The Cronut and Dominique Ansel Bakery: Dominique Ansel

Dominique Ansel’s invention of the Cronut — an inspired liaison between croissant and donut — was supposed to be a one-time indulgence for Mother’s Day. But once word spread about the perfect hybrid pastry, his Manhattan bakery was overwhelmed by endless lines and Cronut scalpers. Dominique eventually learned to manage the hype and grow his business while maintaining his craft. Named the World’s Best Pastry Chef in 2017, he has found an entrepreneurial sweet spot in three brick-and-mortar locations and a mail-order business, which will overnight a Cronut to your door, sans the line, and scalpers be damned. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Katherine Sypher. Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. You can follow HIBT on X https://x.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. And sign up for Guy’s free newsletter at guyraz.com http://guyraz.com. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 2:16Guy Raz?

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• 5:11Guy Raz?

  Hey, really quick before we start the show, we have an announcement about a really exciting new thing we're launching: a newsletter. And like our show, the newsletter is designed to be interesting, informative, inspiring, and most importantly, fun. It's 100% free, and to sign up, just visit guyraz.com. That's G-U-Y-R-A-Z dot com.

• 5:39Guy Raz?

  Once you have 150, 200, 300 people in line, I mean, those people were not going to get a cronut.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  No, for sure.

• 5:47Guy Raz?

  Like, only 50 people were going to get one.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe. And we had no rules in the beginning. People were buying a dozen, they were buying two dozen. And then we were left with like, nothing. But it was just insane because we couldn't make enough.

• 5:59Guy Raz?

  I mean, I remember this was covered on like, national news. You had like, camera crews outside the bakery.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Many, many days, we had like, reporters reporting live in front of the bakery.

• 6:09Guy Raz?

  Live from the cronut bakery.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Because it was madness. So I had to hire a security to manage the line. And all I felt like is like, it's a nightmare.

• 6:28Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:40Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how an arranged marriage between a doughnut and a croissant led to a perfect pastry called the cronut, and made Dominique Ansel's Bakery one of the best-known in the world.

• 6:59Guy Raz?

  There's an inherent tension between making an exceptional product and running a scalable business. A really well-made, high-quality product usually takes time, and it takes expensive materials, and it's hard to scale, all of which is perfectly fine. Scale doesn't have to be the goal. The goal is to build a sustainable and profitable business, which is what Dominique Ansel's done, despite the temptation and the pressure to expand and go big. Now, you may not immediately recognize his name, but you will know the product he's most famous for. It's what got him global attention for a period of time, starting in 2013.

• 7:43Guy Raz?

  Dominique invented the cronut, a cross between a croissant and a donut. For months and even years after its release, people would line up around the block in front of Dominique's Bakery in New York just to get their hands on one. Soon after, investors and other folks with dollar signs in their eyes approached Dominique. Expand, they said. Build a cronut factory. But Dominique resisted that. And today, he's built a brand around just three bakeries and a mail-order business. It's profitable, sustainable, and most importantly to Dominique, it doesn't cut corners when it comes to quality. And he's now widely considered to be one of the best pastry chefs in the world.

• 8:25Guy Raz?

  But over the years, Dominique's also learned how to be a businessman, how to splurge on things like butter and flour, but cut costs by learning how to fix generators and toilets himself. For a guy who would be an honored guest at a Michelin-starred restaurant these days, Dominique Gensell didn't grow up in that world. In fact, he grew up in a working-class home in a small town in northern France where his dad worked in a factory.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  I grew up in one of the poorest towns in France. I grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in that town. And I remember growing up, I remember like, food was something interesting to me because I don't think my family was the best at managing money. Very often, like, you know, the second or third week of the month, we had nothing left. And so, I was not starving, but it was not easy to come by. I was not eating like the best food either. And my mom was actually a terrible cook. It was so bad. And I think that's probably what inspired me to get into kitchen. So, you know, when I was 15 years old, I was told that, you know, I need to get a job.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I couldn't like keep going to university or anything like this. It was not accessible to me.

• 9:43Guy Raz?

  You were not going to go to university. That was not your...

• 9:45Speaker 01

  No, that was not an option. But, you know, my parents never gave me any like guidance. They were okay with anything I wanted to do. So, early on, I decided, you know, I figured out that I was on my own. And I had to make my own choice, my own research. And I decided to, you know, to find a humble job and I started in the kitchen.

• 10:05Guy Raz?

  This was at a local, this is at a local restaurant you were working at?

• 10:07Speaker 01

  A small local restaurant that was a chef, savory chef.

• 10:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  So I did this program that was three weeks with an employer and one week at school.

• 10:16Guy Raz?

  It was like a culinary school.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  A learning culinary year, but my first year was just like miserable. I hated everything about it. The people I was working with were just terrible. Abusive with in every sense of the way. So they will like cut me with knives.

• 10:32Guy Raz?

  Cut you with knives?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, just for fun. They look at me laughing.

• 10:36Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Uh, the sous chef there was like smoking weed. He would like heat up the spatula by the stove, remove it from the stove and then would come just see on my arm with a hot spatula.

• 10:47Guy Raz?

  Wow, that sounds like hell.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  So this, you know, like this is, this is hell. This is horrible. I would go to work every day, every morning waking up with like a nod in my stomach in fear of going to work. They insult me, you know, slap me in the back of the head, like punch me on the shoulder, like all day long. And luckily, luckily, a year later, the restaurant was sold to a younger chef. And he was tough, but he was a much better person. He started showing me and teaching me, showing me how to appreciate cooking, uh, buying nice ingredients and teach me how to work with them, how to like cook it. And I was, I started like developing the care and the love for what I was doing.

• 11:29Guy Raz?

  So this really was kind of the beginning of your, right, your education. Clearly you were on the, on a track to become a chef. This is what you were learning how to, what to do. And did you, what was it about? About that life that appealed to you? Did you like, I don't know, did you like the idea of making something and watching people eat it? Did you like the experimentation?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  So at that time, I had no choice. I had no choice to gather a little bit of money to support the family. And I had no options to quit. Quitting was not an option.

• 12:06Guy Raz?

  You needed the check.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  You needed, you stick with it no matter what.

• 12:10Guy Raz?

  But did you find that you were? Had a little bit of a talent for cooking. Did you, did you, did you, anybody in that kitchen ever say, you know, you're a little bit better than, than the other trainees?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Back then, no. You know, it, it took time for me to appreciate what I was doing. And then loving it. And I think when you reach that level of like loving what you do, this is where you really like blossom and you really like explore like cooking at a different level.

• 12:42Guy Raz?

  Got it. Okay. So you, you basically do that for, I think about, about three years.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:47Guy Raz?

