2024-03-07 22:20:27
A bakery that has been in the family for three generations will close at Easter. The operators in Franconia cannot find any successors.
An era ends in the Franconian town of Pottenstein. The Brendel bakery in the Kirchenbirkig district has to close – after 112 years of existence. The owners are giving up the business in the settlement with around 5,200 residents for reasons of age, reports “Merkur”.
The report states that Elsa and Erich Brendel are no longer able to run the bakery themselves and that they are “not so fit anymore”. And they haven’t found a successor either – neither within their own family nor outside of it. The couple has three daughters, but all of them are said to have declined. One is even a master baker, but lives in the Netherlands.
Elsa Brendel is not surprised that there are problems with recruiting young people in bakeries. “The working hours and weekend shifts” are not particularly attractive for young people, she tells the newspaper.
Are bakeries dying out?
The closure is also regrettable because, according to the operators, the bakery was in good financial shape. Customers even came from Nuremberg and Bayreuth. Erich Brendel was the third generation to run the business, which opened in 1912. He took it over from his father in 1984. Bread and rolls will be sold for the last time on Easter Sunday. What exactly will happen to the business and the facility is not yet clear.
There are many reasons for business closures: many companies lack young people from their own families, other companies are struggling under the high electricity prices and raw material costs. The minimum wage also puts a strain on finances. And yet the industry as a whole is not doing badly. Sales increased in the first months of 2023 and amounted to five billion euros between January and May. However, according to the data platform Statista, this was more due to increased prices than higher sales figures.
According to the Central Association of the German Bakery Trade, there were 9,607 companies in Germany in 2022 with 238,000 employees working. Total sales this year were 16.7 billion euros.