No in-depth market analysis studies have yet been carried out in the area of bakery products in Switzerland. The study we conducted focuses on the market segment of food services, more specifically on bakery products in the Swiss hotel industry. The aim was to evaluate the market potential in the whole industry and to divide it into several sub-segments.

The collection of the necessary data is carried out by means of a survey, as well as by expert interviews. Based on the hotel categories (e.g. stars, beds, location, type of guests etc.), we offer our customer a detailed analysis in the various hotel segments. To collect the contact data of the Swiss hotels, we used the so-called web-scraping with the help of the statistical tool "RStudio". This tool, with the help of expert coding, automatically retrieves all desired data of a website, in this case hotelleriesuisse.ch. This practice saved us a lot of valuable time. It enabled us to find the addresses of 4200 of the 4500 hotels in Switzerland. The expert interviews were conducted with a diverse range of different hotels.

The potential of bakery products under the consideration of certain limitations and hence in the segment of Swiss hotels, could be determined within this project, being an estimated CHF 39.89 million for the whole market. Broken down into an average expenditure for bakery products per hotel, this number would be CHF 9’711. According to the survey and the expert interviews, it has been evident that quality is the most important factor for hotels when buying bakery products, followed by locality and price. Furthermore, it has been noticed that deep-frozen products seem to be more popular within urban hotels and hotels belonging to a chain, compared to rural hotels which seem to obtain more bakery products from local bakeries. According to the survey, an average 3-star hotel spends CHF 12’819 annually. We would recommend Délifrance to target its efforts largely towards three-star hotels and lower.The future trends, according to the experts interviewed, are believed to be vegan and healthy bakery products in first and second place. An additional statement which is often made, is a movement towards an increasing desire for lactose and gluten free products. Furthermore, there is a trend in the direction of more special, local and seasonal bakery products, especially breads.