  And I guess we should make this distinction because most chefs do not know how to do pastry. And most pastry, a lot of pastry people, they know how to cook, but not as well. Because it's like, it's like if you're in baseball and you're a pitcher, you can hit, but you don't really know how to hit because you're not practicing hitting anymore. You're just pitching. It's, it's like, right?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  So during my, my, my training, uh, in the first, in beginning stage, so I did two years in a restaurant with the same program, and then I did one year in a bakery. So that was my first taste of learning baking. So I did work in a bakery for a year.

• 13:22Guy Raz?

  I see. Okay. You did, and but what was it about baking and pastry? That you thought this is the direction I want to go into? Cause it's really one or the other, you, you, right? You, you got, I mean, if you're going to choose cooking, that's one direction. If you choose pastry, that's the other direction.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  I think I still love both. I think cooking is more like feeling, tasting, seasoning. And baking is more like scientific. It's precise.

• 13:47Guy Raz?

  It's science. It's weighing. It's.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  It's also art. It's also like creating, building from scratch. I think there's, I was a lot more attracted to like those steps of building, understanding the science and the precision of it. This was more matching my personality and what I wanted to do.

• 14:05Guy Raz?

  I, I wonder, I mean, cause you basically, you, you started to drop your resume off at different bakeries.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. I decided to go to Paris, the capital, from the countryside, and to find a job in a bakery. So I knew nobody. I had no connections, no cell phone at the time. Still had this like big, like huge map. And I was completely lost in the city. I had printed out a few resumes and I would drive around for like. Hours like for many days and every time we'll see a bakery, I randomly like park the car, run inside, drop off my resume.

• 14:37Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  And I found a job at Patek Patek, which was at the time, one of the oldest pastry shop in Paris. I will always remember this, this job because to this day, I think there I made one of the most beautiful croissants I've ever made.

• 14:54Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  And I can, I can say that I have, I have no, no shame to say that I still like perfect my croissant every day. But the, the, the, the way we were making it, so instead of, you know, putting the butter inside the dough, uh, we used to cream the butter in our hands. So it has to be pliable, but not,

• 15:12Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  not too soft, not too, not too hard.

• 15:15Guy Raz?

  Not melty.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  And you will spread it with your fingertip inside the dough in two additions.

• 15:20Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  And only, only a few people can do this because most people, most people's hands are too hot to, to handle the butter.

• 15:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  But I've always have cold hands, my entire life.

• 15:31Guy Raz?

  You have cold hands?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  I have cold hands, which is good for chocolate and like dough.

• 15:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How, how long, by the way, does it take to make one croissant from the moment you start to pour the ingredients to the time that it's sold in the, in the, in the display case?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  It takes three days.

• 15:49Guy Raz?

  Three days?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  So the first day we mix the dough, uh, and then you have, you have to let it ferment, remove uh, all the gas that, that from the fermentation, let it chill. The next day you incorporate the butter and you give all the folds. Then you cut it, you roll it and day three, you have to rest overnight. Day three, you ferment it again and then you bake it.

• 16:12Guy Raz?

  That's unbelievable. People don't know this. They don't realize that, that it's something that takes you like forty five seconds to eat. Took three days to make.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's a real craft, you know, that's, that's one of my saddest thing, you know, growing up in France. I've been to like lots of bakeries. I love bread. By nature in France, people think that bread should be cheap.

• 16:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  And I, I, I, you know, I don't believe in that. I believe that bread should be a little bit more expensive. It takes, takes so much labor and so much time.

• 16:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So from you, you work at this bakery, this pâtisserie Peltier for, for your, okay. You move on to Fochon, which is now, if you go to Paris, there, there are a bunch of locations and it's, it was, but I think when you worked, there was just maybe one location.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually they, uh, they fell from, for bankruptcy unfortunately a few, a few years ago and they closed everything now. It was one, one of the most prestigious like bakery and retail and like, it's like the most high end.

• 17:10Guy Raz?

  It sold chocolates, right? They sold all kinds of things.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Fruits, vegetables, spices, coffee from all around the world.

• 17:17Guy Raz?

  And you were hired to be, I mean, this was when you were hired, you were just hired as another pastry chef?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  So, yes, I, I left Peltier after one year and I walk in, uh, into Fochon because I knew it was one of the best bakery. I was a seasonal worker. So I was hired for the holidays from September to December. So one of, I was one of thirty people hired actually. And towards mid-December, they called us all in a room. They told us they will keep one person only and they had chosen me to stay. So I was supposed to stay for four months. I ended up staying for, uh, close to eight years.

• 17:53Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  And, uh, when I was there, I was, after six months, I was promoted as the chef of the party and then quickly into sous chef. I was twenty-four. They, uh, bought like another like ten locations. I was in the kitchen. I was in charge of a team of over a hundred people.

• 18:11Guy Raz?

  So you were just handed this team of a hundred people. How did you even know how to manage a hundred?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  I mean, I was not by myself. It was another chef.

• 18:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Plus some, a lot of other sous chef and was one of the sous chef. So I was, uh, one of the youngest in the kitchen, actually.

• 18:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Because by the time you were twenty-four, I mean, you already had eight years of experience in a kitchen under your belt. So you were very experienced. You were very young, but how did you, I mean, how did you just learn how to be a boss?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, I think my entire life, uh, observing was something that, that was, I was very good at. So growing up, I always observed my siblings, you know, all the things they were doing, all the bad things, all the good things. I was picking, choose what I want to do. And I think I was, I was the same in the kitchen. So I've seen a lot of people, you know, I've seen a lot of chefs yelling and screaming. And it always made me feel uncomfortable. I see them putting pressure on people. I see them like, that was not my style.

• 19:10Guy Raz?

  Did you, I mean, you were rising up the ranks at Fochon, right? Did you ever, while you were there, think, okay, eventually I gotta start my own thing? Or were you just happy working there and being a part of that company?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  I think like, deep inside, since I started, I always wanted to do my own thing. I had some up and down into like, opening the business. Mostly, looking back, I was scared of the financial aspect.

• 19:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  I was always scared like, how much it would cost, how much risk it would be for my life, and spending too much and taking risks. But deep inside, I always wanted to open my own thing.

• 19:46Guy Raz?

  And I guess we should mention that in France, and in many, actually many countries, it's not like in the US where you could just declare bankruptcy and move on. Like, if you start a business and it goes bankrupt, you're saddled with that debt.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, you are, yes. You have to pay for it.

• 20:00Guy Raz?

  And that's why there's fewer risk-taking, I mean, there's just less risk-taking. I mean, I'm not saying that bank declaring bankruptcy is a good thing, but one of the arguments as to why there's more business innovation in the US is because of bankruptcy, like, you could take the risk.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you can, yeah, you can still do it in France, you know, declare bankruptcy for a company, but there's a lot of like, things that are attached to you personally.

• 20:22Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  And that is, it's hard to get out of.

