Paris Baguette unveils new brand design

Paris Baguette unveils new brand design

Paris Baguette recently announced a comprehensive brand redesign. The reimagined approach includes an elevated guest experience through every consumer touchpoint: modern and welcoming café layouts, distinguished brand packaging and an enhanced digital and mobile presence.

This comes at a time when the bakery-café chain is projected to open 1,000 new locations in the US by 2030. There are currently more than 90 US locations primarily located on the east and west coasts.

“We believe that every neighborhood deserves to have its very own bakery café and we’re on a mission to make that happen,” says Pete Bell, chief marketing officer for Paris Baguette. “With the brand evolution, we wanted to push beyond the wonderful service and delicious food offerings guests have come to expect and set the stage for exactly what the ideal café experience should look, feel and smell like. Our new design reinforces our goal to create a heartfelt, authentic and detail-oriented atmosphere that sparks moments of joy, community connection and changes our definition of hospitality.”

Each Paris Baguette store will be home to a variety of experiences designed to showcase its master bakers and cakers while being a welcoming invitation to customers. Each location will have an elegant entrance and a window into the cakers at work. French architectural features add eclectic flair with contrasting modern elements surrounded by a palette of blues, soft white textures and dark accents.

New baguette price sparks ire of some in France

The new price of baguettes at a leading French supermarket is sparking outrage from some.

As of last week, customers in Leclerc stores were greeted with the new baguette price – 29 cents (in Euros).

The president of the Leclerc supermarket chain, Michel-Édouard Leclerc, announced Jan. 11 that baguettes would remain at that price in Leclerc stores across France for a minimum of four months.

“Yes, blocking the price of the baguette at 29 cents is quite a symbol!” Leclerc tweeted Wednesday, officially launching the initiative, adding that: “The baguette is a benchmark for the evolution of prices and purchasing power for consumers.”

That is 10 cents cheaper than Leclerc competitors Intermarché and Super U, and 16 cents less than at Carrefour stores. Meanwhile, the average baguette price in France is 90 cents.

This new price stirred the ire of five key players in the industry that branded the measure as “shameful” and “destructive” in a joint press release signed by the national farmers' union FNSEA, the National Association of French Milling (ANMF), the National Confederation of French Bakery and Pastry shops (CNBPF), the organization representative of the French cereals sector Intercéréales and the General Association of Wheat Producers (AGPB) on Wednesday.

“In France, there are 450,000 people doing all this work in the cereal sector. It’s not just bread, but the whole cereal industry. I think it’s denigrating the whole industry!” the president of Intercéréales Jean-François Loiseau said to ABC News, arguing that “every day, a French person eats 30 cents worth of bread on average. When Leclerc sells his baguette for 29 cents, if I follow the same proportion, it means that he offers the French to eat bread for 10 cents every day. That’s a 20-cent difference every day. Is the subject of purchasing power in France at 20 cents a day, on bread?”

In the joint statement, the five organizations emphasized the difficult circumstances they said they are facing. For many years now, they said they have been fighting to be paid more fairly, while the price of wheat has exploded worldwide in recent months, and production costs are also increasing “strongly.”

Some customers had mixed reactions to the pricing announcement.

To Youssef Aïtbaila, 39, who just bought a baguette at the boulangerie Les Pyramides in Colombes, a northwestern suburb of Paris, Leclerc “is right” because “everything has become very expensive.”

“It’s always good to be able to give everyone access to a cheap baguette because it’s true that bread has increased a lot,” said Emilie Péré, 38, a client and mother of one.

At the Leclerc store across the street, 30-year-old Justine Grangette wasn’t too thrilled about the decision, insisting that it’s part of Michel-Edouard Leclerc’s “mentality” of cutting prices. “Anyway, I will continue to buy from my local baker.”

After an increase in 2021, the purchasing power per household in France is expected to fall by 0.5% in the first half of the year according to an assessement by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee).

Paris Baguette tests new climate-controlled smart lockers

In response to the changing food industry and the rising demand for fast-casual restaurants to meet customers where they are at, Paris Baguette is testing the concept of climate-controlled smart lockers at its Edison, New Jersey location.

