In 2024, Lesaffre celebrates 50 years of its Baking Center™ concept, with a network of 51 dedicated application centers around the world. Throughout the year, Baking Center™ teams around the world will be celebrating the anniversary with customers and partners. For the occasion, two original books were published: a comic book and a recipe book entitled “Les pains du monde”, featuring 40 bread recipes from around the world, interpreted by local technicians.

The 51 Baking Center™ around the world are training customers and partners to use Lesaffre products and in breadmaking. They are acting as a benchmark for bakery fermentation, Lesaffre highlights, with more than 300 bakery technicians at work to develop new products and techniques.

The training offerings provided by the Baking Center™ network have been expanding over the years. Today, they include support in sourcing local raw materials in bread-making ingredients, baking processes and waste reduction.

“At Lesaffre, we are committed to helping bakers develop their skills and activities, whether they are craft or industrial bakers. In 2050, there will be 9 billion people on Earth to nourish healthily, considering the planet’s limited resources. With these unprecedented challenges awaiting us, we strongly believe that our Baking Center™ network will continue to grow around the world in the years to come, enabling Lesaffre to be even closer to its clients, and to keep providing them with solutions that are ever more adapted to their needs,” says Brice-Audren Riché, Lesaffre’s CEO.

“In 1974, Lesaffre was the first company to create an application center that trains bakery professionals in the art of bread-making: the Baking Center™. Today, with a strong network of 51 Baking Center™ around the world, our teams of bakers have built up a lasting relationship of trust with our customers, adopting an ever more customer-centric approach by providing them with a growing portfolio of products and innovative services,” sais Thomas Lesaffre, Group Baking Marketing Director at Lesaffre.

Lesaffre celebrated its 170th anniversary in 2023 and it is present on all continents. The Group’s products are distributed in over 185 countries, produced at 77 production sites and developed at 10 R&D centers around the world. This footprint reflects its strategy of customer proximity, in its work with bakeries of all sizes.

Photo: Lesaffre