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Food Experience Design:
Rethinking baker’s, pastry and ice-cream shops.

By Carlo Meo, sociologist of consumption and teacher at the course in Food Experience Design by Poli.Design – Politecnico di Milano, and Gianpietro Sacchi, architect and teacher at Politecnico di Milano.
With the cooperation of Nicola R. Ticozzi, Director of the course in new Experience Design by Poli.Design.

The shops and places of our commercial culture need to evolve: a simple, banal but extremely urgent consideration. If during the last years the concept of shop has continuously evolved in the sectors of fashion retail, large-scale retail, and entertainment, this hasn’t happened to traditional shops, or rather it has been easier to close than renovate them.
This is all the more absurd as these retail formats are the most linked to our tradition, the role of sociality, our culture: we shouldn’t forget that our cities have developed around artisan workshops and not around big commercial centres.

It becomes therefore more and more important not only to face the renovation of these commercial concepts, but also to develop the competences necessary to meet such projects from new viewpoints: these are the reasons that have brought to establish the post-university course of specialisation in Food Experience Design.

The bakery as place of relation
Today shops have become places of passage and no more of relation. People, also in recent commercial ads, are depicted as seeking the lowest prices, wandering about gangways and grabbing every product in promotion, places of frenetic passage where nothing remains to you. Fortunately it is not so, the consumer pretends value and this cannot be built without relation!

The baker’s shop has been and keeps on being the retail shop of relation, the venue of closeness where every day people buy bread, where it is possible to have a chat with the baker or another customer, or even the neighbour to whom we have never spoken a word before, but who in the baker’s shop environment becomes our best friend. For some social groups such as elderly people it is the only opportunity to go out to take a walk, to be still in touch with the world. For the children it is the first place where to get and taste the first piece of bread of their life, that they can chew as a substitute of the dummy!

The social role of the bakery is strictly linked to the value of bread, a primordial product for people, the poorest food but the richest in meaning, the one that can never lack on a table, it’s a pity if it’s thrown away or wasted, it is the food that improves other more noble ones that couldn’t be exalted without its simplicity (ham role, bread and nut cream, bread and oil, etc.).

Bread, a cult product
This analysis mustn’t please the present of bread, but rather be a springboard of the bread and bakery of the future.
The guiding lines to invest on are: product quality, the bakery as place of relation, as a new sales channel, and bread as a cult product.

The consumer considers the traditional bread as something different from the industrial one, but today things are rapidly changing: the modern retail trade is investing in product quality and innovation, while too many traditional baker’s shops have become bread supermarkets where it is difficult to find a good roll or other various regional breads. How many bakeries have their own oven, and how many on the contrary have bent to a more industrial logic? As a consequence, today in big cities traditional bakeries can be counted on the fingers of one hand and cost like a fashionable boutique.

If the situation is so, then also the relational aspect falls, the bigger the bakeries are, the more impersonal the service is, and it is necessary to move to the suburb, to small towns or go to an Egyptian bakery to find the atmosphere of the past.

But the baker’s shop has another opportunity: to become also a channel of quick food service for lunch-time or in general for the take-away market, a sector that is little guarded in Italy and of great potential. The bakery can therefore work all day long by proposing products with a higher added value and marginality, without betraying its identity of “simple quality”.

In the end, such and important product with values so strong would be worth becoming a cult product, as it has lately happened for example to chocolate and coffee. This doesn’t mean that daily bread should bend to the wicked logics of marketing, but to enhance its quality and simplicity.

Ferran Adrià, the number one cook in the world, is famous also for a simple innovation (today copied by many others): the possibility to soak bread in small cups with extra-virgin olive oil!

The pastry shop, a dynamic format
Today the pastry shop on the contrary is one of the most dynamic formats worldwide within the retail trade, exactly in contraposition with the static situation of the bakery.

It depends on the product’s evolution, which is often dragged by renowned chefs, towards new shapes and contents. An experimentation is therefore born which involves product shapes, technologies and raw materials: bijoux products, olive oil ice-creams, dismantled trifles, glasses of sparkling soft drinks.
For sweets of such a kind new and technologically advanced containers are necessary, but also pastry shops up to the task, that become jewelleries where items are on display in a showcase. Hermè in Paris and Tokyo, Ducasse in Beirut, Yauatcha in London are the most relevant cases.

