“Change is the only thing that does not change”– this adage seems to be the rule in bakery industry today. In a world where recipes, consumer trends and brands constantly come into existence and go out of vogue in no time, we digged into what is most popular currently. Here are the trends that are a rage with bakers and customers alike. Manoj Kumar reports.
Cup Cakes
As the buzzword convenience is getting louder and louder, consumers are preferring cupcakes as compared to traditional cakes. Cupcakes offer a lot of easiness to consumers as there is no need to unpack, search for a knife and cut the cake into pieces. “People buy cupcakes and eat them in front of us,” says Nadia Suryakanth who owns The Cup n Cake Factory in Delhi.
“Cupcakes provide more variety to customers. People are bored of eating the same old pastries. They are looking for something new,” says Shitija Nahata, proprietor, The Cupcake Company.
“Call centres and other corporate institutions buy cupcakes in bulk. When officials from other places visit companies, they order cupcakes,” adds Suryakanth.
Cupcakes today have a lot of new flavours. Only traditional flavours like pineapple and black forest were available until some time ago. But the current favourites are red velvet, apple cake with caramel, and others. According to Avijit Ghosh, corporate pastry chef at The Leela Group of Hotels, hazelnut, raspberry and strawberry flavours are also popular with customers. “Flavours have ultiplied now. Now, there is a trend of designer cupcakes too,” says Ghosh.
“Our flavours are very different from what is available in the market. Customers like to have options and when it comes to cupcakes they can choose from a wide range of flavours,” says Nahata, adding that currently the most popular flavours are red velvet and chocolate.
Even for functions like wedding, people go for cupcakes as they spare them of tedious jobs like handling, packing and unpacking, and slicing. “Cupcakes are easy to carry, which increases their popularity. It is also easy to distribute. Also, there is a lot of scope for customisation,” says Savio Fernandes, pastry chef at JW MArriott Mumbai.
Children are a major section of consumers which have made cupcakes hugely popular. Children love cupcakes as they can more easily relate with the small size,” says suryakanth. In the metro cities, cupcakes are elling at different price ranges. A piece of cream cheese cupcake sells at as much as Rs 89 at some places.
Designer cakes
Another popular product is cakes in various innovative 3D shapes. Customers increasingly prefer customised cakes, which is a reason for the spurt in the popularity of designer cakes. “Designer cakes have become hugely popular nowadays,” agrees Rinku Gokarn, who makes 3D model cakes for weddings and other occasions.
“The consumers today are welltravelled and knowledgeable. They are ready to experiment. They don’t mind spending money on a delicious dessert. There is huge potential for quality bakery products,” says Nahata. Savio Fernandes also says that today’s customers are well-travelled and they want to replicate here what they have seen abroad such as designer cakes. As a result, chefs are put to test.
People want their guests to know that the chef specially made the cake for them. Sometimes they want to flaunt that “it was my idea and the chef made it for me.” This has also increased the demand for designer cakes. Characters from Walt Disney and other fictions are very popular shapes. When the customers have some high-end design in their mind, they discuss with the chef. Fernandes reminiscences how he took three weeks to “create” a 7-foot rich wedding cake.
There is, however, a glitch when it comes to designing and creating cakes in 3D shapes. Design is a faculty that belongs to fine art. Even the most talented chef may not necessarily have artistic abilities to design 3D models. Only those chefs with some artistic aptitude can make aesthetically appealing cakes, according to Fernandes. “It needs passion and interest to create designer cakes,” Ghosh concurs.
Just in the case of cupcakes, children form a big segment of consumers of design cakes. “Children want a lot of elements in cakes. They want princes, star fish, teddy bear, and all sorts of animals in the cake. Before cutting the cake into pieces, they want to see it and enjoy,” Gosh shares his experience.
Greater demand for exclusive shapes means high prices too. In luxury hotels, designer cakes sell at around Rs 3000 and taxes per kilogramme. At other bakeries also, designer cakes sell at a premium.
