San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Inflation-proofing the croissant
How local bakeries keep prices stable despite rising costs
From his office in Los Gatos, Andrew Burnham, a former Wall Street energy analyst and current operating partner at the Peninsula bakery Manresa Bread, tracks the price of flour, butter and eggs as carefully as he once watched the markets for oil and gas. But when the prices for those ingredients spike — commodity wheat is up almost 50% this year, for example — Burnham’s strategy at Manresa Bread is more straightforward than the dynamic pricing of Wall Street: Just hold steady.
“Imagine if the corner coffee shop you went to had a different price every week like the stock market,” said Burnham. “That would have a very weird vibe to it. It wouldn’t convey any quality. It wouldn’t convey any confidence.”
Owners of small and mid-size bakeries in the Bay Area who spoke with The Chronicle generally agreed. To retain steady customers amid inflation, they must keep prices stable — even if that means making other changes to the business, or ultimately accepting slimmer profits.
Data from five local bakeries between 2016 to 2022 demonstrate the dynamic. The price of a butter croissant in The Chronicle’s survey sample has risen slowly — an average of roughly 20%. A croissant, which might in theory be a measure of the price of butter, flour and eggs, is, in practice, a measure of a bakery’s resolve. “You do everything you can — you work on proofing times, cut weight, how you shape it,” Burnham said. “You pull all the levers you can before you ultimately take up a price on a menu.” Last year, for the first time since opening in 2015, Manresa Bread raised the price of its croissant, from $4 to $4.50.
Starter Bakery, a wholesale operation in Oakland, has maintained a relatively steady direct-to-consumer price for its butter croissant at farmers’ markets and online, increasing it by 50 cents this year. But the bakery shrunk the size of its croissants by 20 percent, owner Brian Wood explained. Starter has also invested in labor-saving equipment like larger mixers and automated depositors that portion out dough.
Labor, bakers said, was their highest cost, driven up by rising wages. At Neighbor Bakehouse in San Francisco, co-owners Greg Mindel and Christine Savage-Mindel have raised the price of their butter croissant by $1.25 since 2016, reacting mostly to labor costs. A higher minimum wage has raised wages across the board, even at businesses like Neighbor where wages start above San Francisco’s minimum of $17 per hour.
Michel Suas, founder of the influential San Francisco Baking Institute, called it the “responsibility” of a baker to keep prices low for customers. “You have to make money — but at the same time, you have many ways to reduce costs,” said Suas, who also owns Thorough Bread and Pastry and co-owns b. Patisserie with Belinda Leong. He recommends trimming product selection and keeping a close eye on waste. The price of a butter croissant at Thorough Bread has been $3.25 since 2019; at b. Patisserie, the price has been $3 since 2017.
Not all croissants come so cheap. The butter croissant at Tartine, which was $4.25 in 2016, is now $5.50. The price of a stuffed croissant can creep even higher: At Tartine, an almond croissant is $6.50; at Arsicault, a chocolate almond croissant is $6.25; and at Breadbelly, a chocolate version is $6.75.
Of course, those croissants might be mere occasional indulgences. But if it’s sold at a reasonable price, a plain croissant can be a daily ritual, as it is in Suas’ native France. In the United States, Suas said, high-quality croissants were once hard to find. He doesn’t take their current prevalence for granted.
“You cannot abuse demand,” he said. “If we overprice it, it’s going to disappear again.”
“You do everything you can — you work on proofing times, cut weight, how you shape it. You pull all the levers you can before you ultimately take up a price on a menu.”
Andrew Burnham, operating partner at Peninsula bakery Manresa Bread