• 20:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So you're, you're working your way up at Fochon, and, and you eventually get promoted to like, corporate pastry chef, which I guess means that you start traveling around the world and sort of helping them to develop new stores in other cities.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:43Guy Raz?

  And then, with all that travel, comes this really major turning point in 2006. You, you get a call from Daniel Balloud, who was, and is, one of the most famous chefs in New York City and even around the world. He calls you and he says, hey, I'm looking for a pastry chef. How did you even get on his radar?

• 21:05Speaker 01

  So we had some friends in common. They had mentioned my name and gave my number. And Danielle just calls me out blue and tells me about, you know, restaurant Danielle and how he's interested in my resume and he wants to talk to me. And I did a little bit of research, of course, about Danielle, the restaurant, what he was doing. I love New York. I had visited before. And before I went to Danielle, a lot of people told me, you know what, it's gonna be tough. He has high expectation, it's a very difficult job. And the more I would hear this, the more it would make me like, wanna do it. So Danielle invited me to come to New York for a few days to do a tasting for him and to meet and to see the restaurant.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  And I had prepared probably, I think it was like four or five desserts plus a cake, some viennoise, some petit fou. So I remember like he was sitting down on table. So I dropped the first desserts, come back, clean up, drop the second dessert. And I was standing next to him and he looked up and he was like, so when can you start?

• 22:12Speaker 01

  I was like, excuse me?

• 22:13Guy Raz?

  After the second dessert.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  After the second dessert. And then he offered me a job writing in there. And then I know that, you know, eight weeks later, I came to New York with two suitcases and I took a small apartment in Queens and I started working at Danielle.

• 22:28Guy Raz?

  Wow. So, I mean, this is, and this is like 2006, you were 28. This is like the beginning of the heyday. This is, this is still before, I think, the Michelin guide came to New York. It would come within a couple of years. And, but this was certainly, I mean, this was like about as good as it gets in New York City. What, I mean, what were you, what was your charge? Were you told, hey, just knock, knock people out? Work on things that's just gonna blow their mind?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  No, I had no specific assignments, just to follow the style of cooking and make some good desserts. I have to admit, at the time, I was very nervous. Because coming from for sure managing a hundred, 120 people in the kitchen to managing 10 people at Danielle, piece of cake.

• 23:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  But add the cultural difference, add the restaurant setting, add the language barrier, add all of this, that makes it like super challenging.

• 23:28Guy Raz?

  A pressure cooker, right? Also because they were, I mean, I think three years after you arrived. They won three Michelin stars. But I imagine that that's actually when the pressure really kind of goes up a notch because then you need to maintain that level of quality and service.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's a lot of pressure. And one of the first thing that Daniel say to all of us, and I always remember, I've heard it before, but that's the first thing he say, say that three Michelin star, it's hard to earn. Three Michelin star is like much harder to keep.

• 24:05Guy Raz?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 24:08Guy Raz?

  While you, so you end up spending about five and a half years there. At what point did you in your mind start to think, because the next thing that would happen is you would leave and start your own bakery. But at what point in your mind did you think, okay, I think I'm ready to take this leap and do this?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  You know, so it took me about like at least a year to get comfortable with what I was doing at Daniel, to find my style first, find my style of play the dessert. And like after a year, four, five, I was hungry for something else. I wanted something else. I remember actually going to see Daniel and talking to him about what I want to do, open a bakery and showing him the business plan. And I remember going back to him like, hey, we should talk and we'll do something, we can do it together. He was like, no, Dominique, I'm sorry, you know, it's a little too risky. I'm not sure, I'm not sure it's a good time.

• 25:05Guy Raz?

  Which is fine. I mean, probably part of partly because he didn't want to lose you.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  I think that was the biggest thing for him.

• 25:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  I remember, I remember like, because of course he was not happy about it. And, you know, I think he was like, looking back, probably hurtful for him. Uh, you know, we were such a tight, close team. It was almost like losing a son. But, you know, he's, he's smart. He's, he was been nothing but supportive to me. And, you know, I would always be like grateful to have the opportunity of coming with him, to walk under him and to learn so much.

• 25:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So when you decided to start your own bakery, which you founded in 2011, Dominique Ansel Bakery on Spring Street. And so first of all, how did you get the money to do it? I mean, how did you find the financing to even start a business?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  So back then, I was like looking for investors. I had reached out to a few people. I was talking to like two, three people that were more or less serious. I had nothing. I had like a couple thousand dollars of savings. So I was hoping to get investor and, you know, I had this meeting with my designer to see a space on Union Square. I didn't walk out. He went back to his Soho office, got off the train on Spring Street, walked by the bakery and called me. He was like, okay, this is the space here. This is bakery, you know, not too far from my office. It looks in pretty good shape, like you should check it out.

• 26:33Guy Raz?

  Oh, it was available for, it was available for lease?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yes, it was available for lease. It was, it used to be-

• 26:36Guy Raz?

  And it was already had, it already had, it had already been built out, basically?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  It was built out. It was like set up as a bakery. And I walk in the bakery and I fell in love. I was like, this is, this is the place. This is like perfect. It had a little garden in the back. You know, it was not very pretty. It was not very good looking. We fixed it up. And at the time, I was dating this, this girl who was in, in Hong Kong. She was a food writer and this girl was my, my girlfriend. And she became my wife. And I dragged her into New York. I say, hey, why don't you come help me open the bakery? And she had a bit of savings as well. So we put everything we had, both of us, and on the table and, and started this way.

• 27:20Guy Raz?

  Wow. So, so she took her money, her savings, your meager savings, and you took out a lease? And you had to take what, a three-year lease or five-year lease out?

• 27:29Speaker 01

  10 years lease.

• 27:30Guy Raz?

  10 years.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  And I painted the bakery. I did some tile work because I did this when I was a kid. Electrocuted myself a few times, changing outlets. Cleaned the toilet, fixed the computer. And we patched it back up and we opened the bakery. And that's, that's all we had and we had for employees.

• 27:52Guy Raz?

  So this is 2011. You, you opened- This bakery up and what did you want it to be? Did you want it to be like patisserie peltier that you worked at in Paris? Did you want it to be more like fashion? What was your vision of what you thought it should be?

• 28:08Speaker 01

  No, I wanted to, I wanted to be Dominique Ansel Bakery. I want to be my own. I have to say, I have to admit, I was very innocent back then.

• 28:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  And completely unaware of what it would take to open a business. So we opened with four employees. We had no managers, no, like, I remember like looking at bank accounts. Once it was like on a business bank account have like $2,000 left. And I was like, how the hell are we gonna make it? This is like, my kitchen was probably without exaggerating 15 feet by 10 feet.

• 28:46Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  That was my kitchen. There was one table and the door shitter was sitting on table.

• 28:51Guy Raz?

