France is the home of the baguette, that delicious, crisp staple of a fabled gastronomy, but just try getting a fresh one in the evening, or on a holiday, or even in August, when many of the country’s 33,000 bakeries are closed.
Jean-Louis Hecht thinks he has the answer.
The baker from northeast France has rolled out a 24-hour automated baguette dispenser, promising warm bread for hungry night owls, shift workers or anyone else who didn’t have time to pick one up during their bakery’s opening hours.
“This is the bakery of tomorrow,” said Hecht, who foresees expansion in Paris, around Europe and even the US. “If other bakers don’t want to enter the niche, they’re going to get decimated.”
For now, though, that’s a lot of talk.
He’s only operating two machines — one in Paris, another in the town of Hombourg-Haut in northeastern France — each next to his own bake shops. The vending machines take partially precooked loaves, bake them up and deliver them steaming within seconds to customers, all for 1 euro (US$1.42).
Despite the expansion of fast-food chains, millions of French remain true to their beloved baguette: It’s the biggest breakfast basic and the preferred accompaniment for lunch, dinner and cheese.
Yet customer convenience here often takes a back seat to lifestyle rhythms. Many stores in small towns and even lower-traffic areas of Paris close for lunchtime. And in August, many businesses — including bakeries — shut down for part or all of the summer holiday month.
Late-night supermarkets are rare, even in Paris. And they’re generally seen as a source of low-grade, desperation bread, not the artisanal product of a certified baker. Hecht wants his automated baguette machine to fill in the gaps.
His first try two years ago ran into technical troubles. Now, with the help of a Portuguese engineer and improved technology, Hecht developed a new-generation machine that started operating in Hombourg-Haut in January.
It sold 1,600 baguettes in its debut month and nearly 4,500 last month. If that rate keeps up, the 50,000 euro machine will be paid for within a year, Hecht said.
“If you sell 100 baguettes per day, there’s a 33 percent [profit] margin: It’s phenomenal,” he said, adding that he already has three patents pending.
His second baguette dispenser in northeast Paris started running last month.
Hecht came up with the idea a decade ago. He — like many French bakers — lived upstairs from his bakery in Hombourg-Haut and customers would often come knocking at his home after closing to scrounge for a baguette to hold them until morning.
“My wife said: ‘We’ll never get any peace!’ so I said, ‘We’ll put out a bread distributor and we’ll be left alone,’” Hecht recalled.
Now, he thinks the automated bread dispenser could revolutionize the lifestyles of bakers, many of whom get up before dawn to go to work. With the machine, they could sleep in a bit, he says.
Unlike bakery-fresh bread, these baguettes are precooked, a technique used by industrial, high-volume bread producers who deliver to many French vendors. Hecht calls it “a good compromise.” The machine holds about 120 baguettes at a time in a cool storage area.
Customers don’t get a choice. The machine spits out only one product: a hard-crust “-traditional”-style loaf — a denser and crunchier cousin of the standard baguette.
Innovators for years have tried to develop baguette distributors, but no one has yet succeeded, according to officials at the Paris bakers labor union. Previous attempts hit inventory-management troubles, served up soggy or cold bread, or didn’t garner wide appeal.
In an Associated Press newsroom taste-test, reviews were mostly favorable, ranging from “I never would’ve guessed it came from a dispenser” to “the crust’s a bit soft.”
Still, French skeptics were out in force.
“For me, it’s not homemade bread. It’s not kneaded and baked at the point of sale — by definition, it’s from a machine,” said Marc Nexhip of the Paris bakers’ union, who admits he’s hasn’t tried one yet. “I’m not convinced that good taste can be maintained over time. Maybe for 15 minutes — but not for several hours.”
However, for Hecht, it’s about changing with the times.
“It’s like with banks: Before, everyone went to a teller; now, everybody uses ATMs,” he said. “It will be the same with bread: Today, everybody goes to the bakery. Tomorrow they’ll go to the baguette dispenser.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day