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What is good bread? A baker is fighting Lidl


Photo: istock

Lidl vs. loaf

Bread can either be bought at Lidl or fresh. Both things can not be done together, as a Saxon master baker is sure - and thus open doors for consumers.

Stefan Richter is a baker by passion. He runs a bakery in Kubschütz, a small village of just 43 square kilometers in Saxony. What this bakery leaves is under guarantee from regional products that are natural. And what Richter is even more important: bread and rolls are traditionally made here. The dough is kneaded with hands, shaped and pushed into the oven. Here baking is still a craft - no longer a matter of course.

Because many discounters and city bakeries now swear by industrially manufactured goods, complain consumer advocates. It is faster and cheaper in the mass. But not only the taste, but also the health suffers. For the tan of brown bread does not worry about one hundred percent grain and hours of baking time, but color malt or caramel, as determined by the product testers again and again in samples. Additives make industrial bread more durable, and the grain is imported overseas massively and cheaply - or produced directly in Asia, as EU inspectors recently discovered. Fresh and healthy is different.

Now, of all things, the huge Lidl Group is promoting its bread with the slogan "How do you recognize what is good?" . For Stefan Richter, this rhetorical question sounded ironic enough to engage with the corporation. Only recently did Lidl advertise his bread with the slogan "We bake it fresh for you several times a day" - earning a shitstorm, as it turns out, that bread and rolls from the discounter are at best baked on the spot, but behind the scenes Lidl branch probably no traditional bakery kitchen hides.

The 34-year-old judge hurts this mistreatment of his craft in the heart. He lives up to his name and now targets discounter bread - at least on the internet. The master baker launched a campaign called #lidllohntnicht - an allusion to the company's slogan - and wrote an equally ironic bid to Lidl, in which he applied to become a master baker.

Contribution from Bakery Richter, Kubschütz.

Richter's application sounds like this: "I will miss the baking, the smell of freshly baked bread and the direct contact with the product of my work. On the other hand, I can rely on laboratory tests and the legal department, and then I'm sure I'll eat something different than what I've produced for you. " He's getting the message across - not only with consumers via social networks, but also with the organization Slow Food Germany, which also criticizes Lidl's new advertising offensive.

The organization calls the slogan a "fuzziness of the quality concept" of baked goods and asks Lidl to cease the campaign and to have its range of independent experts checked for fairness, sustainability and quality. Slow Food Germany accuses the group of dumping offers, pesticide-rich food and factory farming.

Bäckermeister Richter has shown how many bakers and consumers share his opinion of Lidl s Brot - figuratively, as well as on Facebook, where his 'application' has been shared over 2000 times.

And while the group Lidl has to think again how he polished his reputation again, Stefan Richter stands in his small village bakery and bakes his 'bread couture', a brown bread from rye meal, sunflower seeds, potato flakes - and the proof that there is another way : fresh, healthy and without artificial additives.

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