Today we’d like to introduce you to Teddy Dumoulin
Hi Teddy, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I am Teddy 40 years old, I started as a pre-apprentice baker at 14 years old in a small French village of 500 inhabitants called Blacourt in the north of France. After spending 3 years studying bakery in a specialized school I left for Paris to look for work because my girlfriend at the time lived there, who is now my wife 😊. My first position as an employee baker was at Max Poilâne, an artisan baker who only makes breads shaped by hand and cooked in a wood fire, these 5 years spent in this bakery were pure happiness, you can’t be more of a baker than that, having to light your wood oven, put it in the oven with a shovel and shape all your products by hand is just the pure tradition of our profession. I then decided to go and work as a temporary worker in a bakery to learn more about the profession by working in several bakeries that needed my services, which gave me the opportunity to see multiple working methods, after several years of being temporary workers I made the decision to find a bakery in which I wanted to stay in a permanent position, which led me to work for Boulangerie Martin located near the Parc des Tuilleries in Paris, not far from the Champs Élysées, a small neighborhood bakery where everything is homemade, every day and run for over 25 years by the same couple, a family business as we like them. A Parisian baker friend, but being based in Marseille sent me a text message one Sunday morning asking me if I wanted to come to Marseille to work as a Head Baker, I told him, yes why not, so we decided to move to Marseille. Very rich experience also in Marseille in terms of working methods and management. After a year spent in Marseille, my wife, a hairdresser and colorist by trade, no longer enjoying her job, asked me if I wanted to open a bakery, I told her why not again 😅 and we ended up a few months later in this small village near Montpellier in the south of France called Saint Genies des Mourgues, a thousand-year-old village. After 7 years of managing this small bakery and 6 years of producing all the products alone every day and fresh, we finally decided to realize our dream, to come and try our luck in the United States, more specifically in Florida, a state that my wife loves very much after having come on vacation many times with her parents in the 90s. So we decided to sell everything we owned in France, our business, our house and we stayed in a friend’s house in Aveyron, a French region while waiting to find the ideal business, between the time we put our bakery up for sale and our arrival in Florida, it took almost 3 years. We found this little pizzeria for sale, in which I redid all the small decoration and small works alone and I had all the necessary equipment brought from France via an American company, oven, proofing chamber, rolling mill, cooling cell, as well as flour and butter. flour with which we have twice won the prize for the best baguette in our department in 2017 and 2018. We arrived in the United States on October 17 with our 14-year-old daughter, 9 suitcases, 1 dog and 2 cats. We managed to open on December 20, and the… our adventure really began and our dreams became reality after 3 long years of planning everything.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The hardest thing at the beginning of this adventure was the sale of our bakery, in fact we had a crisis in electricity prices in France and the bakery bills were multiplied by 10, which made bakery sales almost impossible and many went bankrupt. The bank of our potential buyer at that time had therefore asked him for more than €40,000 in additional contribution, which he did not have, so we decided to lower the price by €40,000 which represented 1/5 of the initial price, because otherwise we would never have been able to sell. We then put our house up for sale, and a crisis in real estate rates arrived just a few weeks later, and the banks were lending very little to families, we had to lower this time by €50,000 to succeed in selling. This had a big impact on our investment budget for our project.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I think that the thing I am most proud of in my job is to have always moved forward by myself and to have learned from my own mistakes and to never have counted my hours whether as an apprentice from the age of 14 to 17 where sometimes I happened to do more than 50 hours per week, that as a worker where I always tried to accomplish my work with a true professional conscience and to give the best of myself and finally as a boss, to definitely no longer count my hours, to sacrifice myself for the good of my company and my family to tell myself by repeating to myself that one day it will pay off and I see the result now by having the feedback from our customers here which fills me to the highest degree.
How do you define success?
I think that success, in my opinion, is when, after having made a lot of sacrifices to achieve a goal, we finally reach that goal and the recognition of our audience, if I may say so, is our reward, well, success is there, in my opinion…
Pricing:
- $3.70 for à Croissant with french butter and French Flour
- $3.50 for à French Traditionnal baguette with French Flour, we won twice prize of Best baguette of our County
- $5 for Chocolate Almond Croissant or Almond Plain Croissant, with Authentic French method
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jadore.thefrenchbakery?igsh=MWJ4enh2eDlqYWd0ZA==
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1GutgTBsF6/