Premixes
Convenience seems to be the buzzword once again. Further, premixes also offer consistency in the end product. Ingredient manufacturers are launching newer premix products every other day.
Premixes for desserts have been quite popular in households for several years. Ease of use and standardisation are other factors that make premixes popular. Today you will get premixes for almost every bakery product. Bread mixes and cake mixes are no longer limited to big bakeries.
“The premix market as a whole is set to grow. It reduces the need for manpower, which again is a factor why bakeries are going for premixes,” says Tushar Gupta, managing director, Tushar Nutritive Foods Pvt Ltd.
The opportunity for bakers to start with small volumes, experiment with the products and then grow the category is a useful benefit with premixes.In each category, there are a large number of pre-mixes available today, which are suitable for both artisan and industrial bakeries. Health bread, Alpenburg break, wheatmeal dark break, and country grain bread are some of the types of pre-mixes within the bread category. “Fruit mixes and chocolate continue to top the taste charts, even though more people are open to experimenting with their taste palette,” says Binu Varghese, managing director, AB Mauri India Pvt Ltd.
Premixes have more to do with the sweet goods category in the cake formats and also in part finished goods like pizzas and savoury snack items. Sweet goods, which include brownie mixes, muffin mixes and many types of cake variants, come in full mix formats and fast-bake items like pizzas and burgers have inclusions of necessities like yeast, emulsifiers and enzymes. This also helps make the products technically very close to what is desired. Enzyme use can be very expensive, when added directly.Even two drops extra can be an expensive proposition and could upset the recipe. “Premixes take away that risk,” explains Varghese.
Pillsbury, Puratos and AB Mauri are among the leading premix manufacturers. Enhance Proteins,Eurofoods, Iffco Ingredients and Delta Nutritives also have formidable presence in the market.
“It has been a journey, especially in the Indian context. AB Mauri was among the first companies to launch premixes and went through a large gestation period for acceptance. The scratch method was prevalent. There have been a lot of factors such as consistency of the finished product, speed of preparation, challenge of getting skilled manpower consistently, constant supply chain issues in large topographies like India, and of course, the taste that are driving the growth of premix market,” says Binu Varghese.
AB Mauri has around 12 products within the cake mix category alone. The company has been able to deliver the taste profiles of pure Western products like brownies, muffins, doughnuts and simpler cake mixes. Its egg free range of such mixes is very popular. The company has also ventured into the breads category, with premixes like whole wheat bread, multigrain, focaccia and the very Indian masala bread. The company’s new product development teams are working on new creations. The company is looking at more offerings in exotic bakery products from the Western world, and customising what the quick service chains require. Desserts also remain a priority for AB Mauri.
“People want your final product to be the same each time they come. If customers like a product, when they come back to taste it again, they want the taste to be the same. Premixes help achieve this,” says Varghese.
In complete premix category, the only external ingredient that the end user needs to add is water. However, many chefs at five-star hotels do not prefer premixes. “The chefs at luxury hotels will never completely shift to premixes. They mostly love to make everything from the scratch. The market for premixes will always be bakeries and professional home bakers,” says Rajesh Sanghvi, director, Delta Nutritives Pvt Ltd. Gupta also believes that five-star hotels may not be the right customers of premixes. “Chefs at five-star hotels have enough time to experiment. It will be the other bakeries and individuals who would love to take advantage of the convenience and standardisation aspects of premixes,” says Gupta.
It is not that the standardisation of premixes precludes scope for experimentation and creativitiy. “The premix is a base. What and how you want to bake something entirely depends on you. There is a lot of room for creativity while using premixes,” says Gupta.
Earlier, bakers and chefs used to believe that premixes were the end of the creativity trail, which those skilled people specialised in. But premixes are very customisable now. They are very malleable and the chef or the baker can use his pallet of skill and creativity to tune the final product as their own signature product. It allows for addition of basics as per taste, fruit and other infusions and so open to decorations. It gives the basic benefit of simplifying the addition of complex technical ingredients and yet gives opportunity for creativity.