  And so, once you were ready to open, it's just four of you and, and it's you, your then girlfriend, now wife, and two employees baking. You were gonna bake everything and run the front of the shop, sell, you know, cashier and everything. So that was just four people total doing everything.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was just, that was insane.

• 29:10Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, things get slightly more insane when people start camping outside the bakery just to get their hands on a cronut. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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• 31:43Guy Raz?

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• 32:15Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2011, and Dominique Enselle is just about to open his first bakery in New York. But of course, there are tons of bakeries in the city, especially cupcake bakeries, because cupcakes are really big at the time. And people are telling Dominique that he should make them too.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  So that was one of my pet peeves before I opened the bakery, because a lot of people were telling me to make cupcakes. They were telling me that a lot of French chefs have tried to open a bakery in New York and failed, that I shouldn't do it. They were telling me, they were giving me all these advices without me asking. It's, I mean, I don't mind cupcakes, you know, I've had more bad one than good one, but I never, never wanted to do cupcakes.

• 33:04Guy Raz?

  But did you get any, I mean, you're such a small team, did you have any like press or any articles written about the bakery, or you just opened the shop up and?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  So since, you know, I was at Daniel and Daniel, of course, is a star with all the, all the media in, um, in, in New York and in, in the US as well. People pay attention because I came from Daniel, I worked for Daniel for so many years and people want to see what I, what I do, so of course, like, it's one of the first things that actually Daniel told me when I left. He said, remember, whatever you do, my name is attached to yours now, so you better do well. And I kind of like smirk when he said that, but now, now I see it and I understand it. And, uh, so we had, uh, the New York Times, Florence Fabrica, that came to the bakery before we opened,

• 33:55Speaker 01

  asking questions, see what I was going to do, and she came back after we opened as well to taste the food. And she, you know, she loved it.

• 34:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  So she wrote this like beautiful piece on the New York Times. And I remember right after that, we were like, you know, busy-ish, not too crazy in the beginning. After the New York Times article, I think it was like, uh, two weeks after we opened, we were slammed every single day. It was like madness.

• 34:22Guy Raz?

  After her article came out?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't realize the impact.

• 34:26Guy Raz?

  Oh, she's a massive deal. I mean, she's a, she's like an old school New York Times food writer. It's been there for a long time.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  She's brilliant, like knowledgeable about food. She's, she's smart and I understand why people read her and why people like follow her.

• 34:42Guy Raz?

  So tell me about your day, your average day at that time. You would get to the bakery at three in the morning because you got to start the process of making the dough and proofing it.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. So get there three in the morning, start mixing the dough, laminate the dough. So that will be for the next day.

• 34:56Guy Raz?

  Laminate means put those sheets of butter on, fold it.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Exactly, doing all the folds, getting everything cut and ready. Then at eight o'clock, I will go to the service station. We have a little service station there where we do all the made to order egg sandwich and stuff like this for breakfast. So we'll help with that. And then I'll go back and prepare the pastries for the day. Everything was baked before opening or right at opening.

• 35:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  The cunyaman as well. Cunyaman is one of our best seller.

• 35:25Guy Raz?

  It's your like that caramelized, sugary croissant-like little roll.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Oh my god, yes, it's divine. It's like a flicky caramelized croissant, it's crunchy on the outside, like chewy and tender in the center. That was one of our specialty.

• 35:40Guy Raz?

  And, and all right, so those are ready by, so the pastry is ready by 11:00. And then tell me about the rest of the day when, at the bakery.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  The rest of the day, I would prepare all the pastries, put everything out by 11:00 and 11:30 start service. So we're doing all the sandwiches made to order, all the salads, soup, everything for lunch. By like 2:00, 2:30, I was done. I'll go back to the kitchen, start prepping for the next day.

• 36:06Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  It was, it was a little bit too much in the beginning, but it was, you know, looking back, it was fun. It was like, I was excited to share. I was excited to like, to show what I could do, but I didn't want to stop. I wanted to do more.

• 36:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And what time did you get home?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  So we closed the shop at 8:00. And then I would, I had no dishwasher at the time, so I'll wash all the dishes, take out the trash, sweep out the floor, mop the floor. I would go home between like 10:00, 11:00 PM.

• 36:36Guy Raz?

  So you would sleep for three, maybe four hours a night?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, I mean, I had, I had no choice. I had so much work to do.

• 36:45Guy Raz?

  How, how many, how long did you do that for?

• 36:47Speaker 01

  I think I did this for probably like three, almost four years.

• 36:53Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  That was, that was a lot.

• 36:56Guy Raz?

  I mean, how did, how did you manage your, your health? I mean, that's just unhealthy.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  It is, it is unhealthy. I don't suggest anyone to do that. I had no choice.

• 37:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  I had this, the stamina, the determination, and I don't give up and I stay positive. So we had nothing and nothing but my determination and me fighting every single day to make it work.

• 37:18Guy Raz?

  Were you profitable from the beginning?

• 37:20Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 37:21Guy Raz?

  No.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  No, we lost money. We lost a lot of money in the beginning.

• 37:24Guy Raz?

  What were you losing money on? Cause I mean, you're, you're, was it just the, the, the cost of ingredients? I mean, you had very few employees. What was the, what was the?

• 37:33Speaker 01

  We were losing money on everything. Not so much the cost of goods where you have to build inventory, which I never thought of. You know, and even I think about building inventory costs money, uh, staff, uh, insurance, benefits, all the stuff added, uh, rent when it comes in packaging. We start investing packaging like, oh my God, like, which is like bleeding money for like months before we like could make a little bit.

• 38:00Guy Raz?

  You were still pretty young doing this. I mean, you were like thirty five, thirty four, thirty five. But I mean, you'd gone from being the head pastry chef at a Michelin three star restaurant with the attention that comes with that and the prestige to sleeping three hours a night and sweeping the floors and mopping the floors and doing the dishes and like, kind of like what you were doing fifteen years earlier. Were there any moments where you're like, oh, what have I done?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  No, because when it's your own, you fight with everything you have. You know, I was living very humbly. I didn't have many expenses. I have no kids, you know, I was like living with my, my girlfriend at the time. It's. It's risky, but I knew eventually it was going to work. We just had to find the right, the right pattern, like, you know, even like how much you sell your pastry for. Is it like really worth it? Will people buy it if you increase your price a little bit? Uh, you know, can you save on, start saving on costs? Like looking at all like the packaging. Like, I remember calling one of my suppliers and asking him to like, drop the price of the trash bag. He's like, excuse me, like it's too expensive.

• 39:14Guy Raz?

  Of trash bags?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're buying a three millimeter trash bag right now. That's the thickness of the trash bag. You can buy two millimeters or one, one is cheaper. I say, yes, but one would break and people will start doubling that back.

