Paris Baguette plants flag in Manhattan to redefine the bakery-caféParis Baguette plants flag in Manhattan to redefine the bakery-café

To Jack Moran, it seems he has spent his career searching for the perfect croissant. The search has finally landed him at Paris Baguette, where he thinks he has found a company that can bring a flawless flaky pastry to the masses. 

“We’re bakers, and we’re proud of our craft,” said Moran, who was the director of operations at Au Bon Pain and Le Pain Quotidien before coming to Paris Baguette America, where he is CEO.

Before entering the bakery-cafe segment, he spent four years in France working for Hard Rock Cafe and falling in love with baked goods and bakeries. 

“The secret in France…they tell you if you open a bakery and, say if you don’t have the time and money to get all the products right, the way you cheat is have a great baguette and great croissant.

“And if those two are great, most people will forgive you on the other products.

“If you can’t get these right, people think, ‘You’re kidding me? They can’t even make a baguette? They can’t make it.’

“So, then we’re exposed as a fraud. This is why symbolically this becomes unbelievably important,” Moran said holding up one of his brand’s baguette.

The croissants, the baguettes and all the baked goods at Paris Baguette are made in-house with a high level of precision, but most Americans don’t know that and many have never heard of the brand. It’s Moran’s job to tell Paris Baguette’s story. 

But it’s a complicated story. 

“We are a Korean bakery with a French name that’s trying to do business in America where the bakery culture is on its deathbed,” Moran said. To be fair, the bakery-café segment had total sales of $8.1 billion in the latest fiscal year, according to NRN’s Top 200.

But what defines a bakery-café, Moran wonders. “It’s a broad category.”  As for Panera Bread, the segment leader, “I want them to admit that they’re really a soup, sandwich, salad place and not bakery,” Moran said.   

“And we’re trying to teach the culture something that it forgot. That you can get up in the morning and gather around freshly baked goods and not gorge yourself.”

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Paris Baguette was founded in 1988 and now has over 3,500 locations worldwide. The company is owned by Paris Croissant, a division of SPC Group, a bakery and confection manufacturer based in Seoul, South Korea. The company is so proud of their product that they’ve even opened locations in Paris, France, a city with strong opinions about pastries. 

They’ve had a small presence in the U.S. for years. There are about 80 locations in the U.S. today.

But Moran, who took over as CEO last year, has been tasked with making Paris Baguette a household name in the States, starting with New York City.

“We think New York is a billboard for the world,” said Moran. “If we want to get on the map in people’s consciousness, we want to plant a flag here and want to be very highly visible and noticed. And we want people to come here and see and think, ‘I really would like one of these back home.’

“If back home is Wichita, Kansas or Seattle, we want to plant that seed by having the brand very visible in New York because of it.” 

On a recent morning, Moran was standing at the door of the new Paris Baguette in Time Square. It’s one of six locations in Manhattan that the company opened or plans for opening in the borough this year, all company-owned. 

Moran is surveying passersby and asking customers and staff questions. The location was doing a brisk business in bottled water and drip coffee. Inside some customers were confused about how to use the tray and tongs stacked up to gather pastries. Moran intervened. 

The self-service model is fairly standard at Paris Baguette locations around the world, and at Asian bakeries in general.  

“We have to teach people how to use the brand,” Moran said.   “I think there’s going to be this cross-educational thing where we’re going to teach the American customer some things, and they’re going to teach us some things.”

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The baked goods at Paris Baguette could be considered a cross-national experience. There are traditional French sweets like pain au chocolate as well as Asian delicacies like mung bean cakes and milk bread. Then there are mashups creations like the pastry-wrapped hotdogs and sweet potato pastries with sesame seeds. There are also cakes, which aren’t traditionally found in Paris bakeries, but are what American customers are craving, said Moran. These cakes, priced at about $35 each, help raise the average check price, too. And the new line of sandwiches and salads bring customers in for more than just sweets and coffee. 

And Moran has got to bring in a crowd. Many of the new locations are large and expensive to run with a full staff downstairs crafting pastries and cakes. 

“Because of all that manual labor, I have to be mass market,” he said.

At least he has support. Hur Young-in, chairman of Paris Baguette parent SPC, supports this thoughtful, quality-focused approach to growth in the U.S., said Moran. 

But ultimately, it’s Moran’s job to sell Paris Baguette to America. All of America.

“We want to democratize the concept in the States and come up with the model that works,” he said. “[Paris Baguette] is meant to be high quality, but it’s also meant to be easy to use and something that will have, ultimately, lots of outlets. It’s not a boutiquey concept. It’s for the people.”

Contact Gloria Dawson at [email protected]

Follow her on Twitter: @GloriaDawson