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Thursday, March 28, 2024

More of this baguette, please. (Photo: Ulrica Loeb via Flickr)

Subscription services are thriving, delivering everything from meal kits to international candies or indulgences for pampered pets. And restaurants, with dine-in capacity hobbled by coronavirus restrictions, are selling pantry items directly to customers, as well as doing more delivery.

What’s needed is an intersection of the two – and my very specific vote would be for a baguette subscription service.

Such things aren’t unheard of. In September, the Balthazar bakery in New York began deliveries for a $7.50 fee; more specifically, this month a group of bakeries created breadbasket.nyc to deliver baskets every one, two, three or four weeks, but for a hefty $40 per drop-off. That’s more bread than makes sense for most people, whether you mean money or, well, bread. And it isn’t just New Yorkers that deserve good bread.

Less of this “French bread,” please. (Photo: Marc Levy)

But you know what is a reasonable, regular delivery product? A baguette. And I wonder how many people in and around Cambridge might be willing to pay a few recurring bucks to guarantee themselves a steady supply of one truly good loaf from an artisan – or even something adequate but fresh, such as from Panera – when threatened with the bad joke of “French bread” too often sold at our grocery stores. (The Star Market chain has one from Piantedosi in Malden that is so soft it literally droops over the side of the basket it’s stocked in. The Piantedosi “French bread” is to baguette what “American cheese” is to cheese, and unsurprisingly there’s usually many left at the end of the day while more faithfully baked baguettes sell out.)

Maybe Bread Obsession in Waltham wants to get more granular (it already delivers wholesale to Pemberton Farms and four locations in Somerville). Maybe the local Forge Bakery can ramp up production and employ some pedal power. But please, some baker somewhere should step up and say: “carb-e diem.”