Consumers perceive Brioche Pasquier as an authentic French brand, offering them recipes which go all the way back to the founder’s father’s family bakery in Les Cerqueux.
The brand was extended last year with the launch of Brioche Pasquier Beignets (a French twist on a classic doughnut), and now, the company is set to launch another new product into the range. Pitch Blueberry brings a fresh and fruity addition to the popular Pitch range of products, adding to the classic chocolate selection.
Fabien Pasquier, Sales Manager at Brioche Pasquier UK, tells Grocery Trader all about the launch and what sets the brand apart from others.
What are your best-known products?
As one of the UK’s leading morning goods brands, our range of products features regularly in shopping baskets across the UK. From our Brioche Rolls to our Croissants, and Pains au Chocolat, we have products for every meal and snacking occasion. For 50 years, we have used our ‘savoir-faire’ to create our delicious traditional brioche range. We offer simple, yet indulgent products that stay fresh for longer thanks to our unique recipe.
Our most popular products are undoubtedly our Pitch range of individually wrapped, soft brioche rolls filled with either our best-selling chocolate & hazelnut, or choc chips. Pitch is our leading lunchbox and snacking product, well established in the UK market and listed across all major retailers. The brand continues to grow year on year and is a popular lunchbox choice for children and young adults.
What’s the latest news from the brand?
Supporting our brand with consumer and trade advertising, on-pack promotions and constant innovation, we work hard to ensure that our products are well represented in retail stores and online. Our focus on driving sales has led to Brioche Pasquier now being the 10th largest morning goods and speciality bread brands in the UK^. This is a great achievement, and we are also ranked #3 in terms of growth, delivering double-digit growth year on year^.
^The Grocer’s Top Products 2025 in association with NIQ: 52 weeks to 6 September 2025
What are the major trends and developments affecting your category and your customers, and how are you responding?
Aside from a continuing focus on price and convenience, we have seen a real interest in different flavour profiles – consumers are keen to experiment with something new and if it’s a trend that’s also across social media, it becomes even stronger; an example has been the recent boom in pistachio – from Dubai chocolate to pistachio lattes, matcha variants and even pancakes.
Conflicting a little with this flavour trend is the move to more natural product ingredients and this is something our brand has always embraced. Our Pitch brand is free from artificial preservatives and colours, and this is a focus for us across all of our products, we always offer our consumers high quality products through the ingredients we use in our product development and manufacturing.
One of our most recent launches is Brioche Pasquier Beignets – with either the indulgent chocolate & hazelnut or a delicious raspberry filling, these two new products launched last year to deliver something new in the snacking category.
We are also continually focusing on developing more convenient formats to help us to reach more consumers. We launched Pitch x4, a smaller pack format which is perfect for convenience retailers or the smaller store format to stock.
What sets your brand apart from others?
Brioche Pasquier is seen as an authentic French brand, with consistent quality and a strong heritage, which builds trust with our retail partners and our consumers. Our Development & Innovation Team has perfected the quality, consistency and taste of the Brioche Pasquier range over many years and still uses ingredients, and simple yet delicious recipes originating from the founder’s father’s family bakery in Les Cerqueux, giving our products their unique texture and rich flavour.
Our range of products and commitment to innovation keeps us relevant to the marketplace and we have the perfect products for breakfast, with our croissants eaten as they are or made into something incredible with say, smoked salmon and avocado! Our Pains au Chocolat offer an on the go ‘elevenses’ snack and our Brioche Rolls are the ultimate accompaniment to a delicious breakfast filled with scrambled egg or a twist on a lunchtime sandwich and of course, a BBQ wouldn’t be the same without sausages, fried onions and a Brioche Roll! We can also adapt to desserts with an easy to make ice cream sandwich – guaranteed to keep the kids happy (and even the adults). It’s important to us that our product range can be used by our customers across different meals and eating occasions, so our adaptability is high, adding to our popularity.
From our UK head office and manufacturing site in Milton Keynes (where we make some of our products), we focus on delivering stable supply to our retail partners to maintain customers’ and consumers’ satisfaction.
How much is the UK bread and baking market worth? Is the category in growth? What is driving the growth?
The ambient bread and bakery market at the end of 2025 was valued at over £8 billion according to Kantar*, with annual growth of 4% being driven by price and frequency of purchase. For us at Brioche Pasquier, we now rank 10th in this category, and we are delighted with this result. Delivering double digit growth in the category, we sit at number 3 and this too is something we are incredibly proud of in a very competitive market.
*Kantar – Duration: 52 Weeks, Period End Date: 28-12-2025, Product: Ambient- Bakery, Base Measure Type: Volume, Product Attributes: Total Products, Retailer: Total Retailers
Do you have any NPD to talk about?
On the back of our 2025 launch of Brioche Pasquier Beignets, our latest new product is Pitch Blueberry. Featuring the trendy and well-established blueberry flavour, this new product brings a fresh and fruity alternative to the classic chocolate range, expanding the Pitch offering and appealing to new consumers. We have secured product listing in Tesco and will have advertising support for our trade customers and consumers.
What marketing support do you have for the brand?
We’ll be running Spotify Audio advertising, and a Digital Out of Home campaign on screens in proximity to stores listing our products to support the launch of Pitch Blueberry. We’ll also have in-store digital gondola end screens and shelf barkers to bring focus to the fixture. A summer on-pack campaign will run across the full Pitch range.
How do you work with retailers to help them grow sales?
Our team works closely with the buyers across all retailers to update them on new products or advertising campaigns and how we can maximise our sales. Our packaging is impactful and easily identifiable by our consumers, so we make it as easy as possible to be seen on shelf and quick to pick up. With Brioche Pasquier, having the right range in place, good shelf positioning, and some additional visibility through secondary displays can really help drive impulse and repeat purchases. Supporting innovation and new launches also helps keep the category dynamic and can bring incremental growth, especially when linked to the right activation in store.
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