Customer case · Bakery and patisserie

Digital signage in a bakery:
the Atelier Banette case

Fifteen screens installed since 2020, in the shop window and behind the counter, all driven remotely by the chain’s marketing manager. Here is what was fitted, what the screens show as the day goes on, and how much time it takes the team.

The rollout

Fifteen screens, five ranges, one person at the controls

Atelier Banette logo

Atelier Banette

Bakery · patisserie · snack
Shops across France
Fitted by EMITY since 2020

Atelier Banette is a French bakery, patisserie and snack chain with shops across France. It brings together five ranges — bread, patisserie, sandwiches, pizzas and tarts — and they do not all sell at the same time of day.

That is precisely what led the chain to digital signage in 2020: to be more visible from the street and to show its products off inside the shop, without adding to the workload at the counter. Fifteen screens were installed, all driven from E-MANAGER, the dashboard that opens in a browser.

15

screens fitted, in the window and in the shop

2020

year the screens went live

5

ranges to keep alive on the same screens

1

person drives the whole estate, remotely

Before the screens

What a bakery window has to show, and where paper struggles to keep up

A bakery does not sell the same thing at 7 in the morning and at 5 in the afternoon. It is that rhythm, more than the number of products, that puts printed signage under strain. Three situations kept coming back.

The range changes three times a day

Pastries in the morning, sandwiches at midday, cakes in the afternoon. A chalkboard, on the other hand, stays exactly as it was written at opening time — and by four o’clock it is still talking about breakfast.

Sold out, and still being advertised

A tray goes faster than expected. The printed sign carries on promising. The customer reads it, reaches the counter, and the disappointment is dealt with face to face — just as the queue is building.

Every shop redoes its own signs

Across a national network, a seasonal campaign turns into as many versions as there are shops: same products, different layouts. The brand dilutes itself one print run at a time.

The fit-out

Two building blocks: the software, and the screen

Digital signage comes down to two things. The rest — how the screen connects, what size the panels are — is settled during the site visit, shop by shop.

The software — E-MANAGER

A web dashboard that brings the screens, the content and the scheduling together. Visuals are put together in EMITY’s built-in editor — and, if your teams already use them, Canva and Adobe Express plug in as well. Nothing to install on any machine: the platform opens in a browser, at the desk or on a phone.

The screen — with or without a player

This is what does the displaying. There are two ways to connect it to the platform: the E-SOFT app installs straight onto a recent professional screen, or an E-BOX player connects over HDMI. So the player is not a third building block: it is one of the two ways of connecting the screen.

A shop-window screen is not a living-room television

Behind glass facing the sun, an ordinary television becomes unreadable as soon as the light hits it, and heats up until it shuts itself down. A panel built for a shop window is far brighter, is cooled to match, and can be fitted upright or on its side depending on how much glass you have. The formats and orientations are set out on our digital window display page.

On the ground

Four positions, four different messages

A screen does not say the same thing in the window and above the sandwich counter. The position decides the content, and the time of day decides the rest.

Portrait screen in a bakery shop window announcing the morning pastries

In the window, whatever has just come out of the oven

The screen faces the street. It announces the batch of the moment at eye level, right where someone walking past decides in three seconds whether to push the door open.

Shop window

Baker placing loaves on a shelf beneath a wall screen announcing sourdough loaves

At the bread counter, whatever is in the oven

Above the bread shelving, the screen says what is baking and what is about to come out. The baker keeps his hands in the flour rather than on a chalkboard.

Bread counter

Serving counter at an Atelier Banette bakery: two screens present the sandwiches on offer, below the lunchtime deals displayed above the chilled cabinet

At the counter, the lunch deal

At midday the sandwich cabinet takes over. The deal, what comes with it and the time service ends all fit on one screen, directly above the food itself.

Menu board

Pastry display at an Atelier Banette bakery: a screen advertises the viennoiserie offer above the eclairs and fruit tartlets

In the afternoon, cakes take over

At four o’clock the scheduling switches by itself: the cakes of the day replace the lunch deal. Nobody had to change anything at the counter.

Pastry display

Day to day

What the team actually gains

The benefit is not measured in grand claims: it is counted in small jobs that drop out of the day.

The day is set up once and for all

Every piece of content gets a time slot: pastries until 11, the lunch deal until 3, cakes from 4. The screens switch over on their own at the right moment, seven days a week, without anyone at the counter having to think about it.

A visual gets made without a designer

EMITY’s built-in editor offers templates to fill in: a heading, a photograph, a note. The marketing manager puts the visual together and publishes it straight away — which is exactly what she describes below.

The network speaks with one voice

Screens are grouped by shop and by position. A national campaign is pushed to a whole group — every shop window in the network, for instance — while each shop keeps control of its own local content.

