re: French Baguettes From a Vending Machine? ‘What a Tragedy.’

It’s not a new phenomenon—little town shops have been losing ground to Aldi, Lidl, the Hyper U, and Carrefour for two decades.

But I feel compelled to clarify that the baguette vending machines are NOT some sort of automatic Japanese style mini factory. They’re convenient dispensing points for local bakeries to sell their products without incurring labor costs. I bought a couple of baguettes from a machine in Petit Andelys, in Normandy, a couple years ago. The machine gave you a choice of two sizes, and it was refilled with fresh bread twice a day—before daybreak and in mid afternoon. So it’s not the most romantic way to buy bread, but it still allowed ppl in a quite small ville to get their fresh bread.

I operate my own small cottage bakery, and I can tell you that it’s physically heavy work, with antisocial hours if you sell fresh bread in the AM. I only bake once a week for a direct sales market, and that’s enough of the baker’s life for me. Some independent bakers flip the hours, selling fresh bread in urban areas in the afternoon/evening (like Tartine in San Francisco), but those who service wholesale accounts in fine dining (dinner crowds) are stuck with the early life.

In the UK, there is a small movement to form cooperative bakeries in more isolated towns: the town or a group of citizens hire a baker, with community members volunteering to work the sales counter, to deliver to wholesale accounts, or to do prep work. The Dunbar Community Bakery in Dunbar, Scotland, is one example: LINK. The town seems to be sustaining the little community bakery, but it’s also a town that has tourists visiting the Belhaven Brewery and it’s the terminus of the John Muir Way, a walking path of more than 100 miles (Muir was born in Dunbar).