Why put an Astréïa Mill in my bakery? 5 September 2024

You’re probably wondering whether it’s a good idea to choose a mill for your bakery, depending on your clientele, your passion for bread, your quest for higher quality flour… These are just some of the questions we’ll be tackling in this article.

We’ll look at all the reasons why some of our customers have made this choice, this investment.

Reason number 1: Create a buzz in my bakery with a flour mill

If you want to create an animation in your bakery, it’s important to know at what level you want to create it.

• Is it for all the customers who come into the bakery?
• Is it for the foot traffic in front of your bakery?
• Is it for the educational aspect and to help your own customers understand the way you want to work?
• Is it for the impact on your business, so that your customers can see the difference between your know-how and expertise and that of the big chains?

So many specific questions to think about. It’s not the same thing to look for a mill to create pure animation and to install a mill to make people understand, appreciate and differentiate yourself from the surrounding department stores.

For this example, we recommend that you watch Jean-Pierre Olivero’s report on France 3, which looks at the subject of animation and customer education in bakeries.

Reason number 2: Work with better quality flour

Many bakers contact us because of physical suffering at work (beyond the hours, the workload and the social pressure). They are looking for a raw material that will enable them to make a decent living from their work without getting sick:

• Do you suffer from skin diseases?
• Do you suffer from lung disease?
• Do you think the flour you use is the source of your skin or lung disease?

Many bakers contact us because their customers want to eat less bread. Whether it’s on the advice of their dietician, doctor, naturopath, etc., many of your customers are led to eat less bread for various reasons: diet, intolerances, etc.

• Do your customers want to eat less bread?
• Does flour suffer from a poor image in your local network or area?
• Are your customers asking for flour traceability?
• Are your customers increasingly asking for gluten-free breads or breads made with new flours (small spelt, spelt, cereals, etc.) that you are not used to working with?

There’s only one answer to these two issues – the health of the baker and the health of the customers who eat the bread from the bakery: flour and its quality.

Today, customers are informed and information circulates easily and quickly. There have never been so many households with gluten intolerance… The cause is not just a ‘fashion’ effect on the subject and the theme of flour, but also the reality of flour blends.

So it’s hardly surprising that gluten intolerance increases when refined flours are packed with added gluten to help with bread-making and the whiteness of the baguette. At the end of the day, the debate is now about how you want to do your job for your customers?

If you’re looking for quality flour and traceability for your flour: for you AND for your customers, there’s nothing better than to carry out the entire process in your bakery.

1. You can find the cereals locally (customers are bound to appreciate this and your region will be grateful!) and pass them on to your mill.
2. You enable a cereal farmer to sell his produce locally and give meaning to his work.
3. You can then diversify your range of breads by varying the cereals to create different recipes depending on the cereal growers near you
4. You can be sure of the way in which the cereal grower cultivates and maintains his land and so promise quality to your end customers
5. You can learn new things about growing cereals, so you have a better understanding of what will become your raw material!
6. So you can protect your health as a baker and the health of your customers.

In this case, the mill is not going to be used directly to differentiate you by a visible mill in the bakery, but much more in the fact of explaining and tracing your raw material and your know-how.

We invite you to watch the video of Arthur’s Bakery in Auvergne, equipped with an Astréïa mill in the bakery.

Reason number 3: Educate customers about the wheat, flour and bread chain and differentiate your bakery

In this chapter, we’ll look at the reasons why some of our bakery customers decide to equip themselves with a mill: both for the quality and diversity of the flours that the mill will provide, and to bring a certain education to their customers, a source of differentiation and customer loyalty.

• Not only do you want to create a showcase in your bakery to explain your work and how you source raw materials, but you also want to work with quality flour for all or part of your bread-making process?
• Would you like to have a mill to show your customers, but this is not an end in itself?
• Would you like to enjoy working with different types of flour and flours from different cereals, while easily explaining this know-how to your customers?

In our view, this involves taking stock of a number of factors:

1. How is your bakery laid out?
2. What would you like to highlight: flour, bread, know-how, flour production?
3. Do you have teaching skills (ability and availability to explain to customers)?
4. How is your bakery laid out and how much storage space do you have?
5. How many kilos of flour do you work with each day? each week?
6. How is your team currently organised?
7. Who are your direct competitors and how do they compete?
8. Are you prepared to be ‘trained’ (deformed!) to work with finer, softer flour?
9. Do you have local cereal growers available to deliver the raw material you need? In what volume and at what regularity?
10. …

These are all vital questions to ask yourself before you even think about installing a mill. The mill in your bakery will only be a solution that adds to, reinforces and improves what you’re already doing.

At this stage, you can contact us so that we can review together how we can support you in such a project. We can put you in touch with several of our customers who have installed an Astréïa mill in their bakery for the same reasons.

In this context, we strongly advise you to follow the video of our baker customers ‘Léa and Alexandre’. They were followed for several months by the programme ‘Le Feuilleton des Français’ (Years 2020 and 2021) broadcast on Sundays at 1.15pm.