Pandemic Blues - Bakery industry remains buttered not battered

Over six months since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns that rocked global economies – what to date remains seldom affected across geographies is the consumption pattern of food from outside. One major segment of the food service sector, bakery, although witnessed lean sales figures with the onset of the pandemic-induced lockdown, the segment only thrived in the following months paying heed to the mounting demand for artisanal cakes, pastries, and other succulent savouries and confectioneries. Reportedly, amid the COVID-19 crisis and the looming economic recession, the Bakery Products market worldwide is assumed to grow by a projected US$108 bn driven by a revised compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.9%. A research study by IMARC Group also inferred that the Indian bakery market reached a value of around US$ 8 Billion in 2019. Listing breads and biscuits in FMCG category, sales of these products in India has only increased with time. Moreover, the introduction of value-added bakery products is giving an impetus to the market growth. The study furthermore expects the Indian bakery market to exhibit moderate growth during 2020-2025.

Moving away from the traditional sit-down eatery set up, the current crisis has only enabled business owners to revolutionise the food service sector on the back of technology. It took mere time for the sector to respond to this herculean crisis, by just channelising its product sales from front of the house to virtual channels via Food Service Aggregator (FSA) platforms like Swiggy, Zomato, etc., or independent dedicated websites. Although this has plugged respite to some players, on the flipside several bakeries are shuttering operations permanently due to exorbitant rentals, high manpower and utility costs, and also dipping sales because of lack of hygiene, poor capacity, inconsistent taste in products, etc. This indeed shows that although the demand is soaring for baked goods and the delivery channels are quite robust to suffice the same, the major challenge that business owners to date scramble to stem mostly lies in the kitchen area. The many equipment that a bakery kitchen usually demands, by and large, are heavy & huge machinery that garners a lot of kitchen space. Keeping them continuously switched on for standard results translate to increased utility bills, and also the need for more than one person to keep monitoring the whole baking process manually. Furthermore, with the consumers becoming more sensitive amid the outbreak of the contagion, they are highly cautious when it comes to ordering their favourite cakes or savoury puff pastries from only trusted brands who follow high standards of hygiene. As much as the production process in the conventional baking equipment is tedious, its cleaning procedure is even more cumbersome which leads to ignorance by the workers that in turn reflects on the customer reviews. All these factors integrally have led to the meltdown of the crucial bakery industry in these trying times.

Reiterating the word ‘Revolution’, it is not just something that the food sector has gone through only superficially, but also at the root level, wherein commercial kitchen equipment manufacturers have been striving from the last several decades to provide commercial kitchens with compact, hassle-free, highly efficient state-of-the-art multifunctional equipment to decrease not just the stress of the chefs but also to optimise costs without hampering the customer experience. Combi ovens like RATIONAL SelfCookingCenter? come as a classic example of having set a bar in any commercial kitchen set up. Multifunctional in its approach, the equipment can bake, grill, roast, steam, stew, blanch or poach sizeable quantities of food at the same time, all by itself with minimal human assistance, that too within a space of less than approx. 1 sq. m. If your baked goods are to have light or dark browning, with or without crust, proved or unproven, the information just needs to be fed into the smart combi-oven through its user-friendly panel. Ideal for standalone as well as a chain of bakeries, these smart cooking systems - a path breaking innovation of their kind – can be easily managed by one person; consume less electricity; are intelligent and keep you updated about how they are baking the goods so you can monitor in real-time, and last but not the least come equipped with self-cleaning function hence riding out the hassle of manual cleaning.

Equipment exhibiting unique features as aforementioned were only dreams in the yesteryears. A little while before and the pandemic period have in fact unleashed the full-fledged usage of these contemporary technology-driven cooking systems. Not just star hotels, but meeting the needs of cloud kitchens to standalone bakeries, these new-age equipment tick a lot of boxes which otherwise remain unresolved challenges for the food service business owners.

Moving forward, in the times to come, the modern consumers are going to keep demanding hygienic high-quality baked goods, catering to which will in turn move them to provide organic reviews about the bakery brand. Making smart decisions not just from the front-of-the-house marketing perspective to swell sales, but a focussed stance at the back-end operations, i.e. kitchens and their optimisation are equally crucial if a brand is looking at lower operational costs, high customer retention and longer-term sustenance in the market. Leaving no room for complacency will only help bakery brands to not only sustain in the current trying times but also to leap forward with popularity in the future.

P.S. If you are planning to setup a new bakery, or want to upgrade your existing one with a latest equipment, or thinking of adding bakery items to your menu- Attend our exclusive Bakery Special RATIONAL CookingLive session tomorrow (15th October, 2:00-4:00pm), Gurgaon. Get tips and guidance from the experts and even get all your queries answered during the session. To register, call +919953956619 (Pallavi).