The Brand That's Listed and Not Yet Signed: Paris Baguette, the DACH Long List, and the Order in Which K-Bakery Enters Europe

Paris Baguette is the flagship brand of South Korea's SPC Group, controlled by the Heo family through a Sangmidang Holdings vehicle that took its current shape in January 2026. The global footprint as of Q1 2026 sits at roughly 3,750 Korean stores plus six to seven hundred international stores across eleven markets – the 700th international site opened at London Westfield in December 2025. Forward targets are explicit: twelve thousand stores worldwide by 2030, a thousand of them in North America by the same date, and four hundred fifty in Europe by 2036 with two hundred specifically in the United Kingdom. A USD 160 to 208 million Texas production hub is in motion as the North-American supply skeleton. An Italian master-franchise was signed with the Pascucci family in March 2024. A Czech-Republic exploration was announced at a Prague leadership conference in September 2024.

DACH does not appear in any of those ledgers as a current activation. There are zero stores in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. There is no signed master-franchise. There is no announced site, no property search at scale, no AHGZ or Hogapage or Tageskarte coverage of any tender. There is one operationally tangible signal: a Paris Baguette listing on FranchisePortal.de live since 22 July 2025, in German, naming an EUR 1 million investment volume and EUR 300,000 minimum equity, with multi-unit options on the table.

Ten months between that listing and any signed contract. That gap is what this brief reads.

What we see

A globally aggressive K-bakery brand with an explicit twelve-thousand-store horizon by 2030. A European pipeline whose announced sequence reads France 2014 → United Kingdom October 2022 → Italy March 2024 → Czech Republic September 2024 (exploration) → DACH listed since July 2025. Six Paris stores. Five to six London stores. A Pascucci-controlled Italian master-franchise. A state-investment-agency-level conversation in Prague. And a German-language acquisition page on FranchisePortal.de that has been live ten months without a follow-on announcement.

What it tells us

SPC has built a pipeline-machine and is sequencing it. The order is not random. France was the spiritual flagship that proved the K-bakery concept could survive in a European baguette culture. The United Kingdom is the franchise-scaling base that anchors the two-hundred-store-by-2036 commitment. Italy is the first capital-light master-franchise in continental Europe under a multi-brand operating champion. Czech Republic is the first stated entry into the post-EU-15 geography. DACH is consistently listed as a future option in the same Korean-media briefings – but never as a current activation.

Why it matters now

The FranchisePortal.de listing since July 2025 is the most operationally tangible pre-activation signal we have. It is a data point of pipeline-readiness rather than pipeline-activation. The order in which SPC has committed contractual capital across Europe places DACH fourth or fifth in sequence. A sponsor underwriting the next continental move should read the long-list status as a 2027–2030 candidate-window, gated on the United Kingdom's two-hundred-store trajectory and the Pascucci-Italian execution producing positive operating data.

A pipeline that is loud about Texas and quiet about Berlin

The capital architecture SPC has put on the table since 2023 reads as one of the most explicit international scaling commitments in K-bakery. The North-American line is documented enough to use as a calibration point. Roughly two hundred US stores plus twelve in Canada at the start of 2025. A net-opening cadence of around one hundred locations through 2025. North-American revenue of approximately USD 500 million in 2024 and sixteen consecutive quarters of positive like-for-like growth under CEO Joey Bingham. A franchise architecture run through Paris Baguette Family Inc. as a single franchisor with individual and multi-unit franchisees rather than an external master-franchisee, FDD investment per location at USD 0.5 to 1.6 million. A Texas production hub at USD 160 to 208 million capital expenditure and roughly 1.6 million square feet of capacity that services North America today and Latin America on a future horizon. The thousand-North-America target by 2030 sits on top of that scaffolding.

Italy entered the architecture in March 2024 through a memorandum of understanding with Mario Pascucci of Caffè Pascucci as master-franchisee. This is the same master-franchise model that delivered Wagamama's Italian acceleration through Cremonini's Chef Express division – a multi-brand operating champion absorbs the build-out capital and the real-estate access, the licensor collects royalty, and the rollout calendar sits with the partner. The first Italian opening had not occurred by late 2024 or early 2025, and the trade-press cadence around the partnership has been measured rather than aggressive. That measured cadence is the model at work.

