Status: 02/21/2023 08:42 a.m
Bakeries complain that the requirements of the German bureaucracy cost them too much time, nerves and money. In Baden-Württemberg there is now an attempt to relieve the companies.
Hans Wucherer’s small bakery has been in Reutlingen since 1688. He is proud of his traditional craft. “Here we still bake for real” says his website. Lately, inflation and energy prices are causing additional problems for bakers. But there is another burden that is slowly bringing usurers to their knees: the German bureaucracy.
According to Wucherer, he worked for weeks on a folder that contained all the additives in his baked goods. The folder is required by law. In it, customers can read about allergens, for example. Only: In eight years nobody wanted to see this folder. If the customers want to know something, they just ask. The staff at the bakery know exactly what goes in where. The folder could actually have been saved.
Folders that nobody cares about
And there are even more folders at Wucherer that nobody is interested in at the end of the day. But he has to fill it out, according to the regulations. For example, he has to document when the breadmaker is cleaned. Every day, on paper, with a signature. All of this costs usurers time and money, up to 40,000 euros a year, he estimates:
I didn’t become a baker to fill out forms and paperwork, but to work creatively. This is very frustrating.
Four ministries responsible
Reducing bureaucracy is being discussed in politics. In Baden-Württemberg, the Regulatory Control Council should help. In 2021 he published a study with 20 suggestions that could relieve bakeries of bureaucracy. In the study, the Regulatory Control Council calculated that companies in Baden-Württemberg could save a total of 70 million euros in five years.
Less bureaucracy is consensus, but how? Politicians disagree on that. Baden-Württemberg’s Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann found that the Regulatory Control Council did not go far enough in reducing bureaucracy. Now the green-black state government has taken matters into their own hands.
Responsible at the state level are the consumer, economic, finance and interior ministries, the state statistical office as well as the federal government and the EU. There is also a coordinator for bureaucracy reduction in the state ministry. When asked, this explains that seven of the proposals made by the Regulatory Control Council have already been implemented. However, many other demands were directed at the federal government or the EU, so they cannot be implemented at state level.
“It keeps getting worse”
Stefan Körber is the general manager of the bakery trade in the southwest. He explains that the bakeries have not noticed much of the relief so far. A mini advance is that you no longer have to document the refrigerator temperature. Previously, bakeries had to record by hand whether the cooling temperature was low enough. The refrigerators beep themselves when the temperature rises.
That was one of the suggestions that has already been implemented. But his general conclusion: “It’s getting worse and worse.” Not every single documentation is the problem, but the sheer mass. In addition, the forms are often incomprehensible. Instead of being digital, most of the documentation would have to be recorded on paper. All of that takes time.
Paragraph sign made of lye dough
Another annoyance for Stefan Körber is that responsibilities are often not clear: “If I tell a district administrator that I want to change something, he says: The state is responsible for that. The state tells me that the federal government is responsible.” At the federal level, he would then be told that it came from Brussels. “And there they say: That’s what the World Health Organization wants. As long as everyone keeps saying it’s the other person, we can’t change anything, nothing will change.”
For bakers like Hans Wucherer, this means: things will continue as before. Filling folders and documenting the cleanliness of his breadmaker – these activities remain an integral part of his job. In the meantime, he sometimes uses his lye dough to bake paragraph signs instead of pretzels – out of frustration.