Hangzhou bakery owner waited for 1 year after ordering food: This is not “hunger marketing”

The bakery studio called “Gulu Ye·Xinmu Shao” in Linping Yishang Town, Hangzhou has become so popular because of its unique wood kiln baking process. After ordering online, you have to wait for a year to receive the bread. The owner “Gulu Ye” responded to the question of “hunger marketing” and admitted that it was not that their bread was delicious, but rather that they happened to catch the Internet craze, and because the production capacity of small stone kilns is actually extremely limited, it was in no way intentionally creating a feeling of scarcity.

According to Chao News report, this bakery, known as “the hardest-to-find bakery in Hangzhou”, uses natural yeast and wood-burning furnace baking technology. It bakes in up to two or three ovens a day, producing only 60 or 70 loaves of bread per day. It takes more than two hours in an oven. In the winter of 2023, orders exploded after being recommended by food bloggers, and customers expanded from surrounding areas to the country and even Xinjiang, Jilin and other places. The store owner emphasized that only four types of bread are sold in the store, and the best tasting period is only three days. Due to unintentional and indiscriminate expansion of production, the order queue has extended up to a year. If customers can’t wait, they can make a refund at any time, and the money is monitored securely by a third-party platform.

This phenomenon of “one has to wait a year for bread” has triggered polarized discussions on the Internet and among consumers. Some netizens who tasted it said, “The waiting has become a short expectation, and you can eat the texture of carefully hand-made bread, which is completely different from assembly line bread.” However, there is also a group of netizens who look at it rationally, “This is just a very ordinary bread, just a taste, and will not be bought again. It has more of an emotional value.” “Waiting for a year is too exaggerated. The bitter taste and slightly sour taste are not acceptable to everyone.”

The owner “Gulu Ye” is born in 1995 and has more than ten years of baking experience. The studio was originally built in 2022 as a personal hobby and cultural showcase, and most of the baked bread was distributed to neighbors for tasting. After it became popular, he once considered closing the store, but he believed that the indiscriminate expansion of production would destroy the soul and flavor of kiln baking, so he decided to stick to his duties and knead the dough for baking step by step, and called customers one by one when the schedule arrived to confirm customers’ needs, thus respecting customers’ trust in prompt delivery.

Lin Wei, executive vice president of the Institute of Leisure Studies and Art Philosophy of Zhejiang University, analyzed that the store is not deliberately doing hunger marketing, but showing the current psychological shift of consumers. This type of slow-paced booking breaks the “instant gratification”, giving young people a sense of comfort and smaller expectations in fast-paced daily life; At the same time, the personal management of the store owner who adheres to handicrafts and is not bound by traffic allows consumers to gain the extremely rare hand-made warmth and trust in an environment full of standardized products.