Czech Republic entered in September 2024 at a Paris-Baguette-Europe leadership conference held in Prague. SPC confirmed that it was exploring entry into the Czech market and naming conversations with the country's state investment agency and financial authorities. That is exploration with state-level access, not a signed contract – but it is loud enough to surface in trade press, which is more than DACH has produced.

The AMEA division stood up in January 2025 as a dedicated unit covering Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa, with Australia named as a perspective market. Malaysia has been live since January 2023 through the Berjaya Group joint venture, with a Johor halal production hub completed in February 2025 at three hundred thousand baked items per day capacity. The Philippines opened in April 2024 at SM Mall of Asia through Paris Baguette Philippines Inc., another Berjaya Food vehicle. The eleven-market list as of October 2024 names China, USA, Canada, UK, France, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Germany is not on it. Austria is not on it. Switzerland is not on it.

The pattern reads cleanly: SPC is building production-and-supply infrastructure at scale where it has signed entry vehicles, and it has signed entry vehicles in eleven specific countries plus the Italian and Czech adjacencies. DACH is not in that set. It is in the next set.

The Heo family architecture: family ownership, Korean-regulation push, no US-IPO yet

The ownership of SPC Group is a closely-held family architecture that has been steadily reshaped to look more like a holding-and-operating split than a traditional Korean conglomerate. Until 2025 the apex was Paris Croissant, which held roughly 40.7 percent of SPC Samlip and stakes across more than fifty in- and out-of-Korea subsidiaries. The January 2026 restructuring split Paris Croissant into Sangmidang Holdings as a pure holding vehicle and an operating Paris Croissant entity that runs the brands, Paris Baguette included. The equity at SMDH replicates the prior Paris-Croissant composition: Chairman Hur Young-in at 63.31 percent, eldest son Hur Jin-soo at 20.33 percent, second son Hur Hee-soo at 12.84 percent, and Lee Mi-hyang at 3.54 percent. SPC Samlip is KOSPI-listed under ticker A005610 and reported 2024 revenue of KRW 3.43 trillion against a net profit of KRW 86.5 billion. An Asiae analysis from March 2024 calculated that approximately 78 percent of the SPC Samlip dividend flow reaches the founder family through direct stakes plus the Paris-Croissant overlay.

Two readings carry forward. The first is generational succession: multiple Korean governance analyses interpret the SMDH split as a deliberate simplification of cross-holdings to ease the eventual transfer to Hur Jin-soo and Hur Hee-soo. The second is regulatory pressure on the home market. Korean franchise-bakery expansion has been capped at roughly 2 percent annual store growth since the early 2010s, alongside minimum-distance rules that protect independent bakeries. Domestic growth has been throttled by policy, not by demand. SPC Samlip's 2024 numbers carry the signature of that ceiling: revenue effectively flat against 2023, and an operating profit that fell roughly 59 percent on a Fair Trade Commission fine combined with a fixed-cost step-up from production reorganisation.

Speculation about a US-IPO has circulated in Korean and international trade press since 2023. The negative-evidence read through May 2026 is unambiguous: no formal filing, no bank-mandate disclosure, no banker-of-record in any reporting we can verify. The SMDH restructure is the kind of governance simplification that often precedes an offering, but the offering has not consummated. The capital story is therefore family-balance-sheet plus operating cashflow plus master-franchise royalty rather than public-market float. That distinction matters when reading the tempo of European expansion. Royalty-driven master-franchise economics absorb the cycle of master-partner identification, contract structuring, capital deployment, and first-store opening at a different cadence than capital-deployed-from-IPO-proceeds would. SPC's calendar is patient because the architecture below it is patient.

The push factor is unambiguous. Korea growth is capped. International is the only available growth lane. The DACH question is not whether SPC has the motivation to enter – the regulatory ceiling at home has produced a permanent forward-pressure on overseas activation – but whether DACH ranks high enough in the queue to receive contractual attention while UK and Italy are still in their respective build-out windows.

