Mass producing baguette is done in many supermarket in France, but I've never tasted any good one coming out of it

Producing a good baguette is an art, meaning that a good boulanger knows how to take into account many external factors like humidity in the air to adapt the recipe (% of water, prep time, cooking time). produce consistent result and a baguette that taste good and fresh for a full day.

As for the number of baguettes produced in one batch, it is also because baguettes (different from other bread that last serveral days) are really better fresh. Fresh from the oven (for breakfast !) is best, half a day is good, 1.5 day and still good means you have a very good boulanger.

Supermarkets are going to target "cheap and good enough", in general. An industrial-scale factory can control for a lot of those external factors - it's a lot more likely to have humidity and temperature control, automation that ensures precise timings and measurements, etc.

I do agree that freshness is key with breads like this - there's nothing like a freshly baked one, and I still miss the morning croissant and baguette from when I stayed in Paris years ago.

You want to adapt the recipe for the weather outside of the bakery / factory not only for what happens in the bakery, i.e. cook it a bit more when it's supposed to rain so the baguette doesn't become soft / stays crunchy. That can be done at small scale, but is difficult at industrial levels.

We buy a bunch and freeze the ones we don't use. Pop it back in the oven for 20m and you have something almost as good as first-day bread. For convenience (it reduces quality a bit) we pre-cut some of the ones to be frozen so we can just pop them in the toaster oven.

Baker is the English word.

I don't think the taste of mass produced baguettes is so bad as the lack of texture. And they are usually over cooked

A Baker makes bread but a boulanger is required to make a baguette !

I always find industrial baguettes under cooked, but you raise an important point : it all come back to personnal preferences and that's for me the special thing about the baguette, so few ingredients and so many variations in taste ...

IMO in supermarkets in the UK they're both under and over cooked - too consistent in colour and texture throughout.

In France, even in les supermarchés you get a nice crisp exterior and soft fluffy inside.

I agree with you, but I'm curious as to why french bread in stores is universally less good than french bread from dedicated bakers (places like ACME, a Berkeley based bread producer, that sell to larger stores such as Safeway I would classify as dedicated bakers).

Maybe something about the volume of dough required to make bread on a truly industrial scale means it's not feasible to knead the dough properly? I was reading that you actually knead a baguette relatively little, but I can see that with a large volume of dough, it would be hard to achieve a uniform dough with very little kneading.

There is nothing specific about french bread there - basically any bread produced at an industrial scale is noticeably inferior to the equivalent "human scaled" version if that exists (not always true). Sometimes shockingly so.

I suspect if anything was as elementary as "it's the kneading" they would have figured out a way to mimic the better technique. It's more likely that the logic of the industrial scale process itself is inimical to some of the finer points of producing top-shelf breads.

Which could be economics: at industrial scale, the relative cost of the ingredients is much higher than the cost of labor. at smaller scale, the labor cost starts to outweigh. so an industrial manufacturer is more tempted to cut costs on ingredient quality. Even if that quality reduction is primarily in service of variance reduction (i.e., going with a wheat supplier who can guarantee availability in large quantities year round, instead of continuously needing to tweak recipes to work with different wheats).

In many cases, the extra delay between production and consumption of a large industrial manufacturer also leads them to pursue solutions that improve shelf-stability.

It's perhaps worth noting that in your examples also (hams, cheeses, whisky, etc.) the very best stuff is far more likely to be small batch and eschews many of the "industry standard" approaches for larger producers.

The reasons may well be similar to bread.