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Annually the Greek food industry, production and sale of pastries, accounts for over €250 million. At time on economic crisis producers constantly renew their range of products and seek for new ways to keep themselves on the market – they combine the “sweet sin” with healthy foods, lower quantity in the package, instead of raising the price and they create new and attractive marketing strategies for promoting their products. All those are the measures undertaken by producers of pastries and snacks, in order to keep the interest of their consumers.

According to retailers since the beginning of the year there has been a slight decrease in the sale of pastries. Studies show that consumer demand has fallen only with 2% in comparison with 2008, even though that cookies, croissants and other articles of this kind, are not included in the consumer basket of first necessity. It is a fact that every 6 out of 10 packages from this category, is bought from big supermarket chains, which have an advantage compared to small neighborhood stores in Greece. New trend is that the same supermarket chains created in-store brand sweets, distributed on the local market and for the last few years they took over 10% of the total sales in this category.

Snacks production in Greece is concentrated among very tight circle of enterprises (like Papadopoulos, Evga, Allatini, Vivartia, Nutiart, etc) and even Bulgarians are familiar with the production of some of them. 15% of the volume of the annual production of those enterprises is being imported. As a whole snacks and pastry demand has been stable and going up with 2% every year for the period 1990-2007. Right now things are a bit different, because consumer attention is set to price and comparing same products offered by different brands. This habit cannot leave the pastry category untouched by the crisis, especially when it is relying on the so called “impulse” shopping.