Baking Up Business

Take a look at the photo above. Can you recognize and name that specific type of bread? If your answer is no, don’t feel bad. Hardly any of our customers can either. In fact, most of them can’t even pronounce it.

It’s ciabatta, an Italian white, yeast-risen bread known for its elongated, flatter shape and soft, porous interior. “Ciabatta” is also the Italian word for “slipper.” However, the only thing our customers are interested in is why this “squashed loaf” has so many gosh darned holes in it. Let’s see…because it’s supposed to?

This brings me to my main point. At the Bakery’s tourist trap location, our artisan bread line does extremely well. The location is a prime stomping ground for serious gourmands, chefs, and foodies alike. There are overpriced cheeses, meats, sauces, produce, seafood, and pastas abound. Our breads may also be expensive, but an identifiable market segment exists in that location for people desiring high-quality levain, spelt, semolina, and other unique loaves.

But at the Bakery’s location in the mall, sales of the artisan bread line are consistently flat. When my manager first informed me that the Bakery was launching their artisan breads at the mall, I was skeptical from the start. Her reasoning was that there was no current retailer of artisan breads anywhere nearby. I wonder if it ever occurred to her (or the marketing department, if one even exists) that there is, in fact, a reason why.

There is a Safeway meters away that sells loaves for a third of the price of our breads and a neighbouring, well-known Chinese bakery that rakes in enormous sales of Asian-style bread everyday. If you’ve ever had Asian-style bakery bread, you’ll know that it has nothing in common with crusty, dense, hearty European artisan breads.

If the manager (or marketing department) of the Bakery evaluated the segment attractiveness of our intended target market in relation to the mall’s geographic area and the demographics of the mall’s primary clientele, it would be realized that the market segment for those wanting artisan bread, especially in this area of Vancouver, is not attractive at all. The segment is not identifiable, substantial, reachable, responsive, or profitable.

There is no identifiable need for “fancy, made-to-impress” bread in this area. The number of customers who do purchase one of our loaves is dismal; it is not uncommon for us to sell less than ten loaves a day. Reactions to free samples of our bread vary, and some customers are even dissatisfied with the different taste and texture of our nothing-like-Asian-style breads. Reaching customers is difficult when we’re forbidden to leave the shop, and the Bakery’s online presence is near non-existent. As for profitability, the Bakery’s profits are clearly made from the sale of our other items.

I won’t be surprised to see the ciabatta go in the next few months or so. But if the Bakery was smart, it would be gone tomorrow.