Paris sandwiches / Paris
Meeting in the middle
Parisians famously adore bread and they also love Japanese food. Join the two and you’ve uncovered a new market, as have several restaurants in the capital selling ‘sandos’ – delicious Japanese milk-bread lunches.
Bread is serious business in France. Some six billion baguettes are sold here every year – most baked in the ovens of 35,000 independent boulangeries, according to the Confédération Nationale de la Boulangerie et Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Française. On average, each of these shops serves some 300 customers a day.
France is also obsessed with Japan: it is the biggest overseas market for manga and Europe’s largest consumer of sushi. Japanese entrepreneur Michio Hasegawa and his business partners put two and two together and gambled on selling shokupan…