Mandatory notices travel the same way

In France, a bakery has to display its prices including tax so they can be read from outside (arrêté du 3 décembre 1987) and to make allergen information available for food sold unpackaged (décret n° 2015-447, applying EU Regulation 1169/2011). A screen can carry those notices just as it carries everything else: they are corrected in the same place as the visuals, on the day a recipe changes.

The sequence

From the first visit to running it alone

1

The site visit

The EMITY design team walks the shop and notes where people already look: the window, the counter, the queue. That visit decides how many screens there are, what size they are and how high they go.

2

Fitting and connecting

Screens mounted, connections checked, screens declared in the platform and grouped by position: window, bread, sandwiches, cakes.

3

Getting to grips, in one session

The marketing manager learns to put a visual together, give it a time slot and send it to a group of screens. The rest is learnt by doing.

4

Running it alone

The marketing team creates and publishes without technical help. A season’s visuals are reloaded the following year instead of being made again.

Screen in the staff area behind a bakery counter, showing the week's rota

The same platform runs the back of house

Screens are not only for customers. One fitted in the staff area carries the rota, the delivery plan and the campaigns coming up — the same E-MANAGER account, simply another group of screens. When a visual needs making, the platform offers EMITY’s built-in editor — and, for teams already using them, Canva and Adobe Express.

  • ✓Screens grouped by position: window, bread, sandwiches, cakes
  • ✓Scheduling set in advance, with a start and end time
  • ✓The state of every screen in the network, visible from the office
  • ✓A season’s visuals reusable the following year

In the client’s words

 

“What is good about it is having that remote control, and being able to create straight away with an editor built into the tool. It really is good — it is a very fine tool.”

Marie
Marketing and communications manager · Atelier Banette
Translated from the original French

The questions that come up

What bakeries ask before fitting screens

Atelier Banette runs fifteen across its network, but a single shop usually starts with two: one in the window facing the street, and one above the counter. The third tends to arrive for the lunch trade, which keeps its own hours. An EMITY account handles anything from 1 to 1,000 screens, and moving from one to the other changes nothing about how you work.

It does, provided you fit a panel built for the job. A window screen is far brighter than an ordinary television and its cooling is sized for the heat that builds up behind glass. The format then follows the space you have: upright for a narrow pillar, on its side above a display. There is more detail on our digital window display page.

Someone from the business, in most cases — at Atelier Banette, the marketing manager. EMITY’s built-in editor offers templates to fill in: a heading, a photograph, a note, a display duration. Nothing to install, nothing to export. If your teams already use Canva or Adobe Express, those plug into the platform too.

Yes, and it is one of the reasons the format works well here. In France a bakery must display its prices including tax so they can be read from outside (arrêté du 3 décembre 1987) and must make allergen information available for food sold unpackaged (décret n° 2015-447 of 17 April 2015, applying EU Regulation 1169/2011). On a screen those notices are corrected where the visuals are made: the day a recipe changes, the correction goes out to every shop concerned. What is displayed remains the business’s own responsibility, exactly as it would on a chalkboard, and the rules that apply depend on the country you trade in.

Screens are grouped by shop and by position. A campaign then goes to a whole group — every shop window in the network, for instance — rather than screen by screen. Each shop keeps its own local content: opening hours, recruitment, a nearby supplier.

No. Digital signage comes down to two building blocks: the software and the screen. On a recent professional screen, the E-SOFT app installs directly onto the screen — no player at all. Otherwise an E-BOX player connects over HDMI and can feed several screens. The choice is made during the site visit, based on the screens already in place.

Only if you want it to. Standby is scheduled like everything else: off at closing time, back on before the first bake. That is electricity saved and panel life gained. Worth noting in France: illuminated advertising and shop signs fitted outside must be switched off between 1 and 6 in the morning (décret n° 2022-1294 of 5 October 2022) — a switch-off is set once and never touched again.

It depends on how many screens you run and which subscription you choose — Standard, Premium or Excellence, the last of which unlocks the widgets and interactive display. The detail is on our subscriptions page, and a trial account lets you try before deciding.

Read on

Three pages that go with this customer case

The dynamic menu board

The dynamic menu board

How to build a menu that changes by itself as the day goes on, and what it costs to keep up to date once it is in place.

Digital window displays

Digital window displays

The formats, brightness levels and orientations that hold up behind glass, and what someone walking past actually takes in.

All EMITY customer cases

All EMITY customer cases

Thirty-three documented references, from a single kiosk in a town hall to hundreds of screens across a logistics hub.

Two screens to begin with, the rest later

A window and a counter are enough to see what digital signage changes in a bakery. The starting point is the same for everyone: a demonstration built around your own shop, with no commitment.