When the founder of Laurent Bakery, Laurent Boillon was 16 years old, he decided to try his hand at being a pastry chef. He liked it, stuck at it, and over time his skills grew and advanced. Around 16 months later he decided to try his hand at baking bread, but his dad attempted to warn him off.
“He told me that you have to start a batch of loaves at 10 pm and then get back to work at 7 am,” Boillon recalls. That might have worked with most 17-year-olds, but it did not work with Boillon. “I am very happy about becoming a baker. I am passionate about baking, and I am excited about what I do when I get up each morning.”
He has stayed excited for more than 40 years, and many miles, since.
“That was the beginning,” Boillon says. “I started travelling Europe, went to the Caribbean, the States, and came back to Europe, then went to Scotland. From Scotland, I decided to move to Australia, and Australia became my final destination. I met my wife in Australia, stopped travelling and began my own business in 1993 with one employee. Today it employs 600 people.”
Boillon bought a small factory, studied the worldwide market, and came to realise it was nominated by a single product – the one that every other product since has compared to; sliced bread, wrapped in plastic.
“Unless a supermarket decided to bring its own small bakery into the shop, that was the only offering any manufacturers were bringing to market,” Boillon remembers. “I saw we needed to be different.”
In 2006, Boillon invested time and effort into designing new ways to offer bread. They provided fully baked bread for hotels and restaurants that could be put back in the oven after it was bought to make it fluffy and crusty and pleasant to eat. It formed the foundation of an artisan range of bread that Boillon launched in 2007, presenting it to Australia’s major hotels, quickly expanding to also serve McDonald’s and Hungry Jacks – the Australian arm of Burger King.
“We did pretty well, but I wasn’t completely satisfied,” Boillon tells us. “I wanted the project to be much better. I went to factories in Europe to look at equipment for a new vision of how to make bread. I found the best supplier in Holland and Germany, and in 2012 I developed one of our first lines for supermarkets.”
A New Offering
Where it used to be that if you walked into the bread aisle of any supermarket in the world you would only find shelf upon shelf of sliced bread, Laurent Bakery introduced a new kind of bread product, and the market shifted.
“It was not just about the quality,” Boillon says. “The only way to keep up is to always be ahead of our competitors. So, I went to the next level, and in 2014 I created a new product.”
This product was a load prepared for 30 hours, in loads of five tons at a time. Laurent signed a contract with one of Australia’s biggest supermarkets to invest in Laurent’s new factory to bake this product. Already Boillon is looking for the next step, planning a new factor that will put 40 hours of preparation into each loaf.
“We are creating a bread with wheat, flour and salt, and no additives,” Boillon says. “You slice it at home, put it in the toaster it comes out super fresh.”
With two manufacturing sites in Australia and New Zealand, and a staff of 600 people, Laurent Bakery is able to sell fresh bread to Australia, New Zealand, England, China, Singapore, and Korea.
Constantly Rising
Across all those markets, Laurent Bakery’s reputation is built on hard work, innovation, dedication, and consistency, but also Boillon’s own drive to constantly improve.
“When you think you have made it, when you think you are there, that is when you start again,” Boillon says. “You are never there. You must always be looking for a way to make it better, especially when you are working with an ingredient like wheat. You must keep changing, keep cooking.”
For Boillon this ongoing quest for improvement comes naturally because he has always had a lifelong love of technology and innovation. From the moment he began planning his factory, he wanted a facility that was on the cutting edge. The industrial line he has built is open seven days a week, all year round, with 150 people on every line at all times.
“The industrial line staff don’t need any specific knowledge, they just need to be familiar with the software and make sure the line is running clean, with a maintenance team to support it,” Boillon says.
However, for Boillon, sharing that passion with the latest generation of workers has been a challenge.
“People want to love what they do, which I always have,” Boillon says. “Since Covid, a lot of young people do not know what they want. They are working for the money; they change jobs all the time. There is a real shortage of people loving what they are doing.”
New Markets
Laurent Bakery will continue expanding. As well as Australia and New Zealand, Laurent is looking to export to England, where Boillon observes there is demand for the kind of quality Laurent offers.
While the UK has a readymade market for Laurent Bakery’s products, and the same is true of North America which is the biggest market for bread in the world, so Laurent Bakery is looking at entering that market too.
Other markets, however, can be a bit more challenging.
“If you go to China, bread as we understand it doesn’t exist,” Boillon tells us. “The only way people know about it is through world travel. When they come home, they expect to see it in shops, but they do not know what to do with the product, or how to eat it, because you do not typically have it on the table in China. So, we show them how to make a sandwich or a slice of toast. The main thing to bear in mind is that in the Chinese market, people do not often have a kitchen in the way you would understand it in Europe or Australia. It has a hot plate and a pan, and you learn to cook with that. So, we take a pan and show them how to make a toastie, demonstrating all the ingredients it works with.”
