Franchising in France

So, though I left beautiful Paris a month ago, my thoughts are still mulling over my time there and my guts are still digesting all that I ate. When I arrived on the murky shores of the Seine in late January I was under the impression that all the little bakeries in France have somehow managed to remain independent while still producing quality baked goods. Turns out I was wrong. You can find every shade of bread imaginable - from the appalling to the mind-blowingly good. There are small bakeries, big factories, and everything in between. Regardless of quality, probably the most interesting matter to me is that today in Paris roughly eighty percent of the bakeries have some sort of contractual relationship with a franchise. While I am generally an opponent of things getting bigger in the food business, it seems that franchises are both part of the problem and the solution for keeping good bread traditions alive.

I have long been intrigued by franchises. For those unfamiliar, the idea is essentially this: a company (in this case a food company) has products it wants to sell and it wants to keep profits good. Say that Carl makes croissants. Carl makes croissants in his croissant shop, and does well. But he wants to sell more croissants, so he opens a second shop and he starts selling twice as many croissants. He opens a third shop and triples his original profits. Then he opens his fourth shop and things get out of hand - there's too much for Carl to manage, he chose a bad neighborhood to open up in, and he's feeling stressed. So, rather than opening more company owned Carl's Croissants, he decides to franchise. Rather than keeping complete control - and risk - over additional outlets, he lends his franchisee, Caitlin, the Carl's Croissants name, its products, recipes, and perhaps even financial assistance in exchange for a cut of Caitlin's profits. Carl's Croissants can now expand limitlessly with the help of new investors and franchisees and Carl still gets some profits.

Pretty much any major restaurant you can think of franchises. A company like McDonalds happens to both franchise and run company owned restaurants. Their rules are tight to maintain company unity, but the franchises are generally quite successful. Restaurants like Dairy Queen are also franchises, but give a much greater amount of flexibility to the individual restaurants to do as they please - hence the greater variety of items on the menus and layout for stores.

So, getting to Paris, I was intrigued to learn that franchises are big in the bread business but incredibly flexible. The franchises of Paris are not bakeries which decided to get bigger, but largely millers who decided to expand. In the 1980s large millers and millers cooperatives realized that they needed to do something about the decrease in bread consumption in France. In the preceding eighty years, consumption of wheat had decreased eightfold. Part of the blame for this decrease in flour consumption was the decreasing quality of bread. So, the mills started into new territory to try to save their products. While initially controversial and risky, just twenty years later it is the norm rather than the exception.

Unlike franchising done by a bakery, the franchising done by millers is all about moving product. French franchises give a wide variety of options offering varying degrees of commitment about how bakeries can join up. The weakest commitment can mean nothing more than promising to buy some flour from a miller, others contract exclusively, others still take recipes which are designed to work specifically with the miller's flour that the baker will use. Franchises can offer flagship products which bakers can receive instruction and training on how to make. With further commitment, bakers can receive signage, take the name of the franchise as their own, or even remodel the entire store to be a part of the franchises branded look.

Walking through Paris, it's tough to figure out who is a franchise and who isn't. Some stores give no indication beyond their napkins - others advertise their affiliation loud and proud. The effects on the bread are mixed - while being part of a franchise is intended to guarantee a certain standard of quality, there is a lot of variation between individual bakeries. If behaving poorly enough, bakeries can be asked to resign from the franchise - but if they do well, they can be rewarded with perks from the company. The biggest franchise are Ronde des Pains, Retrodor, Banette, Baguept, Le Greniet a Pain - and though these names are everywhere, it would be easy to live in Paris and not notice how prolific they really are.

Overall, none of the best bread I had in Paris came from a franchise - but the worst didn't either. Being part of a franchise seemed to mean that you would be getting something which was solidly middle ground. While some independent bakers have done fantastic baking, some small bakers do as little as needed to get by. From what I could tell, franchising seemed to be a good thing for most bakers - but the bakers who join into these schemes are often the ones who needed it. It's hard to imagine these bakeries out of context - the variety of millers to for this variety of franchises is a bit unimaginable in a North American context. An odd little difference in this crazy world of baked goods...