WALK ALONG Hong Kong streets and you will find bakery shops dotting the retail landscape. Be they outlets of big chains or family-owned stores, these ubiquitous shops - not to mention the supermarket stalls with their late-evening clearing discounts - do a brisk trade all day, proving that the bakery industry is rolling in dough.
New bakery chains and outlets, including foreign ones, are sprouting up everywhere, selling bread, pastries, pies and cakes.
Providing one of life's staples, bakeries attract every kind of customer, from housewives and office workers to students and people on the go.
'Bread is a daily food of average people - it's a must,' said Philip Wang Yau-ping, general manager of Cherikoff Bakery & Confections.
Cherikoff began life as a restaurant in the 1950s and is now a busy bakery chain of nine outlets in public housing estates in areas such as Tseung Kwan O, Kwun Tong and Sau Mau Ping. Its business is growing slowly but steadily.
Bread consumption is on the rise. Hong Kong's retail per capita consumption of bread in 2004 was eight kilograms, the second highest in Asia after Singapore, according to market research firm Euromonitor International. Industrially produced and packaged bread dominates the market, accounting for 94 per cent of volume sales in Hong Kong in 2004, according to Euromonitor.