The European footprint Paris-Baguette already has, and the order it has built it in

France is the starting point. The first Paris Baguette opened in 2014 in the 1st arrondissement near Châtelet with forty-six seats, a locally adjusted assortment that leaned harder into sandwiches and conventional French bakery items, and the explicit identity of a Korean-inspired bakery-café operating alongside the local boulangerie tradition rather than imitating it. The first two Paris stores cleared seven hundred thousand customers within roughly two years of opening. The expansion calendar was deliberately slow until 2022, when three new sites opened in La Défense and Montparnasse to bring the Paris cluster to five. The official French country page lists six Paris-region locations as of 2025/26: Châtelet, Saint-Michel, the two La Défense sites, Montparnasse, and Place du Maréchal Juin. Twelve years from market entry to six sites is the calendar.

The United Kingdom entered the architecture in October 2022 with a company-owned store at Battersea Power Station, followed by Kensington High Street in November 2022. The first UK franchise location opened at Canary Wharf in 2024 – the moment Paris Baguette UK shifted from learn-by-operating to scale-by-licensing. The 700th international store at London Westfield in December 2025 brought the UK count to five, with a sixth London site indicated by a March 2026 secondary signal. Three of those sites are franchised. The two-hundred-UK-by-2036 target sits on top of that base and reads, in calendar terms, as a fifteen-year compounding window from 2022.

Italy entered through the March 2024 memorandum of understanding with Mario Pascucci. Caffè Pascucci is a multi-generational Italian coffee group with a developed travel-retail and retail-network footprint, and the parallel to Wagamama's Cremonini partner is precise: licensor brand, licensee capital and real-estate access, royalty rather than equity flowing back to SPC. Czech Republic is one step earlier in the maturity curve – the September 2024 Prague conference disclosed the conversation with Czech state authorities, but no master-franchise has surfaced in public reporting and no opening calendar has been announced.

The order, then, is France → United Kingdom → Italy (master-franchise signed but not yet open) → Czech Republic (state-level exploration) → DACH (FranchisePortal.de listing since July 2025). DACH is fourth or fifth in the sequence. SPC has put contractual signatures down in three of the four slots ahead of it.

DACH on the long list: the FranchisePortal.de signal and what it doesn't yet say

FranchisePortal.de is the single most operationally tangible pre-activation signal in the DACH file. The Paris Baguette page has been live since 22 July 2025. The acquisition material is in German. The investment volume is named at approximately EUR 1 million per location with EUR 300,000 minimum equity capital and an explicit acknowledgement of multi-unit deal structures. The international network is referenced through New York, Paris, London, and Seoul. The audience is, unmistakably, German-speaking franchise candidates.

What the listing does not yet contain is also informative. There is no named master-franchisee. There is no DACH-specific country page on parisbaguette.com or any subsidiary domain. There is no DACH location list. There is no signed contract surfaced in Korean financial press, where SPC corporate transactions of this magnitude usually receive coverage in Korea Times, Korea Herald, Korea JoongAng Daily, or one of the Chosun outlets within days of signing. The DACH gastronomy press has produced zero coverage of the listing through May 2026 – no AHGZ, no Hogapage, no Tageskarte, no Berliner Morgenpost. A signed master-franchise tender by a brand with this profile would not pass through the German-speaking trade press silently.

The Korean-media framing of DACH within the European strategy is consistent. Germany is named repeatedly alongside France and the United Kingdom as a "Top-3 European bakery market" in the strategic-discussion register. The named order of European activation in those same articles is France → United Kingdom → Italy → Czech Republic → DACH-when-ready. "When-ready" is not a refusal to enter. It is a queue position.

The FranchisePortal.de listing reads, in that context, as a screening exercise. SPC's corporate-development function is collecting inbound interest from German-speaking multi-unit candidates, building a candidate file, and preserving optionality without committing capital or contract. That is a rational posture for a parent whose UK operation is still in its first scale-up decade and whose Italian master-franchise has not yet produced a first opening. The sponsor reading this brief should treat the listing as a pipeline-readiness data point, not as a pipeline-activation announcement.

