I’ve been in the food industry for 20 years. I find it fascinating to make artisanal products at scale.
Editor’s Note
In this ongoing series from Stanford Business magazine, we tell the story of a manufacturing business overseen by a Stanford GSB alum.
Nicolas Bernadi, MBA ’06, is the CEO of La Boulangerie/Shaw Bakers.
Arriving in the U.S. from France in 2004, I was surprised by the poor quality of the frozen food available to retail consumers. I came to the GSB because I had a strong entrepreneurial desire, which became a natural opportunity for me to start that kind of business. I started working with a few classmates to understand why there was such a big gap between the quality of manufactured food and ready-to-eat meals in the U.S. versus Europe.
A classmate introduced me to Pascal Rigo, the founder of La Boulangerie, in 2010. I became his right hand on sales and marketing. I joined Pascal because he always started with the product and built manufacturing processes to make sure that the quality would be top-end. Baking is incredibly technical, way more than a lot of food categories.
We were growing incredibly fast. In 2012, we sold the company to Starbucks and were put in charge of the food at 15,000 stores in North America. In two and a half years, we doubled sales just by bringing in better products. If you go into a café and get a warm chocolate croissant — delicious, served warm, with a smile — it’s game over.
Eventually, Pascal and I bought back the bakery and some of our cafés in San Francisco. We brought back all our bakers and restarted from scratch. We applied the same principles we started with: We only focus on products that we love and provide great value to the end consumer. I don’t want to launch products we’re not proud of. — Told to Dave Gilson
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