BO&MIE, the bakery and the ideas

In April 2018, BO&MIE is five months old. The first outlet to take an interest is neither an interiors magazine nor an address guide, but the trade press.

Back to school

Les Nouvelles de la Boulangerie recount a path still unusual in the sector: after a first career as an entrepreneur, Jean-François Bandet goes back to school in his forties for a CAP boulanger, the French baker’s vocational diploma.

The aim is not to become an accomplished artisan in a few months — nobody does — but to understand the trade before presuming to change anything about it. It is a nuance that explains much of what followed.

An out-of-format bakery

The project that comes out of it looks nothing like the neighbourhood bakery: a large floor area, a central location, attention paid to service and to what the customer experiences on site — and, at the centre of it all, product quality as the condition for everything else.

The profession, in November

The year closes with the Convention internationale de la boulangerie moderne (the international convention of modern bakery), in November 2018, where BO&MIE is invited to present its model. Seven months separate the two moments: in the first, the house explains what it would like to do; in the second, the profession asks it how it went about it.

Read again today, this interview matters for what it pins down: the initial intentions, before the successive openings and the international expansion. The rest is told in our story.