BlueBrixx Bakery Set 107421

BlueBrixx's Bakery is a BlueBrixx Play set built from 401 blocks, measuring 12.7 × 12.7 × 10.3 cm assembled — a café with a counter, till, display shelves and printed pastries, plus outdoor seating with a striped awning, table, chairs and a streetlamp. Three figures: a baker and two customers, one with a skateboard. Removable roof and back. All decoration is printed; no stickers. Released August 2024.

Germany had 55,000 bakeries and now has fewer than 10,000

The small neighbourhood bakery is one of the things people assume Germany will always have, and it has been disappearing steadily for seventy years.

In 1950 there were somewhere around 55,000 independent baking businesses. The figure is now below 10,000, and it falls every year. What replaced them is not nothing — Germans still eat a great deal of bread — but it is chains, supermarket counters and bake-off stations selling frozen dough finished on site.

The reasons are the ordinary ones: a master baker starts work at two in the morning, the margin on a bread roll is a few cents, rents in the places with footfall are high, and finding an apprentice willing to keep those hours has become very difficult. Succession is the thing that usually ends it — the owner reaches sixty-five and nobody in the family wants the bakery.

Which is why a model of a small bakery with a counter and a person behind it is quietly a period piece, and why the ones that survive are defended so fiercely by the streets they are on.

Built to be reached into

The roof and back come off — the standard solution to the problem every model building has, which is that a finished structure hides everything inside it. BlueBrixx Play is the line meant for playing with rather than displaying.

In the BlueBrixx range

Sets 107587 (Modern Family House), 107415 (Urban Family Home), 108027 (Pizza Restaurant) and 108137 (City Bus with Station) are built to the same scale and combine into a street.

Specifications

Pieces: 401 · Figures: 3 · Series: BlueBrixx Play · Removable roof and back · No stickers
Model dimensions: 12.7 × 12.7 × 10.3 cm (5.0 × 5.0 × 4.1 in)