Baked Bread Odour

[chamois]

When I was in the States a couple of years ago, many of the large supermarkets had the smell of baking bread pervading the store obviously to entice customers to buy the stuff. I was curious about this and just wondered how they did it bearing in mind its done artificially.
Does anyone know?

[gumboot]

Well, I for one don't believe for a moment all this guff about bakers baking throughout the day.

Anyone been in a morrisons store late afternoon or evening over the last few years? Visit the in-stor bakery. What do see? Well, I always see a deserted part of the store with one member of staff manning the bread slicing machine if you're lucky. No other staff around and certainly no baker's in their "whites". The front shelves contain only a few types of bread, rolls etc that appear not to have been replenished in hours and gaps are everywhere on the shelves.

So what am I seeing? I'm seeing evidence that the bakers have been hard at work during the night, they've done their job and the stuff they've made has been sold out. There are no bakers there to bake more bread to replenish the shelves no matter what promotional videos show.

But wait, let's go a bit deeper here. Don't you think that if the bakery had yeast, flour etc in the back, they would somehow alter shift patterns so that bread could be baked all day long? Supermarkets don't make money out of ingredients sitting on pallets - its the bread that sets the tills ringing. Supermarkets work on the basis that stuff has to be on the shelves to sell and not in the back areas. Any supermarket manager will tell you this.

For me, all this points to one shift baking virtually everything out of dough shipped in overnight. When they use it all, that's it.