• 39:26Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  So I wanted two millimeters and I want to try it.

• 39:29Guy Raz?

  These are the big trash bags in the back and they have in the kitchen at night. You haul those into.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:33Guy Raz?

  But they, but two millimeters is probably thick enough that's not going to break.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I switched it.

• 39:38Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  And I look at my numbers.

• 39:40Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  And it was like shocking. It was like eight thousand, over eight thousand dollars of saving a year.

• 39:45Guy Raz?

  What, just for going from a three millimeter bag to a two millimeter bag? You saved eight thousand dollars a year?

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:51Guy Raz?

  That's like, that's like those stories that you heard about, you know, when like they remove one olive from the first class salad. You know, United saved a million dollars or something.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  I think the most important is to build relationship with your vendor. You know, you need to like get to know them. You need to get to know, you know, what they, they, they have to make money as well. They have to make profit, but you need a reasonable pricing and then building that relationship where when they buy it, they sell you something, they sell you for the best price.

• 40:18Guy Raz?

  How did you get cheaper flour or cheaper butter? I mean, especially if the same suppliers are selling larger quantities to other places.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Uh, actually, this is, it's gonna sound like crazy and kind of intuitive, but during COVID, everything gone up. All the pricing gone up everywhere. And I decided to import my butter and my flour from France.

• 40:40Guy Raz?

  Wow, that's cheaper?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  No, it's not cheaper. It's a lot more expensive.

• 40:44Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  But you differentiate yourself.

• 40:46Guy Raz?

  I see.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  From the competition because the quality of the ingredients and the quality of the finished product is like much, much higher. Like you want to give the best to your customers and you want to get the best, best price possible as well.

• 40:57Guy Raz?

  But, but going back to that time when you were trying to save money, I mean, you negotiate the trash bags. What else did you negotiate to kind of lower your costs?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  I think not so much negotiation, it's more doing things myself. So if the fridge will break, I'll fix the fridge. There's an issue with plumbing, I don't call a plumber, I fix it myself. I cannot call a plumber and pay like a thousand dollars. I cannot call a nutrition, pay like a thousand dollars to fix small things that sometimes like takes them a minute to fix that is small. So a lot of like, I'm gonna research it, I'm gonna figure it out, I'm gonna fix it myself.

• 41:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right, how long, do you remember how long from the time you opened in 2011? Florence Fabricant writes a piece about you and then there's lines, you know, it gets busier. But how long did it take before you broke even? You started to hit profitability, do you remember?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  I think it took us, I will recover our investment like very quickly because, you know, it was, we invested so little.

• 41:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Uh, it took us about like four to five months, I think.

• 41:57Guy Raz?

  It's pretty great. I mean, I've, I've, I've had founders on this, on this show who have billion dollar valued, valued companies who still haven't broken a profit. So there you go.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, when you, when you start with so little, every dollar feels like, like so much money.

• 42:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  And even, you know, like, you know, spending, like, I remember my first check I wrote to one of my vendor for one month was $10,000. And I, I took a deep breath, like, oh my God, $10,000 for one month.

• 42:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right, so you've got the bakery going, you're grinding away, working like a dog, really, every day.

• 42:37Guy Raz?

  And, and then in 2013, the story I hear, I heard, is that you're thinking of a special pastry that you can make for Mother's Day. So that would be in May of 2013. And you started to think about some ideas. What were you thinking about?

• 42:55Speaker 01

  To be honest, I was busy over one every single day. And my girlfriend, again, not my wife, she was like, hey, this is something like donuts, maybe we can make a donuts for Mother's Day.

• 43:07Guy Raz?

  A donut?

• 43:07Speaker 01

  I laughed at her, I laughed at her, I was like, listen, I'm French, I have no recipe for donut. And she's like, ah, come on. And I was like, no. And then she asked me again and again. She's like, come on, you're creative. We can come up with something.

• 43:20Guy Raz?

  But isn't a donut generally fried? I mean, yes, you can bake them, but they're fried.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fried. Yeah.

• 43:24Guy Raz?

  Okay. So and did you have a fryer in the in the restaurant in the kitchen?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, we we had we had a little fryer.

• 43:30Guy Raz?

  Okay, you have a fryer. Okay.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  I was like, yeah, I can try, but you know, I really have no recipe for donuts. I can try something.

• 43:37Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  I loved, loved, loved croissant growing up, of course, like millions of croissants. And I was like, maybe we'll do something. So I decided to like, take those layers of croissant, these flaky layers, and shape them as donut and fry it.

• 43:52Guy Raz?

  Wait, so you wait, you you made a you basically took croissant dough shaped into a donut and you dropped it in a deep fryer?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  The first one, yeah. And the first test were a disaster. It was bad.

• 44:03Guy Raz?

  Sounds delicious, actually.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  It didn't work.

• 44:05Guy Raz?

  Fried croissant dough?

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it didn't work because like, I mean, there's more to it. It's not just a croissant dough. It's it's a special like type of dough that resembles a croissant, similar techniques. So you need those layers, but you need to be, you cannot be too flaky. So it's it's a little intricate. It took me about like two to three months to develop the recipe.

• 44:25Guy Raz?

  But but what when you said, hey, try a donut, I mean, you you yourself said, I I didn't want to do a cupcake. Because that's not me. A donut's also very American. It's a very American dessert.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, we wanted to do something for Mother's Day for the weekend. It was just for the weekend. So I tried over and over again, probably like thirty, forty version of it. And and then it was getting closer. It was getting better. It was looking better.

• 44:51Guy Raz?

  So what what were the things that you had to do to make that work?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  So I had to change the type of flour I was using. I had to change the

• 45:02Speaker 01

  let's see, the hydration of the dough. There's a higher hydration, uh, so it's a little bit, it's a little softer.

• 45:08Guy Raz?

  More water in the dough.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a little softer though. So the more you add water, the more bouillie you make it.

• 45:12Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  If you cannot make it too bouillie or too like too flaky either, it has to be just in between. Uh, I did try different type of oil to fry. I, uh, I use like different temperature as well for the lamination. Uh, it's, which is a counter intuitive. It has to be, it cannot be too cold. If it's too cold, it's too, too many layers, too many layers, too flaky. So it doesn't work. Uh, and then when I was more or less satisfied with the, the texture, which took a while, it was the hardest part. I played a bit with the feeling and I was like, okay, let's, let's try it. And we're like, yeah, it's good. And we, uh, remember like a, a friend of ours was journalist and he randomly without, without knowing like came by the bakery.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  We're testing it. We're like, what are you guys doing? Like, oh, this thing like it's, we're gonna call it the cronut. We're gonna put in the menu this weekend. Yeah.

• 46:04Guy Raz?

  A cronut.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Croissant.

• 46:06Guy Raz?

