The baguette might be the most French thing there is: so loved, it's protected by law and recognized by UNESCO. If The Economist can read the global economy through the price of a Big Mac, why not read France through its baguette? That's the idea behind Le Baguette Index, the first free, public census of baguette prices nationwide, built on a bakery directory powered by Apify Actors.
Behind it are two brothers, Charles-Eric Lorin and Louis-Marie Lorin, who built the whole thing after hours, around their day jobs at Bunka.ai. There's no business model: no ads, no paywall. Just an AI voice agent named Brigitte who phones bakeries across France to ask what the country's most iconic loaf actually sells for.
With 33,000 bakeries, who do you even call?
France has thousands of bakeries and no clean national list of them with working phone numbers. Google Maps knows every one exists, but it won't tell you the price, and it won't hand you a spreadsheet. So before Brigitte could dial a single baker, the brothers had to turn "every bakery in France" into an accurate, callable dataset, département by département.
Apify gave us a national directory of France's bakeries for the price of a few baguettes. It's the first domino: without that clean, callable list, there is no Baguette Index.
-- Charles-Eric and Louis-Marie Lorin, founders, Le Baguette Index
One Apify job per département
The brothers built the whole pipeline with Google Maps Scraper. They run one job per département, capped at a set number of places, with the language set to French, which pulls in reliable coverage everywhere, not just the big cities. Every run hands back the name, address, phone number, Google rating, and coordinates Brigitte needs to start dialing.
That single step is what turns an impossible directory problem into a ready-to-call list. It cost around €60 and replaced what would otherwise have been months of research, none of it realistic for a two-person team with no engineers.
The results:
With the list in hand, Brigitte started dialing:
- 10,000+ bakery listings scraped for around €60, the cheapest and fastest part of the whole project
- 5,173 bakeries contacted across 11,190 calls placed by Brigitte, the AI voice agent
- 2,055 verified baguette prices mapped so far, up from 1,638 at the May 2026 launch and still climbing
- 17 French and international outlets covered the launch within days, including 20 Minutes, Le Parisien, RTL, TF1, and Les Echos
- Hundreds of thousands of visitors to lebaguetteindex.fr in the first few days
A few patterns stand out. The average baguette tradition goes for €1.25, the median €1.30, and prices cluster so tightly that 31.5% of bakeries charge exactly €1.30. The cheapest baguettes aren't in the tourist towns; the wealthier residential areas tend to set the going rate. Weight barely correlates with price at all, which says more about the baker's skill than the flour. The index even flags 769 "hidden gems," bakeries selling quality baguettes below the median.
And the map keeps growing. The brothers are now scraping and calling the rest of the country, on track to cover all 33,000 French bakeries.
We're not engineers. Apify is the reason "let's map every bakery in France" went from a fantasy to a job that ran overnight, one département at a time, for a few baguettes' worth.
-- Charles-Eric and Louis-Marie Lorin, founders, Le Baguette Index
France finally has a price for its baguette, town by town, and it all started with a list. It was bakeries this time, but that same first step works for any market worth measuring.