With the scan of a QR code, customers can preorder food items from the bakery café and pick them up from designated, chilled or heated lockers at the bakery.

This innovation comes on the heels of Paris Baguette’s announcement of a comprehensive brand redesign. The reimagined approach includes an elevated guest experience through every consumer touchpoint: modern and welcoming café layouts, distinguished brand packaging and an enhanced digital and mobile presence.

South Korean-Based Chain Paris Baguette Has Opened Its First Oregon Shop in Beaverton

Paris Baguette, the South Korean-based company with over 4,000 locations around the globe yet still relatively few outlets in the U.S., has broken into the Oregon market.

The bakery-cafe has officially opened in Beaverton’s Cedar Hills Crossing shopping complex on Southwest Cedar Hills Boulevard.

The shop features a menu of gourmet breakfast and lunch sandwiches, including eggs nestled in croissants and brioche buns as well as caprese and chicken Caesar baguettes; salads; sweet and savory pastries; and cakes, which come whole or by the slice.

The 3,000-square-foot Beaverton location has French-inspired architectural features along with a tribute to the Pacific Northwest in the form of a mural featuring landmarks like Mount Hood, Pittock Mansion and Multnomah Falls.

With only 100 Paris Baguettes in the U.S., the opening of the first of at least two planned Oregon stores is just the beginning of a plan to accelerate its presence in this country.

The shop is also the latest to join the remodeled and quickly growing Cedar Hills Crossing, which has lured a Shake Shack that saw lines of people wrapped around the block for weeks after it opened, hip Rheinlander-Gustav’s spinoff Bargarten, Dave’s Hot Chicken, and a McMenamins with a stunning wood-slatted bar and spinning propeller that resembles the nose of the planes that used to take off from the former airfield there.

Slated to join that lineup later this year is Bamboo Sushi, Moberi and Salt & Straw.

Ex-BioShock developer explains the viral baguette boy’s whole deal

As a repository for all of our waking thoughts and unrestrained id, it’s hard to beat Twitter. Of course, this can be bad; not knowing other people’s idle thoughts is often a good thing! On occasion though, it’s kind of neat — like when someone wakes up on an otherwise normal day and thinks: “Hey, remember how BioShock Infinite had some kid dancing with a baguette in the background for no discernible reason?” And then someone else says “I sure do because I made that kid.”

Over the weekend, Twitter user @instant_grat mused about a moment in BioShock Infinite’s Burial at Sea DLC, the only place in the video game where a boy can be seen frolicking around a pillar with a baguette held over his head — as if all Parisian boys want in the world is a loaf to call their own, to lord over all the loafless street urchins on the promenade.

random sensory flashback to the Bioshock Infinite DLC where they wanted to communicate to the player “you are in Paris, France” so they put a little kid in the game dancing around in the street while holding a baguette over his head pic.twitter.com/E77jzW0Air — Pocklecool (@instant_grat) February 4, 2022

It’s a very funny observation, but what’s even better is that Gwen Frey, the developer behind indie game Kine and former member of the BioShock Infinite team, noticed it, and since it was her actual job to put the bread boy there, could share the story behind this jaunty lad.

According to Frey, a big part of her job was populating BioShock Infinite with background characters, many of which include something she calls “chumps.” In her words, chumps are “skeletal meshes of humans with no AI.” Think of them as animatronics you’d run into at a theme park.

In order to liven up the Paris scene in question, Frey wanted to put a moving background character in the space but it was too resource intensive to script AI pathing necessary to guide a character around the space — so an ad hoc solution was stitched together from other assets taken from throughout the game. A looping dancing animation was deputized to add two dancing children to the scene, but having two kids dancing introduced more problems, and one kid dancing alone just looked wrong. But if Frey could put a baguette in said kid’s hands…that might work!

Frey’s tweets detail a classic problem of game development — the need to make the most of limited resources in order to improve the gameplay experience as much as possible, and make a game world feel just a little more alive. And also provide the raw materials for funny social media posts nearly a decade later.