The French bakery market is in a difficult period, and forced to transform toward snacking, vegan and fusion, said a long-time French brand strategist and designer at the annual Bakery China exhibition and conferences recently.
Photo from Sylvie Amar Studio
The French bakery market is oversupplied since the early 1990s, with white bread flooding the retail channels as a result of massive industrial production, said Sylvie Amar, who founded a design and branding studio with Cyril Mouret, a veteran chef, for the catering industry, in 1997, upon graduation from the École Nationale Supérieure de Creation Industrielle (ENSCI - Les Ateliers).
Meanwhile, the amount of bread consumed by the average person in the last ten years has been declining, down to 120 grams a day, because the French want to reduce their fat intake as butter and cheese is always consumed together on top of bread in the daily life, said she, owner and strategist of Sylvie Amar Studio.
As a result, the French bakery industry is undertaking radical changes, such as adding simple meals, sandwiches, salads, soup and chocolate-related snacks. "It's impossible not to have snacks (in a bakery outlet) but many don't know how to do snacking," said she, in an exclusive interview with the author today.
Photo from Sylvie Amar Studio
Snack food has overtaken bread and taken up more than 40 per cent of the sales of bakeries, she said.
The other trend is vegan and it is becoming compulsory for every bakery outlet to have some vegan bread on offer. There are also many people who are flexitarians, who eat less but better meat while eating more plant-based food, observed Amar.
The third trend is there is a strengthening fusion of bakery, cafes and restaurants into one format that is hard to categorize, into something that probably is best described by the word "eatery", according to Amar. "Everything is mixed," added she.
In terms of store design, uniformization is turning people off and different store outlets are increasingly having their own designs to suit their different locations and targeted consumer segments, she noted.
Photo from Sylvie Amar Studio
Her studio has served companies as big as Nestle and those as small as one-store restaurant and bakeries in France, United Kingdom, Thailand, Japan, Cyprus and most recently in China, which they have just completed their first project, designing handles, LED screens and other aspects of a steaming oven for a leading manufacturer of catering equipment in Shenzhen.
Only some five per cent of their business came from non-food related businesses, mainly cosmetics, whereby they served L'Oreal in some packaging design projects. France contributes only some 15 per cent of their revenues.
Amar brought to China during this trip a book she and her partner, Cyril Mouret, have published in both French and Chinese, on ways of preparing some French dishes. The studio first showed up in Hotelex in 2014, where they had a booth. Since then the two partners have been coming to China more often, meeting with Shenzhen Culinary Association, Tianjin Culinary Association and the China Association of Bakery and Confectionery Industry, launching into deeper discussions and some collaborations.
The Gold Brick Bread. Photo from the Internet
Contradictory to the author's assumption that the French bakery is in all ways more advanced than the Chinese bakery industry, both partners actually suggested that in terms of outward design of baked goods, the Chinese counterpart has done some impressing creations. Both agreed that a bread literally named as "Gold Brick Bread" (金砖面包) is quite exquisite in outward form, textures and flavours. Another bread is like two hair braids twisted together, which may have been inspired by Ma Huar (麻花儿), long stretches of dough that are plaited and fried, a product that has been around in China for nearly 400 years.
Of course, there are some things China has done rather differently - not necessarily better or worse. For instance, the Chinese "put too much fillings inside pizza", and "we French never put lettuce inside". In addition, while business promotion and paying is done digitally on WeChat and the like in China, the French bakery industry relies on SMS (Short Messaging Service) to promote its products and services, and people mainly use credit cards to make payment. ###
Note: A Chinese version of this article is available. 法国烘焙业趋势：简餐、素食与门店混搭风渐起 https://www.jianshu.com/p/7014138348a3.
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