  The donut croissant.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  And it's not, it was just like, without exaggerating, like on the table on the corner, like, oh, let me take a photo, push it to the corner. He took a photo. And then it was like, cool. Like I'm gonna write about it. I was like, okay. He put it on his, on his blog that was, uh, Grab Street at the time.

• 46:22Guy Raz?

  This is, this is Hugh Merwin, I think, right?

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it's Hugh. Yeah, yeah. And then he, he put his article on the blog on Grab Street at the time.

• 46:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  And then he called me this afternoon and was like, listen, Dominique, like, I think you're gonna be busy this weekend. My article went viral. I was like, what? Went viral? What does that even mean? Your article went viral? He's like, well, I have over a hundred forty thousand link to my article, an increase of, of traffic on the website of three hundred percent. So I think you're gonna be busy this weekend. I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm happy. I don't know what viral means, you know? It's just the beginning of social media. Nobody knew anything about it.

• 47:03Guy Raz?

  I mean, he did write in his article, I've read it, he wrote. A bold step forward for pastry. I mean, it wasn't just a little article about the cronut. He was like, he called this a bold step forward for pastry in general. I mean, that's kind of a big deal. So I'm not surprised it went viral.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I still, still like people always ask me, why do you think it went viral? You can't tell, there's so many things that got attached to this idea. I think first like the name is cool. The simplicity of like, when you look at it, it looks like a donut. When you hear about it, it's croissant on donut. So you can visualize it without even eating. And by day three, day three of the article being posted, we had a look outside and I see a line and I see a line stretching around the corner. So I go around the corner and it's going all the way down to the block, to the end of the block. I was like, what the hell is happening?

• 48:02Speaker 01

  So I go count the people myself and I count 150 people before we open the doors.

• 48:08Guy Raz?

  In line before you open the door to get one of these cronuts?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  And I was like, what the hell is this? Like, what's going on here? And then it was just, it was just ridiculous. The line got longer and longer every single day.

• 48:23Guy Raz?

  I mean, if you were, I read that the first day you only had 35 for sale.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 48:27Guy Raz?

  The second 50. And presumably you have to make more. Once you have 150, 200, 300 people in line, I mean, those people were not going to get a cronut.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  No, for sure.

• 48:39Guy Raz?

  Right? Like, I mean, only 50 people were going to get one.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe. And we had no rules. Then in the beginning, people were buying a dozen, they were buying two dozen. And then we're like, left with like nothing. And people were cursing at us. They were like, you know, angry and I get it, you know? You wait in line like you, you don't know if you're going to get it or not. And very early on, I decided to like actually take care of the line. Going outside, letting people know how many we have, how many we have left, and making sure that everyone is aware of it. So if they wanted to wait or not, they could. But it was just insane because we couldn't make enough.

• 49:14Guy Raz?

  I mean, I remember this was covered on like national news in 2013. You had like cameras outside, camera crews outside the bakery.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Many, many days where I had like reporters reporting live right in front of the bakery and I had to tell them.

• 49:28Guy Raz?

  Live from the cronut bakery.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  This is madness. People were coming, fighting in line. I had to hire a security to manage the line. So what happens, the people were coming at two o'clock in the morning because they wanted to be first in line.

• 49:40Guy Raz?

  They were getting there at two in the morning and just camping out?

• 49:44Speaker 01

  At two o'clock in the morning. There were, people were coming to try to like sell stuff to the line. People were like reselling pastries on the street. Like, I was overwhelmed. I didn't know how to handle this. I was like, I can't, I can't be outside and police everyone and we need someone to help.

• 49:59Guy Raz?

  People were selling these on Craigslist for like a hundred, two hundred dollars a cronut, more than that. I mean.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  I know someone that bought like two cronuts and they pay like two thousand dollars each. That's ridiculous.

• 50:12Guy Raz?

  It's totally, the other thing I read, which I think is amazing is you did not allow your friends and family to cut the line and get a cronut.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:21Guy Raz?

  That you actually.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 50:23Guy Raz?

  You actually were like, if you, I'm sorry, if you want to try, get in line. Like your friends, your friends who were like, dude.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Yes, I, I, I lost, I lost a few friends in the process, but I wanted to be true to myself, you know? I was out of respect of people coming as early as two o'clock in the morning. If you want to try, you have to go in line. And the funniest part, I remember this once, like this guy, it was a long line. I was at the door actually trying to help the team. This guy came from Los Angeles and told me he was this famous producer of movies. And like, oh, he knows this movie and this movie. I was like, yeah, I love these movies. It's like, I made them. I was like, good sir. Like, thank you very much. But the line is still right here. And he was a little bitter about it, but you know, I was like, I can't like, we have to be like respectful of everyone when you're in line. It doesn't matter.

• 51:13Guy Raz?

  I love that.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter who you are. My, my family came at the time. It was like a coincidence. And I was supposed to spend some time with them. Of course I spent no time with them. They want to try, I'll say, okay, go in line. And they're like, you're joking, right? Like, I'm dead serious. Please go in line if you want to try. They didn't try it, but.

• 51:34Guy Raz?

  So this went on for months and months and months. It's like, like.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  This went on for years. Like the, the staff was stressed out, the customers were stressed out. All I felt like is like, it's a nightmare.

• 51:51Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, as if the cronut craze were not enough, Dominique comes up with yet another viral dessert, the cookie shot. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  The great episode so far was Joe Clark and Kodiak cakes, mostly because I like the product, but two, hearing how he stuck with it for so many years. And then when he made it big, he still gave his brother half the company back. You can tell that he is a very kind person and it's wonderful to hear people that are kind and have a huge heart make it. And he certainly has made it.

• 52:39Guy Raz?

  If you want to share your favorite episode of How I Built This, record a short voice memo on your phone telling us your name, where you're from, what your favorite episode is and why. A lot like the voice memo you just heard. And email it to us at h i b t at i d dot wondery dot com and we'll share your favorites right here in the ad breaks in future episodes. And thanks so much. We love you guys. You're the best. And now back to the show.

• 53:20Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2013 and Dominique and his team are learning to cope with the soaring success of the cronut and the nonstop feeding frenzy outside their bakery. I mean, with just that size of kitchen, I mean, was there a point where you just said, you know what, we better just only make cronuts for the next several months and that's it?

• 53:46Speaker 01

  To answer your question, no. I was told myself very early on, I don't want my creation to kill my creativity. And I refused to turn into a cronut shop and to do the only thing. A lot of people came, talked to me about like supply and demand and like how I should like, you know, capitalize on the idea and like open a hundred cronut shop. And I said, no. I say, I'm a chef. I believe in the craft. Maybe sure, call me like stupid or call me like innocent, but I love what I do. I cannot, you know, I was the people, my dad worked in the factory. I don't want to own a factory making the same thing every day. Like it was

• 54:27Speaker 01

  not, it was not a good thing, you know, until someone, you know, reached out to me on Twitter and they were comparing the cronut line to the line that people go to wait for food in New York City for like the food bank.

