In the Le Moulin bakery in Saint-Jean on the outskirts of Toulouse, customers are parading and yet this is no longer enough to cope with the rise in electricity prices. Manager Laure Régnaud: “today we are more than two and a half on the bill. We reach 6000 euros of electricity per month.”
Two measures for VSEs and SMEs
So to cope with this increase all savings are good. Laure reduced bread deliveries to schools, scaled back orders from certain suppliers, but she also had to raise the price of bread : “We hadn’t changed the price for four years and now we’ve added 5 cents to the price of a baguette. It’s still not viable. The house isn’t going to sell a baguette for 2 euros!”
In the laboratory two bakers are busy, 15 people work in the bakery. Laure Régnaud is worried about the months to come:“I can’t lower my margins any more than I’m already doing. We can’t go on like this.”
Honestly the government don’t bother, waste no time, no money.”
The day before the government announced a new round of aid for small and medium-sized enterprises. In the viewfinder of the executive in particular: bakeries strongly affected by the rise in prices. The government promises to set up a electricity shock absorber from January 2023 and the maintenance of gas prices next year.
Laure Régnaud, manager of the Moulin remains skeptical about these announcements: “Doing files to obtain this aid takes a long time and if we finally manage to file it, we are never in the nails. There, they will offer us 500, 2000 euros in aid, but besides that the aid on wages just got cut. Honestly the government don’t bother, waste no time, no money.”
The threat of closure
A few streets away, Jean Garcia, artisan baker and owner of the Pain Boutique is less categorical. According to him, this help is welcome and necessary because these next few months are going to be difficult for the profession: “many companies will be weakened and some may even close.”
For the time being, no bakery has gone out of business according to the Departmental Union of Bakers and Pastry Chefs of Haute Garonne.