering a wide range of products such as bread, Viennese pastries, cakes and pastries, sometimes even sandwiches and hot or cold drinks. People have been eating bread since ancient times. In France, it wasn't until the Middle Ages that baking really became a profession. It was first organized into guilds from the 13ᵉ century onwards, and then gradually we began to speak of French bread-making. Bread, and particularly the baguette, is a heritage and know-how widely recognized worldwide as a French specialty. As a result, in 2022, the baguette was listed by UNESCO as a World Intangible Heritage of Humanity. The bread recipe is simple. You need water, flour, yeast and a little salt. To obtain the best possible bread, bakers proceed as follows: kneading, shaping, fermenting, baking and selling. In France, the bakery and patisserie sector is booming, and is considered an indispensable business by most French people. Every day, nearly 16 million baguettes are produced in France. Bakeries produce almost 2.5 batches a day to meet consumer demand. Bakeries can be found all over France, in both urban and rural areas. It's also a job-creating sector, with nearly 3,000 jobs created between 2022 and 2023, for example. Despite a growing decline in French bread consumption, bread remains a staple on the table, with almost 19% of French people claiming to eat it every day. Pastries are also an important part of the French diet, with almost 57% of French people buying them at least once a month. Despite these traditional roots, bakeries and patisseries also know how to reinvent themselves and broaden their offer to meet new consumer expectations: diets, lifestyles, organic products... For bakeries, it's also a question of maintaining sales in the face of fierce competition from other distribution channels such as supermarkets or the network of neo-bakeries. There are many different types of player in the bakery-pastry market, divided notably between industrial and artisan production. In this section, we'll be concentrating on the artisanal bakery-pastry sector.