The bakery window, and other unpleasant attractions.

(published July 2000)

It must have been a few months ago. I was half asleep, listening to that familiar background murmur for many a baker, the BBC World Service. This time the programme was about the excavations in Pompeii. The archaeologists, acting as moral guardians, had suggested to the Italian officials that one room be kept from the public. Locked. For the private ‘research’ of the scholars and academics

As you might probably guess, this room was rather well decorated with various scenes of Roman pleasure. As this was radio a rather detailed description was given, but I’ll leave this up to your imagination. But given the graphic detail on the walls, the archaeologists presumed this must have been some sort of house of pleasure. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? So for many decades this room had been roped off limits.

It now seems they were wrong. After much ‘gruelling’ study, it turns out that the room was a bakery. A lavishly, seductively decorated bakery, and the images of pre and post coital life are now seen as an attempt by the bakers to create a passionate atmosphere within the shop. Perhaps the purchase of a loaf was an adult affair. More likely, though, the Romans identified the simple baked loaf with such physical pleasure, rather than a simple staple, that it was natural to continue the association with other forms of pleasure. So they were keen to create a seductive environment to work in, and to purchase from.

From our price-obsessed corner in the market, I feel we sometimes lose sight of other ways to stimulate customers. Like the window that displays our work to the public. We know of that numbness that takes hold in the supermarket when customers trolley through the bread aisle. Awash with beige and white, with nondescript packaging and ugly design. Is the high street amble any different? Should a customer instinctively know that within one shop lies excellence, flavour, very special things to eat. We must communicate visually, we must explain what lies within the high street bakery.

Looking back over old issues of this journal, and the ‘Confectioner & Baker’, it is clear that prior to the 1970’s, the bakery window was a source of pride for every Baker. If you go further back, pre-1940, the high street bakery was an immensely beautiful encounter, often ornately decorated, lavish and elegant. What has happened to our business sense if we believe that the best economy is to make the process of buying a loaf as plain and mechanical as possible?

I know I bang on about this again and again, but you can stimulate sales through making the purchasing act as pleasurable as possible. Pack that window full of taste. With colour, flowers, fruit in season. Simple tarts full of rich fresh fruit, dredged with sugar and glazed in the oven. Rich overly chocolate cakes, displaying less mechanical technique and more dripping indulgence.

Within the bakery shop, take a tin of coloured paint and give the walls a bit of life. Buy inexpensive coloured fabrics, folded to cover the surfaces of the display. It can be spotlessly clean and colourful. Empower your staff to feel that the look of the shop is their responsibility. Encourage them to get decorating books from the library, watch home improvement programmes on the television, and steal these ideas to revitalise the bakery. Though the work of the high street baker is hard enough, you cannot ever let a depressed look to the shop reflect this.