The DACH demand context: K-Wave saturation in Berlin, no Tous Les Jours either

The demand-side environment in DACH has materially shifted in the decade since Paris Baguette opened in Paris. The director of the Korean Cultural Centre in Germany, quoted in Korea Times in November 2024, described a Berlin landscape with more than one hundred Korean restaurants – against fewer than ten in the early 2000s. VisitBerlin published a featured top-eleven Korean-restaurant list in September 2025, treating Korean cuisine as part of the city's mainstream restaurant geography rather than a niche category. The AHK Korea director in an Arirang TV interview from February 2026 framed K-Wave in Germany as a durable cultural baseline rather than a passing trend. The demand signal is real and durable.

Tous Les Jours, the CJ Foodville-controlled Korean-bakery chain that competes with Paris Baguette in the United States and across multiple Asian markets, is not in DACH either. CJ Foodville's June 2025 international communication via KED Global named the United States, Canada, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Mongolia – and contained no European market. The "Tous Les Jours" listing in Berlin's Hufelandstraße is a local French-style bistro, not the chain. Both Korean-bakery majors have skipped the geography simultaneously. That is unusual when read against the demand evidence and the available real estate.

The Berlin K-bakery scene that exists is independent and small-scale rather than chained. Lia Ppang in Prenzlauer Berg has operated as a Korean-pastry-and-café-culture hybrid since the early 2020s. Vingot in Kreuzberg and Keyu Café in Mitte have built similar single-site operations with strong K-café aesthetic positioning. None of them is a network-scale K-bakery chain. The supply gap between independent K-café and chained K-bakery is, in operating terms, exactly the gap Paris Baguette and Tous Les Jours fill in markets where they have entered. In DACH that gap is open.

Two readings follow. The first is that demand-side conditions in Berlin would meaningfully outperform what Wagamama encountered when it tried to place a UK-priced pan-Asian casual concept against an established Vietnamese-and-pho price anchor. The K-bakery category has no analogous price anchor in DACH because no chained K-bakery operator has set one. The second is that demand, however favourable, does not by itself move SPC's pipeline calendar. The parent's allocation logic is operating within an explicit European queue, and queue position is set by contractual signatures and operating data from earlier-sequenced markets, not by demand-side opportunity in markets later in the queue. Berlin's K-Wave saturation is a useful tailwind for whoever activates the DACH file. The activation, on present evidence, is not yet underwritten.

The Paris Baguette DACH file is the cleanest available case of a globally-aggressive, capital-deep K-bakery brand sitting at the long-list stage of European sequencing without yet committing contractual capital. SPC has the parent balance sheet, the production-hub architecture, the multi-market operating evidence, and the FranchisePortal.de inbound-screening process running. The signature has not been put on paper.

Three readings carry forward.

Listing is readiness, not activation. A FranchisePortal.de presence ten months in without an announced master-franchisee is a candidate-screening posture, not a market-entry announcement. Sponsors reading the listing as a near-term entry event are pricing the wrong question. The right question is time-to-signature against the parent's queue, which is currently absorbing UK build-out and Italian first-opening cycles ahead of any DACH commitment.
The European queue has DACH at fourth or fifth. France, United Kingdom, Italy, and Czech Republic all carry contractual signatures ahead of DACH. SPC will not run two parallel master-franchise rollouts in continental Europe simultaneously without UK and Italy producing positive operating data – that is the calendar discipline visible in twelve years of European movement. DACH activation will follow once those data points arrive, which positions the candidate-window in the 2027 to 2030 horizon rather than the immediate twelve months.
The demand-side opportunity exists but does not move the calendar. Berlin's more-than-one-hundred Korean restaurants, the absence of Tous Les Jours from DACH, and the fragmented independent K-bakery scene are favourable tailwinds for a chained K-bakery first-mover. They are not, by themselves, sufficient to override the parent's allocation discipline. Sponsors who treat demand-side strength as a forcing function for entry timing are mispricing how SPC actually sequences capital.

