The 50 biggest chain bakeries

In its latest issue (brot+backwaren 2/18), the journal’s editor took an entirely new look at the bakery landscape in the German Federal Republic. With meticulous care and diligence, she created a map of Germany illustrating the 54 biggest bakery branch networks.

+A map was prepared for each of these businesses, showing the postcode areas in which the company is represented by branches. Another map in which these points were each grouped into a kind of catchment area shows that there are no longer many places in Germany beyond the reach of these 54 chain stores. Moreover, the fact that there are also local chain stores, possibly strong ones, is also not excluded. Altogether, the map of Germany with its major chain store systems in the German baking industry shows 9,645 locations, and that probably corresponds to nearer a third than a quarter of the total number of bakery chains in Germany. Economic pressure in the last few years has convinced many businesses to systematically close unprofitable locations instead of propping them up any longer.

The portraits of the individual chains are at least as exciting as the overview shown in the general map, which shows clearly that many passed the stage of expanding around their own back door long ago, and even a 100-km radius is no longer the be-all and end-all for many. On the other hand, in the maps for Landbäckerei Stinges & Söhne GmbH in Bruges with 107 branches, and Bäcker Görtz GmbH in Ludwigshafen with 155 branches, it is quite clear how much the expansion policy entails logistics requirements and a sales region that is as self-contained as possible. The picture is also similar for Bäckerei Heitzmann GmbH & Co KG in Bad Krotzingen-Biengen, which has developed its existing branch network of 110 locations extending from Lörrach and Freiburg to Offenburg into a compact region, or Beck in Tennenlohe, which attaches importance to its branches being in a coherent distribution area with only the city of Regensburg as an additional exclave. Junge Die Bäckerei in Lübeck pursues a different but nonetheless clearly recognizable concept with branches in Hamburg, along the entire Baltic coastline, in the vacation areas around Lake Müritz, and recently in Berlin as well.

A counterexample is Bäckerei Wilhelm Middelberg GmbH in Bad Iburg, whose Westphalian origin is still as clearly visible as ever, but whose network of branches now extends to selected points as far south as Leverkusen, Cologne or Kerpen. Hofmeister Brot GmbH in Landau is similar, and scatters its 146 branches from Saarbrücken in the west and Rastatt in the south to the gates of Rüsselsheim in the north and Heilbronn in the east, or Landbäckerei Ihle, whose 258 branches cover a big area.

The private bakery with the biggest catchment area is undoubtedly Meisterbäckerei Steinecke GmbH & Co KG in the Mariental municipality in Lower Saxony, whose network of 648 branches now extends from Nienburg on the river Weser to the Polish border and from Brandenburg in the northeast down to the southern tip of Saxony-Anhalt.

In a separate map, brot+backwaren shows the locations of the four bakeries that are now striving for a national spread through locations in urban centers: Kamps Backstuben, Heberer, BackWerk and Back-Factory.

The editor also generously allows an individual map for the Edeka Group’s five businesses, namely K&U as a subsidiary of Edeka South-West with 805 branches, the Edeka HannoverMinden subsidiary Schäfers with 739 locations, Backstube Wünsche, a subsidiary of Edeka South Bavaria with 276

Ranking of German chain bakeries by number of chain stores

branches, Büsch GmbH represented 183 times on the Ruhr and Rhine, and Edeka North’s subsidiary, Dallmeyers Backhus, with 103 branches. Incidentally, the biggest distribution area belongs not to K&U but to Schäfers, whose catchment zone extends from the Polish border into the Münsterland region and from Bremen to Erfurt. But with 805 to 739 branches, there’s not much difference between them anyway. Thus the two of them are also probably among the five baked goods producers in Germany who between them earn more revenue than the 9,387 businesses each with annual sales of less than EUR 1 million (in this connection, see BackMarkt 4/2018: Germany’s baked products market in 2016: 5>9,387).

2016 sales statistics in Germany

It must be said at the outset that these statistics suffer from a system error. They compare apples with pears. The figure that is counted is for sales reported by businesses for VAT, regardless of whether the sales are at end consumer prices, as in a bakery’s branch outlet, or sales at ex-factory prices as in the case of industrial companies. It would be necessary to add in the wholesale and retail margins to arrive at a comparable end consumer price. Drinks and merchandise in bakery branches also push up sales inconsiderably.

A second distortion, at least of the average figures, is because they count all the businesses that report sales, even if the latter are below EUR 100,000/year. They are as many as 1,920 of these companies listed in the “annual sales below EUR 1 million” category. Even many of the 2,773 businesses that declared annual sales between EUR 100,000 and 250,000/year to the tax authority and earned average annual sales of just about EUR 171,000 can hardly rank as full-time businesses.

Disregarding the imbalance inherent in the way the system collects sales figures, sales in the whole sector as a 2015/2016 year-on-year comparison rose by 1.9% to EUR 20.13 billion. The inflation rate in Germany in 2016 was just under half of one percent, so it is entirely correct to talk of real growth in the sector. The only question is: growth for whom?

It was not in the group comprising the five big businesses with annual sales of more than EUR 250,000 per company. Their total sales fell from EUR 3,002.71 million (2015) to EUR 2,934.15 million (2016). However, Lieken AG suffered the majority of this shortfall.

The 38 companies counted in both 2015 and 2016, and consisting of medium-sized industrial businesses and large chain stores whose annual sales amounted to between EUR 50 and 250 million, represented 17.55% of the

Anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the brot+backwaren journal can download the issue from their web site at www.brotund backwaren.de. After purchase, payment by PayPal and waiver of the revocation option, there are two different downloads, a “short” version of 60 MB and a “large” one of 250 MB with which the maps can also be enlarged without becoming blurred. +++ market in 2015, whereas in 2016 the figure was only 17.41%. In absolute terms, however, their combined sales correspond to EUR 38.03 million, equivalent to a 1.1% increase and thus still lay above the inflation rate of half a percent.

Businesses with individual sales volumes of EUR 1 to 10 million gained a quarter of a percent more market share in 2016. In absolute terms, their combined sales turned out 2.8% higher than in 2015. However, they had to share the upturn with 40 new entrants to the category, so an increase of EUR 4,000 per company per year was all that remained in the end.

The improvements in 2016 were “creamed off” by baking business in the center ground with annual sales of between EUR 10 and 50 million. Their number rose by 11 to 255 companies, their combined market share by 1.26% to 25.34% and their average sales by slightly more than EUR 0.5 million to EUR 20 million/company per year. In percentage terms, however, that’s only a 2.6% increase.

The 9,387 baking businesses that each had whole-year sales below EUR 1 million in 2016 still had a market share of 14.54% in 2016. Their number decreased by 413 from 2015 to 2016. Of these, 362 closed their doors permanently, while, 51 successfully jumped into the next-higher sales category.

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