As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes, over the past several months, we’ve witnessed a great growth of the bakery/baked goods market across the Republic of Croatia, which has generally been accompanied by a large number of newly opened bakeries from both small businesses and larger bakery chains.
One of the serious players on the market, at least in the area of the City of Zagreb and its surroundings, is Pekara Dubravica, which has a chain of 35 bakeries in Zagreb, Zapresic and Zabok and employs as many as 429 people.
Over more recent days, this family company, headed by Damir, Franjo and Krunoslav Mikelec, has been celebrating its 60th anniversary. From a small business much like any other, the Pekara Dubravica bakery company has become a very well known Croatia brand that annually earns a massive 156 million kuna, which is much as they had in the record 2019, while last year, due to the pandemic, their income dropped significantly.
They state from Pekara Dubravica that large stores have definitely become significant competition due to the very low prices of their baked products that they struggle to compete with.
“Most of these products are frozen and are imported. When we talk about the bread we bake every day and use large amounts of sourdough for it, the quality of our bread is incomparably higher. We don’t import any of our baked products that we place in our bakeries, all our products are from our own production. Twenty years ago, we opened our first branches on the market, and at that time there were no retail chains like we have today, nor were there shopping centres like the ones we have today. Markets the place to get together and to shop. Today, that trend has changed drastically and it’s very important for retail chains to attract everyday customers, and they do so in part through the very low prices of bread and other baked products,” they explained from Pekara Dubravica.
Although in the past, some players from this demanding market have embarked on a large export or franchise expansion, Pekara Dubravica says that they are focused on their own branches, they don’t have that in mind, and wholesale makes them a very small share of their overall revenue.
“Logistics and operations are very different whether we do retail or wholesale. We’ve arranged our business in such a way that we don’t have large storage capacities and we don’t have any plans to export, nor to open franchises or our own branches abroad.
Our production is specific, we have a lot of manual work which takes place in production, as well as finishing in the offices where a large part of our products are baked. Basically only bread and some small pastries are actually baked in production.
We’ll continue to keep going in the same direction and we’ve got no plans to expand to foreign markets,” they pointed out from this well known Zagreb company. As their main customers are people going to work, school or tourists, the pandemic has dealt them a considerable blow and they admit that 2020 was especially difficult for them.
“In that year, we had a drop in turnover of 21.1 percent and a drop in the number of customers of 28.5 percent. Our number of customers decreased because people worked en masse from home or didn’t go to work at all, the schools were closed, there were no tourists and all of this affected our business. At the same time, the earthquake led to a large number of people from the city centre leaving, and this also affected our business. We managed to save jobs, and that was the most important thing for us at that moment,” they stated from Pekara Dubravica.
They announced that their plan in the upcoming period is to maintain their good level of recognition and insist on product quality, innovation and freshness. For now, they explained, they’re going to remain in the wider Zagreb area and are working on opening new bakeries with planned dynamics of 1-2 new ones per year.
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