Sirha Food spends twenty-four hours at BO&MIE

Sirha Food devotes a feature to twenty-four hours at BO&MIE, hour by hour. The opening observation fits in one sentence: at five in the morning, when Paris wakes up, nobody here has been to bed. The teams work in three eight-hour shifts, without a break.

The day starts at midnight

At Turbigo, Maxime, head of pastry, starts his shift at midnight. With four people under his supervision, he oversees the lemon tarts, the chocolate éclairs and the finishing touches that will leave in the early hours for the other shops. Last link in the chain, he is the one who decides that a piece is fit to sell.

On the floor above, Nacim lights his oven at around three. Old-style loaves, spelt loaves, small savoury rolls; then he shapes the baguettes, which go into the oven at seven to come out hot for opening time. Five hundred baguettes a day, baked in four or five batches — a rhythm that the rise in energy costs, between three and four per cent of turnover, has not shifted.

At half past two, on rue de Rivoli, the savoury team assembles close to five hundred bagels and eight hundred sandwiches for all the Paris addresses. Salads first, then bagels, baguette sandwiches to finish; meanwhile the day team prepares the mise en place for the following night.

One address, one speciality

The feature catches the house before the Clichy Lab opened: production is still spread across the shops, each holding one family of products. Savoury at Rivoli, pastry at Turbigo, travel cakes at Saint-Martin, viennoiserie at Saint-Michel. Four vans redistribute at daybreak. That is exactly the set-up the Lab came to replace.

150

people, half of them in production

500

baguettes a day

3×8

teams taking over from one another

What the window doesn’t show

Sirha Food picks out the figure that holds everything else together: one hundred and fifty employees, nearly half of them in production. Coordination runs through a centralised information system and one conversation thread per team — in a machine that never stops, the flow of information is worth as much as the skill of the hands.

The feature also notes what never goes through the window: around five per cent of production leaves each morning for professional customers. The rest follows the two rushes of the day, opening and lunch, with a lull in between and the pastries taking over in the afternoon. How all of this is made is detailed in our know-how.