• 54:44Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  And this is when, you know, it's when I was like, hey, wait a second. Like you're right. Maybe you can, we can do something with this and turn into something good. So I decided very early on to be involved with a lot of charities to fight against hunger because this is something I can kind of like suffer from growing up and to help out. So the first, first auction we did, we went to a charity event and we sold 12 cronuts for $100,000.

• 55:13Guy Raz?

  A dozen cronuts for $100,000.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  It is, it is crazy. It sounds crazy. It's a blessing. It's beautiful. And you know, to be a part of this, you feel like... Okay, I have a bigger mission here. I have like, there's something more I can do. And we've done it many times again. And the price ran very high and people were willing to to bid like just to try the cronut.

• 55:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right, so you, you know, part of the frenzy of this time period, lots of people coming in saying you're doing it wrong. You got to go all cronuts. You're being overwhelmed and you got to bake them and you've got angry customers and demand. There does come, a pressing issue comes to your attention, which is if you don't, if you don't trademark this word cronut, you will have created this thing and you will not control it. You will not be able to use that word that you yourself started using. I guess somebody, one of your customers, a lawyer, approached you about this, right?

• 56:11Speaker 01

  So that's right. So I was actually a friend of ours who was a lawyer. And she saw this very early on, I think it was the day like four or five. She came to the bakery. She's like, hey, Dominique should like trademark this thing, the cronut. So she registered the trademark cronut for me. And three or four days later, there were like 24, 25 application for the same, from the same mark.

• 56:35Guy Raz?

  Wow. This is a, this is a, yeah, there are a lot of scammers who do this. They'll, they'll basically trademark something that is popular, that is invented by somebody else.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:44Guy Raz?

  And, and there were, you know, bakeries who started to use the word cronut or they would spell it with a K, cronut. And, and you guys did go after them. I mean, again, some people might say, oh, why is, you know, this successful Dominique Ansel going after these little guys? But you also, first of all, were not a ma, I mean, you were a small business.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  We're small too.

• 57:04Guy Raz?

  But the second thing is that you felt like there'd be brand confusion, that people would be thinking, wait, this cronut I've been hearing about in New York, I'm eating it right now. It's not that great, but they might not know that it's, like, they might associate or think it's the same.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's, that's, that's, that's part of it as well, brand confusion. You know, people try to make all the product out of it. People try to like resell it, make money out of it. Our intention was not to be malicious or like to stop everyone from like being creative. Our intention was to protect our mark. And yeah, once you register a mark, you have no choice. If you don't protect it, you just essentially give up on it and you let everyone use it.

• 57:43Guy Raz?

  That by 2013, so by the end of that year that you introduced a cronut, it was named again, it was named one of the 25 best inventions of the year by Time Magazine. And it was an accident, right? I mean, not an accident, but it wasn't like you were, from the story you tell, it's not like, hey, I'm going to come up with an invention that's going to revolutionize pastry, that everyone's going to talk about. Like, that really wasn't how you were thinking about this initially.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not. I think it's a genuine, like innocent, like simple, like, you know, heartfelt like story. And even if you give me all the money of the world tomorrow, you cannot plan for this. You cannot expect the same, you know, kind of like frenzy. You cannot like, you know, inception people into liking the idea or not. They like it or not for X, Y, Z. And again, for a million reasons, it went viral.

• 58:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  You cannot like, give me all the money of the world and expect me to recreate something that goes viral. I have some great ideas for sure. What goes viral or not, at the end of the day, it's not me who decides, it's people.

• 58:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because I mean, a couple of years later, you would introduce the cookie shot, which is basically a cookie where you could fill it up with cream or milk and have a shot and eat it. And that's very popular, but it didn't have the same virality as the cronut.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Oh, it went viral, but I think it was like overwhelmed by the news of the cronut. So yes, you're right, it's a chocolate chip cookie, shape as a shot glass.

• 59:12Guy Raz?

  It's a shot glass.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  It's lined with chocolate.

• 59:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yes, shot glass. And we serve it warm, a warm cookie, and we pour vanilla infused milk inside the cookie. So you drink out of the cookie and then you eat the cookie.

• 59:25Guy Raz?

  So delicious.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  So it's a fascinating idea, you know, like it's, it, we, uh, we created for, in partnership with a PR company that was launching something in South by Southwest.

• 59:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  And we brought there, we're like, oh, it's a cool idea. Let's, let's do it for, you know, for this, this event. And we were like, oh, we're just going to do it for this event and that's it. It went viral right here and there. We had 750 people lining out outside. I was like, this is, this is insane. Not even the cornut that we created, something else that we're bringing.

• 1:00:00Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  And the demand was so insane that we had to put it on the menu when we came back. So we're only, we were only at the time serving the cookie shot after 3pm.

• 1:00:12Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  The reason why is because our line was so long in the morning that we couldn't have like double line and, and like all these lines of people coming for our pastry. So we decided to do it after, like after school snack, we decided to do it after 3pm.

• 1:00:28Guy Raz?

  Dominique, I want to go back to this idea of like, I understand you did not want to be a cornut factory. I to, and I think it speaks to your integrity and it's a very, by the way, it's a very French and European notion of just like, look, I want to make the best product. I don't care about maximizing profits, right? But now you are in America, right? And you are an American entrepreneur and not to say that Americans are greedy, but.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  I became American a few years ago, very part of it.

• 1:00:55Guy Raz?

  Right. But, but I mean, just from a sustainability standpoint, I mean, I imagine there, there were people saying to you, you have to, this is the golden ticket, Dominique. Like you, you struggled, you had no money, you grinded away to build this, this business. And now you have an opportunity to make tens of millions of dollars on this product. You need to strike while the iron is hot. And your answer was still, no?

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  I think it's a different approach. I think you have to think of it like, can, can I open a hundred shops tomorrow?

• 1:01:35Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  And find the money for it? Easily.

• 1:01:38Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Easily. Is this what I want to do today? Not necessarily. And I don't want to run a factory, you know, pricing like a million cornut every day and ship it frozen around the world. It's, I don't, I don't believe in that.

• 1:01:53Guy Raz?

  And I think I get it because they, they don't, right, it wouldn't, it wouldn't be the same experience to the customer either. You did, I mean, you did start to, with the success of the bakery, it made sense for you to open a larger facility and, and, and then starting around 2015, you, you began to.

• 1:02:16Guy Raz?

  You decided that you will try to bring the Dominique Ansel Bakery to other locations. You opened a location in Japan, in Tokyo.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:02:26Guy Raz?

  In 2015. And tell me the thinking behind it. Given how resistant you were to over-expand or to expand.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Well, it's a different kind of expansion, right? I think the idea was to bring our New York bakery and elevate it and bring it to Japan.

