“The first time you pass by, the second time too, maybe you resist the third time, but the fourth time you go in and buy a croissant.” This is how the doctor and nutritionist Núria Monfulleda, from the Loveyourself center in Barcelona, ??explains how the proliferation of bakeries with tastings invites, in short, “to eat worse.”
For Monfulleda, “the combination of refined flours, sugar and fat generates such a revolution in the body that it manages to calm anxiety almost instantly. This makes this type of offer addictive. If on top of that we find one of these establishments every three steps It’s hard to pass by without buying.
The fact that most of them have “very tempting shop windows that can usually be seen from the outside” – Monfulleda continues – contributes to the fact that many people have practically without realizing it increased their consumption of industrial pastries.
We must not forget that this type of ultra-processed food is not recommended from a nutritional point of view and that, as Antonio Rodríguez, author of El libro de Sinazucar.org (Pluma de Cristal) and creator of the Carmen IA app, a scanner, of barcodes, “should be reserved for occasional consumption, as they are not recommended within the framework of a balanced and healthy diet.
Their appetizing offering and claims such as “the smell, which is sometimes even perceived from the outside and automatically awakens the desire for sweets,” in the words of Monfulleda, means that these establishments have proliferated in the last decade. According to data from the National Institute of Statistics, the number of franchise centers in the Bakery-Pastry sector is 22 brands, which have a total of 438 own establishments and 423 franchisees.
It must also be taken into account that they are usually tremendously profitable businesses. This is explained by the head of Hospitality of the Comisiones Obreras union in Catalonia, Paco Galván: “The majority of these companies, although some have rectified them, are registered as bakeries, although in reality for practical purposes they act as cafeterias. This means that they apply the collective agreement of Bakery and not that of Hospitality, which would be the one that would correspond to them taking into account the activity they carry out”.
For the person in charge of the Workers’ Commissions, “the social conditions of the Hospitality agreement are notably more beneficial for workers than in the Bakery agreement”, so that these companies “take advantage of the advantages of declaring production as their main activity. bakery, even though it really isn’t.
It is not surprising, in this sense, that “a good part of the staff in these establishments are women, often of immigrant origin, because they continue to be a vulnerable group that especially suffers from job insecurity,” says Galván. He indicates that before the interprofessional minimum wage of 1,134 euros per month was established, “many employees of this type of establishments were between 30% and 40% below that figure.”
For its part, the hospitality sector of the FeSMC-UGT of Catalonia pointed out before the Technical Commission for Collective Negotiation on the Collective Agreement that if “companies that fraudulently use licenses that are not appropriate to the real activity of the establishment applied the interprovincial agreement of Hospitality, the staff would have salaries of 400 euros more”.
Thus, “these establishments adhere to a kind of legal vacuum, since without it being strictly false that they are bakeries, it is true that in most cases this is not their main activity, which represents unfair competition for restaurateurs,” continues the head of Workers’ Commissions.
Tasting bakeries insist, however, that “a tasting bakery is a bakery and not a hotel and restaurant establishment.” This was stated at the time in a statement by the Gremi de Flequers of the Province of Barcelona, ??which denounced that “despite this obvious fact, for several years the bakeries in our country have suffered constant attacks by the hospitality lobby” .
This organization defined the activity of bakeries with tasting as follows: “Tasting simply consists of tasting, inside or outside our establishments, the products and specialties that we sell, accompanied by instant and/or refreshing drinks, in accordance with the regulations that we informs and socially accepted uses. On the contrary, the hotel industry is a more complex activity, of a non-commercial nature and in which levels of manipulation are involved that are in no way comparable to a bakery with tasting.
The Gremi de Restauració of Barcelona does not think the same, which has been working hand in hand with the unions for a long time (“a very unusual thing,” Galván jokes) so that, in the words of the restaurateurs, “competition can occur on equal terms.” conditions, something that does not happen in the field of tasting”.
For Gremi, in this case there is a clear situation of unfair competition. “Two businesses, one next to the other, offer the same service (the customer sits down, has a coffee and a croissant or a sandwich, reads the newspaper or works on his laptop, etc.), but are subject to different rules , more lax in the case of tasting. Equality between operators is broken: tasting has an advantage,” states this organization. UGT adds, for its part, that “although it is true that these companies are dedicated to the sale of bread and confectionery, they do not have a bakery and only have an oven to heat the bread that they receive already kneaded and pre-baked.”
For restaurateurs, “the most painful difference has to do with the salary of the workers and is suffered by the staff themselves and also by the company: the salesperson of a bakery with tastings earns 407 euros less per month than the waiter of a bar (gross salary with prorated extra pay). The tasks they perform, however, are identical. The difference for the company is 540 euros per month.”
Thus, the gross salary of a waiter is, according to the agreement, €1,802 per month (12 payments), while that of a bakery salesperson with tasting amounts, according to 2022 data (the latest published), to €1,395. The Guild of Flequers of the Province of Barcelona justifies this difference by insisting that “our type of company and its staff have nothing to do with a bar or restaurant.”
In the case of the city of Barcelona, ??the Gremi de Restauració filed a complaint in 2019 against 50 bakeries with tastings belonging to different chains, which it later expanded to another 20 establishments. The conclusion after the administrative action was that 85% of the reported establishments did not comply with the regulations.
From there, several cessations of activity in processing were decreed, “which occurs when, having initiated a file whose purpose is to correct non-compliance, the premises in question disregard the requirements of the administration,” they explain from the Gremi. In a dozen cases, “the administrative action did not lead to any point, either because the file was abandoned (for unknown reasons), or because it expired.”
Among the most common non-compliance, restaurateurs highlight that all of the premises reported exceeded the maximum permitted capacity of 20 square meters for the tasting area, which means about 14 people. In fact, in one of them, up to 94 chairs were counted. It also highlights that “the municipal ordinance does not allow the sale of alcohol (neither high nor low alcohol) and it was found that all of them sold beer and other alcoholic beverages.”
In addition, bakeries with tasting “are only authorized to sell products of their specialty, but the reported businesses sold other products: salads, meat with potatoes, etc.,” notes the Gremi. Finally, many of them offered menus, a commercial formula that can legally only be offered in restaurants.