Another difficult year

József Septe, president of the Hungarian Baker Association paints a rather gloomy picture of the industry.

‘The profitability level is low, I am rather pessimistic about the quality of flour after this year’s harvest and the weakening of the forint makes imported ingredients more expensive. Despite growing production costs bakers were unable to increase product prices in the last two years. It is good news that between 2015 and 2020 more funding will be available for technological development. At the moment there are about 1,100 baking enterprises in Hungary – 50 less than two years ago. Those bakeries can be successful that find a market niche. For instance Croatian bakeries are successful because their profile is a bit different: they are more like catering units and they offer new types of products at relatively high prices. There are about 500-600 foreign – mainly Albanian – bakeries in Hungary. They are difficult to compete with as many of them don’t respect rules and regulations. Our goal is to expand the Hungarian Bakery Trademark programme. It has been received well by the trade and by the Ministry of Agriculture too. The project also helps consumers become more conscious buyers of baked goods.