Sources

SPC Group / Paris Baguette ownership and governance: Chosun Biz "SPC accelerates holding company shift as Hur brothers consolidate control" (27 November 2025); Chosun "SPC Group Transitions to Holding Company System with Sangmidang Holdings" (13 January 2026); Asiae "Heo Young-in Family's Dividend 'Over 10 Billion KRW'" (28 March 2024); Asiae / AlphaBiz governance analyses (21 December 2025)
SPC Samlip financial data: MarketScreener (A005610.KRX); Stockanalysis.com (KRX 005610); SimplyWallSt full-year 2024 earnings analysis (4 May 2026); Digrin earnings detail (25 June 2025); AlphaBiz / Yonhap report on FY 2024 operating-profit decline (10 February 2026)
Global footprint and 2030/2036 targets: World Coffee Portal "SPC Group to establish Paris Baguette production facility in Texas" (3 March 2025); World Coffee Portal "Paris Baguette North America sets strong foundation for growth in first quarter" (7 May 2025); World Coffee Portal "Paris Baguette opens first UK franchise store ahead of planned European expansion" (28 November 2024); Korea Times / Maeil Business 700th-store coverage (1–2 December 2025); Korea JoongAng Daily 700th-store coverage (2 December 2025)
North America: Fast Casual "Paris Baguette adding 100 locations by year's end" (2 February 2025); Restaurant Dive "How Paris Baguette plans 1k units 2030" (7 January 2025); Bakery & Snacks "Paris Baguette on track to realise 1,000 bakery cafes in the US by 2030" (30 August 2023); Craft to Crumb "Paris Baguette celebrates 2024 growth, looks to 2025" (29 January 2025); Chosun Biz Texas-production-hub investment detail (7 October 2025); Franchise Direct FDD extract (Paris Baguette Family Inc.)
France entry and footprint: Korea JoongAng Daily "Paris Baguette makes its eponymous debut" (23 July 2014); Chosun coverage of Châtelet opening (24 July 2014); Yonhap and Inside Retail Asia "SPC Group opens three new Paris Baguette stores in Paris" (4–6 October 2022); parisbaguette.fr "Nos boutiques" (accessed 2026)
UK entry and franchise rollout: World Coffee Portal "Paris Baguette opens first UK store in London" (16 October 2022); World Coffee Portal first-UK-franchise coverage (28 November 2024); WhichFranchise franchisor profile (Paris Baguette UK); Korea Times / Maeil Business / Korea JoongAng Daily 700th-store London Westfield coverage (1–2 December 2025); Stream Orders LinkedIn post on sixth London site (9 March 2026, secondary)
Italy and Czech Republic: Newsway "Paris Baguette enters Italy" (26 March 2024); AlphaBiz "SPC Paris Baguette enters Italy" (24 March 2024) on Mario Pascucci / Caffè Pascucci master-franchise; World Coffee Portal "SPC Group exploring opportunities to launch Paris Baguette in Czech Republic" (23 September 2024)
Asia Pacific / Middle East / Africa: Korea JoongAng Daily "Paris Baguette launches Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa division" (2 January 2025); Korea JoongAng Daily Malaysia entry (19 January 2023); Asiae Johor halal-production-hub completion (27 February 2025); Yonhap and Korea Herald Philippines entry (17–18 April 2024)
DACH status (negative evidence): NewsTomato eleven-country review (2 October 2024); offizielle parisbaguette.fr / parisbaguette.uk country pages (no German-speaking equivalent); FranchisePortal.de "PARIS BAGUETTE Franchise" listing (last updated 22 July 2025); AHGZ / Hogapage / Tageskarte search (no Paris Baguette DACH entry coverage through May 2026)
Korean regulation and Korea-market context: Korea Herald "Franchise bakeries look beyond Korean market" (4 June 2015); Korea Times "Bakery war deepening" (25 December 2012)
DACH demand context: Korea Times article quoting Korean Cultural Centre director on Berlin's >100 Korean restaurants (14 November 2024); Korea.net (4 March 2024); VisitBerlin "11 koreanische Restaurants Berlin" (2 September 2025); Arirang TV AHK Korea director interview on K-Wave structural baseline (11 February 2026); Falstaff "Top 5 asiatische Cafés in Berlin"; Exberliner / The Berliner on Lia Ppang Prenzlauer Berg
Tous Les Jours non-entry: KED Global "CJ Foodville goes global" (4 June 2025); Tripadvisor / Das Örtliche / OpenTable Berlin Hufelandstraße bistro entries (independent French bistro, not CJ Foodville chain)