Five years ago the baker Antonio Bertasio had tried to make it with an app that did not give him the results he expected. It is called Quiero Pannet and it consisted in selling healthy frozen bread on demand to be baked later.
The pandemic and the consequent confinement made the app take off.
“It gave us hope, a north, it’s like we already had something to do,” Bertasio told Patricia Sulbarán Lovera of BBC Mundo.
Bertasio’s company, Pannet, is in the Florencio Varela province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and produces ready-to-bake bread. Sulbarán reports that they supplied frozen bread to restaurants, supermarkets, canteens and public institutions.
According to Noticias, Pannet has 25 employees and since March has seen its sales fall by 60% due to the quarantine measures imposed in Argentina, for which bars and restaurants have closed.
During the crisis, Bertasio has paid his team’s entire salary, but he is dividing the payment over the course of the month, he told Noticias.
The activation of the Quiero Pannet app has helped him to do so. The app is designed to sell and dispatch frozen product to private customers to be baked at home. When entering, the app asks the user to enter the zip code. If it is within Pannet’s delivery zones, then they must register before ordering.
In the order options there are combos of white bread and bran bread (wholemeal) of 7 kilos and 14 kilos, with 3 dozens of medialunas (croissants and 18 white paninis, or small breads and less quantity of the complements.
La Nación reported that home delivery from Quiero Pannet is made without shipping costs within 48 hours. The bread is packaged so it can be stored in the freezer and then baked.
“With the quarantine, [the app] has had an important takeoff,” Antonio Bertasio told Infobae’s Macarena Sánchez.
As soon as the quarantine was decreed, Bertasio saw the potential of this digital tool that had not worked so well for him five years earlier.
“On March 18, when they decreed the quarantine, I set up an emergency meeting with the team (…) and told them that from now on we would all be sellers and that we would do it by recommending people to use the app,” he told Patricia Sulbarán of BBC Mundo.
This is not the first time that Bertasio has managed to get out of a crisis as a business owner. In fact, Pannet was born from one.
Bertasio had two supermarkets in 2001, which had to close down during Argentina’s economic debacle known as “El Corralito” that year. That’s how he became a baker. “I started by taking the back seat out of the car I had and started to distribute bread in the shops.”
Through the focus on the app, Bertasio and his team take advantage of the situation to seek the expansion of their sales through digital. That is why, according to BBC Mundo, there are already among its employees people dedicated to make a communication campaign and e-commerce experts focused on that online expansion.
“The truth is, it’s a way of dealing with the cooling off that impacts us all. But there was no other way, either we put the focus on this, or we waited quietly for things to get worse,” Antonio Bertasio told La Nación.