Sunday Baking Rule Stalls German Artisan Bakers as Insolvencies Hit Decade High

German bakeries face a paradox: record new openings in 2025, yet total locations fall 2.8%. Rising costs, Sunday baking limits, and skills shortages threaten artisan bakers.

Germany’s bakery sector is caught in a strange contradiction. In 2025, master bakers opened 448 new shops—the highest number since 2018. Yet the total number of bakery locations fell by 2.8 percent to just 8,659.

That paradox reflects a deep structural shift. Since 2015, when Germany counted 12,155 bakeries, the industry has lost nearly 30 percent of its outlets. Roland Ermer, president of the Central Association of the German Bakery Trade, warns that many remaining businesses are running at their breaking point.

Revenue Creeps Up, Staff Numbers Drop

The financial picture is mixed at best. Sector revenue inched up 1.3 percent last year to €18.14 billion. But employment fell 1.4 percent, leaving 232,000 workers in the trade.

That gap between rising turnover and falling headcount tells a story of relentless cost pressure. Soaring energy prices and labour costs are squeezing margins. Artisan bakers find themselves caught between industrial competitors that can bake around the clock and a thicket of regulations that limit their own production.

The Sunday Baking Fight

The association is pushing hard for regulatory relief, starting with the Working Hours Act. At the heart of the demand: scrapping the three-hour limit on Sunday baking. Handwerksbäckereien—traditional craft bakeries—want to bake without restrictions on Sundays so they can compete with industrial-scale operations that face no such constraint.

The coalition agreement between the Union and SPD parties acknowledges the problem. It promises an exception catalogue for bakeries, but the industry says that has yet to translate into action.

Skills Shortage and Insolvency Wave Compound the Pressure

The German Institute for Economic Research (IW) calculates that 71.7 percent of all skilled-worker bottlenecks hit small and medium-sized enterprises. In rural areas, as many as 80 percent of open positions in craft trades go unfilled. For a bakery that means empty baker’s benches and lost sales.

Meanwhile, insolvencies are mounting. Creditreform warns of growing instability in the Mittelstand. In April 2026 alone, 1,776 companies filed for bankruptcy — a ten-year high for a single month.

The drivers are familiar: high energy costs, sluggish global trade, and a thickening regulatory burden. For many bakery owners, the next reform vote in Berlin may determine whether they can keep the ovens running at all.