NARBONNE, France (AFP) - A French pastry chef has been sentenced to two months in prison for systematically humiliating a young apprentice in incidents that were filmed and posted on social media.

Two other apprentices were found guilty of going along with the 46-year-old chef's persecution of the 17-year-old victim in a bakery in Narbonne in the south of France.

Over the course of several months, the teenager was regularly pelted with flour, food colouring and eggs for the amusement of his colleagues, and an incident in which he was dumped in a bin was posted online, prompting the victim to go to the police.

The two apprentices who were convicted, a 20-year-old man and a 19-year-old woman, received a six-month suspended sentence and 150 hours of community service respectively.

All three convicted were ordered to pay 1,500 euros (S$2,500) in damages each to their victim.