District of Munich – Alarm in the bakeries – District of Munich

At the moment, no baker in the whole country would agree that the craft has a golden foundation. Inflation, staff shortages, exorbitantly increased energy and raw material prices – they have not been spared from any of these crises. The existential concern is omnipresent in the bakeries, as is the fear of more bad news. “It makes you sleep restlessly,” says spelled baker Stefan Dümig, who has branches in Haar, Vaterstetten and Ottobrunn. “We’re just at the beginning, if it all takes a long time, it will get really bad,” says Sauerlach village baker Andreas Rubner. The Ottobrunn master baker Werner Fiegert also describes the current situation of his guild as borderline. “We have to trust the guild to get the best out of us,” he says.

Guild master Heinrich Traublinger Jr., who himself manages 23 branches with 130 employees and has his company headquarters in Kirchheim, knows about the concerns of bakers and confectioners, who are particularly concerned about the “cost tsunami” in energy prices. At least now the gas price cap is a done deal. Of course, that doesn’t help any company that fires its stoves with oil or pellets. He will fight for a hardship case regulation for them. On Thursday he talked about it with the Bavarian Economics Minister Hubert Aiwanger. “But there is still too much vagueness,” he hopes that something in this direction will soon become more concrete.

It’s a balancing act that bakers and confectioners currently have to do. On the one hand, they have to raise the prices for their products in order to be able to operate profitably, on the other hand, customers migrate to discounters when the price exceeds their pain threshold. “There are whiners who speak of usury, but unfortunately anonymously online,” says Haar baker Stefan Dümig, who would like to talk to one of the critics about it and explain his situation to him. Then he would probably also report on the thousand walnut loaves that he made for a major customer in the middle of the year and made a loss as a result.

A major reason for the negative business was the drastic increase from 4.80 euros to 7.90 euros per kilogram of walnuts. He has now reduced the production of walnut bread, removed pistachio products completely from the range, “because nobody buys a stollen for 70 or 80 euros”, and puff pastry products can no longer be found in his displays because half of them consist of butter, which now costs 7.20 euros instead of the previous 4.80 euros per kilogram and also requires a lot of manual work.

Open detailed view

“The costs for personnel and energy are driving up to the gigantic level,” says Dümig. In addition, the costs for machine maintenance have increased enormously, the maintenance of coffee machines by around 35 percent. “Nobody thinks about that,” he says. In the middle of the year he was in the red, reports the baker, who is doing well in at least one area. While the price of wheat has doubled to currently over 60 euros per quintal, the price of spelled has risen moderately by six euros to 86 euros.

Up until 20 years ago, Dümig ran his bakery on fuel oil, but then switched to gas for ecological reasons, he says, which has been heating up his ten square meter ovens ever since and driving up his costs. Above all, the electricity consumption in the confectionery also costs money. “Donut baking devices are insane power guzzlers,” says Dümig. He is lucky that he signed a five-year contract for electricity and gas last year. In the past, energy costs accounted for five to six percent of sales, for some of his colleagues it is now 25 percent, and for him it is in the double-digit range. “A baker closes every day,” says Dümig. But not because he went bankrupt, but because a generational change is imminent and many no longer want to put up with their children.

The cheaper industrial tariff

According to the head of the guild, Traublinger, 600 bakeries have closed nationwide in the current year, but no one knows how many because of the explosion in costs. Some rent increases are due to inflation. He expects relief from a proposed reduction in VAT from 19 to 7 percent. A major adjustment screw that needs to be turned in his opinion are electricity prices. It is unfair that the industry tariff of 13 cents net, 24 cents gross plus VAT for 70 percent of consumption only applies to companies with a consumption of more than 30,000 kilowatt hours, while smaller companies have to pay 40 cents gross. “We don’t agree and try to switch the whole thing,” says Traublinger.

Open detailed view

That would also be in the spirit of the Sauerlach baker Andreas Rubner. “I don’t know what’s in store for us with electricity,” he says. And it bothers him that with the aid packages that are currently being put together, it is not clear what that means in concrete terms for him. Rubner heats the oven with oil, which is now twice as expensive, similar to the raw materials. But the prices for the paper bags also went through the roof. He raised the prices a bit, “but I can’t keep increasing them,” he says, although there are few complaints in his area, especially since unemployment is low here.

Open detailed view

He has to pass on part of his higher costs to the prices, says Ottobrunn master baker Werner Fiegert, who usually supplies twelve branches, but has temporarily closed one due to a lack of staff. But he had reached a limit where it would be difficult. His customers also feel the inflation, “and at a certain point they buy bread and rolls in the supermarket,” he says. Fiegert will follow with great interest whether the smaller companies can still benefit from the industry tariff. His electricity contract expires at the end of the year, and the baker expects the price of electricity to increase sixfold. “It gives me stomach ache,” he says.