Hello. I'm someone who has been thinking deeply about the future of Japan's bread culture, and today I'd like to share my thoughts on what I call "The Bakery's 2024 Problem."
You may have heard of the "Logistics 2024 Problem"—a social issue widely covered in the news, where caps on overtime work for truck drivers have led to concerns about insufficient transportation capacity. But I feel compelled to tell you about another "2024 Problem" that's been quietly progressing in the same era. This is the Bakery's 2024 Problem.
Beyond the Misconception of "Something French"
Japanese bakeries are often perceived as "French-ish," aren't they? But in reality, Japanese bread has its own distinct history. It arrived in Japan in the 16th century, gave birth to uniquely Japanese creations like anpan (sweet red bean bread), and has evolved through continuous technical refinement into a genuine part of Japanese culture. This craftsmanship has been embraced across Asia, with Japanese-style bakeries expanding to Korea, China, and beyond.
Yet today, this culture faces a crisis of "spreading before it can be protected." In other words, Japanese bread culture is expanding across the world without being firmly established as "Japanese," and there's a real danger of it becoming diluted while the question of "whose culture is this?" remains unanswered. This is a matter that transcends the profit and loss of any single shop—it touches on the very foundation of Japanese culture itself.
What the Year "2024" Really Means
Labor reform laws have placed caps on overtime work in Japan. The general limit is 45 hours per month and 360 hours per year, with a maximum of 720 hours annually even under special circumstances. Then, in April 2024, these overtime caps (960 hours per year) were finally applied to sectors that had previously been exempt, including truck drivers.
What's important here is that 2024 isn't so much "the year the law suddenly changed everything" as it is "the year the law's reach finally extended to every corner of society." While bakeries may not be direct targets of the 2024 regulations like the transportation industry, the waves of a tightening labor market, upward pressure on wages, and shrinking social tolerance for long working hours arrived at the same speed, in the same year. And for bakeries, another wave—soaring ingredient costs—crashes on top of that.
Logistics Can't "Deliver"; Bakeries Can't "Preserve"
The Logistics 2024 Problem is framed as a shortage of transportation capacity—"we can't deliver enough." It manifests in ways consumers can see: stockouts, delivery delays, rising shipping costs.
The Bakery's 2024 Problem, on the other hand, progresses as a shortage of profitability—"we can't make enough money." Rising costs for wheat and energy, labor time constraints and staffing shortages, and the inevitable waste inherent in a same-day sales model built on the value of "freshly baked"—under this triple pressure, neighborhood bakeries can't secure sufficient profits, leading to closures and bankruptcies. With them disappear the diversity, skill transmission, and regional character of Japan's bread culture.
The insidious nature of this problem is that it rarely enters public consciousness until it manifests as a shop closing its doors. If the logistics problem is a crisis of "transportation capacity," the bakery problem is a crisis of "cultural capacity."
The Ukraine War and the Reality of Wheat Prices
Internationally, the food price index reached record levels due to the Ukraine war, and wheat prices faced significant upward pressure. Within Japan, the government's selling price for imported wheat rose 17.3% in April 2022 compared to the previous period, and has remained elevated since.
For bakeries, wheat is the primary ingredient. If they can't pass on price increases quickly enough, their margins evaporate immediately. When you think about how "ingredient costs"—a mere accounting figure—can act like oxygen deprivation, slowly suffocating a culture, it becomes genuinely painful to contemplate.
"No One's There," and "They Leave Before They're Trained"
Bakery work inevitably involves irregular hours—early morning prep, baking, and sales. Overtime caps make it institutionally difficult to continue the old approach of "making things work through long hours."
On top of that, new graduates tend to prefer large companies, making it hard for independent bakeries to attract talent. Mid-career hires face retention and fit challenges, and developing real skills takes time. The result isn't just "no one's there"—it's "they leave before they're trained," a war of attrition.
The Fate Called Waste
Retail bakeries build their value on "freshly baked." But behind that value lies unavoidable waste from unsold goods. Reducing waste requires demand forecasting, sales data, and production planning, but in most shops, manual data entry remains a bottleneck, and the data never gets properly utilized.
Of course, there are wonderful shops that carefully manage sales and productivity, prepare multiple production patterns based on demand, and absorb waste through freezing technology. But as operations scale to multiple locations, the burden of data entry and the cost of developing managers become barriers, and I suspect many shops still can't achieve data-driven management.
Stopping the Bleeding and Reinvesting: A Two-Stage Design
So what can be done? Let me share the directions I've been thinking about, divided into short-term and medium-to-long-term approaches.
In the short term, we need to "stop the bleeding." Prepare multiple demand patterns so that shop managers shift from "intuition" to "selection." Automate data entry so the information actually gets used. Systematize freezing technology not merely as preservation, but as part of product design itself. Through these efforts, we can reduce waste and improve productivity.
In the medium-to-long term, we need "reinvestment in culture." Reframe expensive equipment investments as "machines that preserve culture." Secure talent through three pillars—new graduates, mid-career hires, and foreign workers—with comprehensive systems for immigration, training, and living support, especially for international staff. Reconceive data management not as "cold control" but as a dictionary that translates artisan intuition for the next generation.
And most importantly, we need to reframe domestic wheat as "the material of culture" and present Japanese bread to the world as "Japanese"—just as we've done with ramen and curry. In Japan, breeding improvements have produced bread-suitable strong flour varieties like "Yumechikara," and demand for domestic wheat is growing. Given that Japan's calorie-based food self-sufficiency rate hovers around 38%, this carries significance from a food security perspective as well.
Send It Off with a Name Tag
It would be easy to dismiss this problem as "bakeries not trying hard enough." But I believe that would be intellectual laziness. External factors—legal frameworks, international markets, labor conditions—and internal structures—same-day sales models, craft skills that live in individual artisans, the difficulty of passing on price increases—are simultaneously draining profitability. To demand individual effort without acknowledging these realities seems terribly unfair.
Let me close with a touch of irony. It's truly wonderful that Japanese bread is spreading across the world. But if we let it travel without a name tag, when it returns, we won't know whose child it is anymore. Preventing that loss is precisely why we need to talk about the Bakery's 2024 Problem now.
Thank you so much for reading my humble words to the end. If even one more person, the next time they visit their neighborhood bakery, pauses to think about the culture and struggles behind it—nothing would make me happier.