Unlike popular belief, there is also a lot of scope for customisation in premixes. There is also now the ability of manufacturers to customise the premixes as per their requirements, as per the equipment you have, the taste profiles sought by their customers and even the kind of flour that they use. “This is definitely very helpful for the premix user,” comments Varghese.
Live Bakeries
This is one of the features that globalisation has brought to India. With the burgeoning of shopping malls and hypermarkets, the live bakery concept has taken off in a big way. Almost every mall now features a live bakery.
The fact that customers can have direct interaction with the product and the staff has made the live bakery concept popular. “People love watching cooking or baking the product they are going to eat. They are also attracted by the freshness of the product,” says Sunil Awasthi, corporate chef (strategy), Future Group.
“People are curious. They want to see how products are baked. They are also captivated by the freshness of the products at live bakeries,” says Nilesh Karkhanis, bakery consultant. The malls operated by Future Group, Spencer’s, and Trent Hypermarkets are some of the places that have buzzling live bakeries. Most of the live bakeries offer high quality products. They ensure that taste, texture, and look of the products remain at a high pedestal.
“Today’s customers are very knowledgeable. One cannot underestimate them or fool them,” says Awasthi. Karkhanis says that today’s customers are widely travelled and they are familiar with the live bakery concept that exists abroad.
People in metropolitancities nowadays go to shopping malls to purchase even grocery and vegetables. Some of them place their order at the live bakeries and go for making other purchases, and come back to collect the baked products. Breads,snacks and cakes are the most popular items at live bakeries. Red velvet, cheese cakes and cream cakes are at the top of the charts at most live bakeries. Another factor for the increasing popularity is awareness about food safety. “People have become more conscious about food safety and hygiene. In live bakeries, customers can see how the food is made. It helps build a lot of confidence in the customers,” says Arup Dastidar, corporate chef, Spencer’s.
Live bakeries also require to impart a great deal of training to the staff. Because people can see how they work, their conduct needs to be extremely professional. Earlier, they used to work in the back-end, where they were not required to control their behaviour. “In live bakeries, the staff should not look they are stressed. They also should not shout or run around while working,” says Dastidar, explaining how Spencer’s trains its live bakery staff.
Fancy Packaging
Packaging is one area where creativity is playing out wildly. Kamal Chhabra, proprietor, Royal Equipment, which supplies packaging material to many hotels and bakeries, says that economical packaging and eco-friendly packaging are hugely in demand. “There is a lot of demand for fancy packaging,” says Chhabra.
“Our tulip-shaped cupcake packs have huge demand from customers,” says Narendra from Benders India. “Our trays to display the Italian sweet bread panettoni are a favourite of customers. Our fancy packaging for mousse cake and muffin are also very popular,” says Narendra.
Namrata Shastri, who runs a bakery Mistique, also says that the demand for fancy packaging is on the rise. “We buy packaging but very often create our own packaging also. Depending on the customers’ need, we often customise the packaging,” says Shastri. Bakers usually engage an outside designer to create custom-made designs.
Bakers are realising the importance of packaging more than ever today. Some bakers even use wooden packaging which gives a classic look to the product. Though fancy packaging pushes up the cost of product, bakers say that today’s customers give value to packaging. The cost of packaging varies between just Rs 10 to as high as Rs 50 for a usual product. “Packaging enhances the product to a different level. And today customers give value to packaging” says Shastri.
Usually the cost of packaging is around 2 – 5 per cent of the total cost of the product. But in the case of fancy packaging it may shoot up to even 25 per cent. It also brings with it its own issues. When customers buy something for their personal consumption, they are not much inclined towards fancy packaging. For gifting purposes, people look up to fancy packaging. But from the bakers perspective, they use packaging as a mechanism to attract customers to the product. “Good packaging enhances the product,” says Namrata Shastri.
Every trend is transient, or else it is not a trend. However, the essence every healthy trend will be absorbed in newer trends that succeed the old ones. Same could be the case with these five trends too.
