The decline of the bakery in France has led to a gap in the market that is being filled by the baguette machine – but what’s it like to get your bread from a machine?
Milo Boyd
10 NOV 2019
Daily Mail
The French national institution of the boulangerie has fallen on hard times – and the high-tech solution has split a country.
The installation of vending machines to distribute the famous baguettes is symbolic of the ‘tragic’ death of French bakeries, some fear.
As with high street businesses across the world, changing shopping habits powered by online retailers and out of town supermarkets have left independent bakeries in France desperate for customers.
As a result many have closed, dooming villages and towns to life without easy-to-access delicious fresh bread.
Rushing in to fill the gap in the market they’ve left is an invention seemingly at odds with the long and proud tradition of French bread – the baguette vending machine.
Rather than a steaming loaf of pain fresh from the oven, many people in France are now slotting a Euro into large metal machines with names such as ‘Le Bread Xpress’.
The machines are stocked with about 100 par-baked loaves of bread produced by local wholesale bakeries.
Once the customer has made their choice, the machine finishes baking the selected loaf.
Those lucky enough to be using a machine made by Le Bread Xpress – a brand so French its official logo replaces the ‘A’ in ‘bread’ for an Eiffel Tower – can be snacking on a loaf 30 seconds after making the purchase.
The machines are increasingly common in France, with the brand alone having reached 120 locations as of March this year.
Unsurprisingly, reaction to the automated bread vendors is mixed.
“Nice hot crispy crust on on the outside soft on the inside,” one person enthused of their Le Bread Xpress loaf.
“The way bread should be. I bought one on the way out of the mall and nearly at the entire thing before I got home.”
Another pain purchaser was less impresed.
“Don’t waste your money,” they wrote online. “Basically microwaved to finish cooking. We threw it out after a few bites.”
Many are equally as unhappy with the decline of the traditional bakery that has led to the machines’ rise.
“Our little village is dying,” said Hélène Collard, whose family has lived in La Chapelle-en-Juger in Normandy for four generations, told The New York Times about the closure of the village’s last bakery.
“We’re no longer in contact with the other inhabitants. It was the only meeting point left.”
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