The economic downturn has forced nearly 10 percent of the nation’s bakeries to close this year, and more are expected to quit the market, a top Taipei Bakery Association (台北市糕餅商業同業公會) executive said yesterday.
The volatility of commodity prices and the economic downturn have had a pincer effect on many bakeries this year, forcing some to close and a growing number to join forces with coffee shops or market their products through the Internet, Taipei Bakery Association chairman Ellen Yin (尹玉仙) said.
“Innovation is still the key to help bakery operators buck the economic downturn,” Yin told reporters yesterday on the sidelines of a press briefing ahead of the Taipei International Bakery Show.
Taipei International Bakery Show 2009, the largest of its kind in Asia, has booked 179 suppliers using 474 booths to showcase their baked goods and bakery equipment.
The show will be held from Thursday through Sunday next week at the Taipei World Trade Center’s Exhibition Hall One in Taipei’s Xinyi district.
Orange Mart (柑仔店), which operates four bakeries in Hsinchu specializing in European-style and organic bread, said sales had dropped between 10 percent and 20 percent this year because customers had reduced the number of visits to their stores.
Ho Ping-tung (何屏東), executive assistant to the president of Orange Mart, said business was significantly affected by the large number of workers in Hsinchu being asked to take unpaid leave.
However, Ho said, the average amount spent by each customer had increased because customers visited the bakeries less often but spent more each time.
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
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