• 1:02:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  It's like I was in love with the idea. I was like, I thought, you know, it'd be like a great thing. And it was, it was, this place was so busy. We were open with another like 750 people in line.

• 1:02:55Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  There was like five to six hour wait line just to get into the bakery, out opening. It was just insane.

• 1:03:03Guy Raz?

  And this was a big shop. You have 100 employees there. I mean, this was, this begins a period where like Tokyo, 100 employees. Then you open London, a bakery there. And then, and then you would go on to, you go on to Los Angeles. And then you expanded the location, a location in New York. I mean, all of a sudden, you're, you're building an empire, whether you want to or not.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:30Guy Raz?

  How, how did you manage that in your head? I mean, you had the teams in New York that you could see physically, but then you had all these. Now you've got employees all around the world. Did, was that exciting to you? Or did that become overwhelming? Did that feel overwhelming?

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  I felt stressed out for sure. I never felt too overwhelmed. I think it's, you know, every, every business has had like local partners.

• 1:03:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  You know, I can't do it by myself. I have, I have an amazing team behind me and the best person, you know, it's my wife today. The one that believed in me from the beginning.

• 1:04:04Guy Raz?

  She runs the business with you.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  She runs the business. She runs everything I cannot run. So she takes care, you know, of the, all the business side, the legal side, the front of the house side. And every, every other aspect that I, I don't.

• 1:04:18Guy Raz?

  She's the brains, she's the brains behind the operation. You're the muscle, she's the brains.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's the brain and the heart. And I'm, I'm the most fortunate man in the world, you know, to have someone like this to support me.

• 1:04:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah. As you started to expand, right? So London and then Los Angeles and then a full-service restaurant in Los Angeles, too. And then a bakery in Hong Kong. First of all, how did you control quality? I mean, how could you make sure that people were going into the London shop or the LA shop or the Hong Kong shop or even the Tokyo shop and they're walking out and saying, oh, the hype is right?

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  We have high, very high standard in terms of quality of production. And we have a lot of system in place to make sure we control the quality. And the team will go through a testing every single day. So they'll pick one pastry, one drink and one other item. So they will test among themselves and send a report on quality. So I can see the photo. I can, you know, just looking at a cross-section of a croissant, I can tell you if it was baked properly, if it was proofed properly. If there's an issue with the baking, if there's an issue with the fermentation, I can pinpoint this by just looking at photo because, you know, I've been doing this my whole life. And this like system of check and balances like help us control quality at the highest level possible.

• 1:05:41Guy Raz?

  All right, let's talk about COVID because COVID is the beginning of, I think, a sort of a retrenchment, right? Coming COVID, a reset.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  It's a reset. I call it the big reset for everyone.

• 1:05:56Guy Raz?

  Because obviously, these restaurants were massively affected by the closures. And in the first, I think the first closures, you decided to close the restaurant and bakery in LA. And over the next two years, you would begin to really close down London and then Tokyo. And really just kind of make things a bit smaller, eventually Hong Kong. I wonder whether. You know, there's multiple ways, right, to think about a business. And there was a point where you had six, seven locations around the world. And clearly, if COVID didn't happen,

• 1:06:40Guy Raz?

  you might have 15 now, right? And that might be a good thing. But also with that comes a different level of stress and a different kind of business. And it doesn't always mean it's a healthy business. Like, I think now, right now, today, you are a profitable business, right?

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're very good financially. Like, we're profitable business. Like, we're healthy, you know? It's a, we still have growth, so which is, which is good.

• 1:07:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  It's true, having like, you know, many, many different locations comes like more stress, more worry, more like, you know, diluting your time and you focus on things. Sure, but I think like if every good business is, the most important is to surround yourself and build yourself a team. You can't do it alone, no matter what, from day one, you know? I couldn't do it alone. I thought I could do it alone, I would have never make it, you know, without, without my partner, without my wife.

• 1:07:38Guy Raz?

  Today, you've got two locations in New York, one in Las Vegas.

• 1:07:44Guy Raz?

  And, and it's a, obviously, you've got a mail order business. When you think about where you are and where you started, working class family, you know, not a family that, not a life where you were going to imagine being in New York, being a famous pastry chef. You built this amazing brand. And I wonder how much of where you are today, you attribute to just the hard work you put in, which was really hard, three in the morning until 11 at night for years. And how much of what happened, do you think, happened because you got lucky? You just, it was luck and chance and fate?

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I think luck is part of it, for sure. It's not the main thing. Um, I think you have to try, you have to dare. Like, someone asked me once, would you have done this if you were in France? I said, I told them, probably not.

• 1:08:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  New York is a very open-minded city that would like to explore. So you give them good food at fair price and you respect your customers. Like, they, they will, they will come back to you. They will let you try, they will give you a chance. I don't think I would have done this in France. Yeah, I was lucky, I was lucky, I thought of the idea, I was lucky, I tried, I was lucky, I worked hard for it. I was lucky, I met my wife, I was lucky for a lot of things, sure, you can, you can say that. I also worked really hard for it and luck, luck is a part of it, yes. But I think that if you're a good person in life, you attract good people on you and good things happen to you.

• 1:09:15Guy Raz?

  That's Dominique Ansel, founder of Dominique Ansel Bakery. By the way, Dominique is still tinkering with new ideas in his bakery every day, including one that has kind of a Willy Wonka feel.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  I want people to eat desserts like, with like zero gravity.

• 1:09:31Guy Raz?

  You want people to eat desserts in zero gravity? Or you want people to feel like they are in zero gravity when they eat desserts?

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, I want them to, to be in zero gravity eating desserts.

• 1:09:41Guy Raz?

  Oh, in space somehow, or like, like on a-

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Maybe not in space.

• 1:09:44Guy Raz?

  But on an airplane that just dives and you go into zero gravity? Or cookie shots? But the, the milk from the cookie shot's gonna be coming out of the cookie. It's in zero gravity.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  Or don't, you see, like, you have to think differently. It will be, by then, by the time you build that zero-gravity chamber, I will have been, I will have created like a lot of ideas of desserts that you can think of eating it.

• 1:10:06Guy Raz?

  Like a marshmallow-y thing that comes out and you can just like eat it in zero gravity as it floats out?

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  I, I got you, I got you excited with the idea.

• 1:10:15Guy Raz?

  I'm, I'm, I'm in.

• 1:10:18Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free. And don't forget to sign up for my free newsletter at guyraz.com. It's full of insights and ideas from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs. This episode was produced by Carla Esteves with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Katherine Seifer and audio engineering by Robert Rodriguez and Kwesi Lee. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Alex Chung, John Isabella, Elaine Coats, Kerry Thompson, and Chris Messini. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This.