But besides these cases, one of the most important fields of intervention in the sector is the restoration of pastry shops in the historical centres, one of the most traditional formats in Italy: Sant Ambroeus and Cova in Milan, Rosa Salva in Venice, Doney in Florence, need to renovate and by starting from the huge value of the brand must update and adhere to the design standards of modern concepts.

The ice-cream shop: a place of innovation
And what about ice-cream shops? They get rid of the seasonal activity to become places of meeting and product innovation!
But attention, ice-cream risks to go the same way as bread, an industrial product that has lost the old quality, has a nice look but a bad taste.

On one side franchising chains of “fake” ice-cream multiply, on the other new ice-cream shops of quality and relation open, such as Chocolat or Riva Reno in Milan, or franchising chains of quality such as Grom.
Meanwhile, also in this sector there are historic ice-cream shops, those with a garden where to take a seat, with ice-cream cups to be eaten seated, which must as well renovate: Orsi and Pozzi in Milan for example.

Atmosphere, design and hybridization.
The future of food retail spaces is already at the disposal of the entrepreneurs and tradesmen of the sector, and of course of the designers that will understand their new languages.
The ‘key words’ to anticipate it are ‘atmosphere’, ‘design’ and ‘hybridization’.

Actually it is necessary to consider that today many situations and reference points are continuously evolving, it is more difficult to classify, standardise them; once they are identified, they are straight away redefined in ever changing ways.

Today the public, consumers, shop customers, are more and more demanding, attentive, prepared and critical with respect to what they consume. Everything is consumed more rapidly, we get quickly accustomed and just as quickly bored.
Also the ‘places’ in a certain sense are consumed and what was defined as ‘new’ in a short time is perceived as old and outdated; we naturally accept everything that is familiar and reassuring of our home or what is organised and ergonomic of our working place, but in other spaces such as a shop, bar, venue or for example an art gallery, we do not want to find the usual and well-established reference points, we look for the new, innovation, and the key words become design, hybridization and atmosphere.
Today everything that is not home or work must be ‘entertaining’, gratifying, give us the pleasure to be there. All the places where we buy and consume food and drinks, but also other things such as music, fashion, books or anything else, must be downright ‘situations’ that represent and express what is happening within them.

The change starts from night entertainment venues and influences commercial spaces
The origin of this change of attitude that regards a growing number of consumers and types of commercial spaces, is the world of night entertainment, the venues where people go to for the happy hour or after dinner.
It is a sector naturally ready to quickly understands the new needs of its customers, it is a territory free from bonds and constraints; suffice it to think of night-clubs, the ‘kings’ of evening and night entertainment for over twenty years, which today have been overcome by the ‘New Entertainment’ venues, new types of club where people go to from the happy hour to the after dinner, where atmosphere and design count more than any other factor.
Such an important and innovative change couldn’t have remained linked only to nightlife, but it has rapidly ‘spread’ all over the world of commercial spaces: the first to transform their showrooms into places where it is possible also to drink, eat, listen to music, relax and have fun, have been fashion stylists, but then it has spread over many different categories. Today it is not difficult to find a coffee bar inside a book shop, or a restaurant in a fitness centre, or an art exhibition in a car dealer and so on. The hybridization phenomenon seems unstoppable and the results are evident. At this point products, atmosphere, service and design of the environment melt together, become an organic whole that make up the offer of a retail shop.”

Hybridization, evolution and enhancement of handicraft
In the food trade, particularly in Italy, traditions are strong and every region or single town produces unique food specialties : when the large scale retail trade doesn’t incorporate or cancels family business concerns, the realities that resist are of high value, crafts that deserve to be enhanced, which exactly because of their peculiarity, specialty and uniqueness can literally move from the back of the shop to the shop-window.

There are successful examples of hybridization in food retail, where fish shops become sophisticated sushi-bars in the Italian style where it is possible to taste appetizers made of raw fish, where salesmen become waiters before dinner or for supper. And it is possible to see baker’s shops with a bar, like Princi in Milan designed by Claudio Silvestrin, where to taste 24-hours a day, 365 days a year, specialties just taken out of the oven, drink a coffee or an aperitif in company and bakers work in the shop window becoming therefore an attraction while their work becomes art.