French bakery treats at home? Vancouver company makes it a reality

Vancouver business helps you successfully bake authentic French bakery treats like baguettes and croissants at home. Read more.

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While I can cobble together a nice lunch or a decent dinner, I’ll be the first to admit that baking is not my forte.

Nevertheless, an oven-fresh baguette or a perfectly golden pain au chocolat rank high up on my list of favourite foods. That’s why when an email landed in my inbox from the Vancouver-born startup Atome Bakery promising perfect French pastries and sourdough bread at home, my interest was piqued.

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Founded in 2022 with the aim of improving the B.C. bread scene, Alice Couderc and Lucas Navilloz built the business from a shared frustration for what they felt was sub-par local bread offerings.

Moving to Vancouver in 2018 from France — where Navilloz jokes there are “as many bakeries as there are Tim Hortons in Canada” — the duo discovered a lack of artisanal bread outposts near their new home.

“We were used to having fresh baguettes and pastries readily available from local bakeries, but in Vancouver, we didn’t live close to an artisan bakery,” Navilloz says. “And we found it difficult to find bread that met our standards in the supermarkets.”

Atome Bakery co-founders Lucas Navilloz and Alice Couderc.
Atome Bakery co-founders Lucas Navilloz and Alice Couderc. Atome Bakery

As a solution, they started making their own sourdough bread. Going through the lengthy process of trial and error creating sourdough starters and experimenting with freezing dough for faster use, they began to bake up the idea of creating a bread business of their own.

“Friends and family quickly took notice of the quality and convenience of our creations and started to ask to purchase the dough from us,” Navilloz says. “This led us to explore the idea of making our bread available to a wider audience. After numerous experiments to perfect the process, we developed a unique baking pan and a model of delivering ready-to-bake, 100 per cent sourdough bread and pastries directly to customers’ doors.”

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Hiring French-trained bakers to help streamline the production and ensure consistency with their results, the Atome team has since expanded beyond its core concept of offering ready-to-bake sourdough breads to include 15 products ranging from baguettes to French-inspired pastries such as waffles and croissants.

Using flour sourced locally in B.C., Couderc says the products are all made, frozen and packaged in the brand’s production lab located in Mount Pleasant where five out of six Atome employees speak French as their first language, Couderc proudly points outs.

“Unlike typical frozen options, our breads and pastries are pre-proofed, not pre-baked, which means they retain their freshness and quality when baked at home,” says Couderc, who has had a lifelong interest in baking and competed as a student in a competition at the Institut Paul Bocuse in France. “The Atome Baking pan that we developed to the right thickness, material and size to recreate the conditions of a baker’s oven, customers can enjoy freshly baked, bakery-quality bread and pastries in just 30 minutes, straight from their freezer, in any oven.”

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Atome Bakery offers ready-to-bake 100% sourdough bread and French-inspired pastries.
Atome Bakery offers ready-to-bake 100 per cent sourdough bread and French-inspired pastries. Atome Bakery

The products are free of industrial yeast and sugars, according to Navilloz, and are currently available via a subscription box model with delivery to B.C., Alberta and Washington State. Boxes start at $136 and are available at their website atomebakery.com and through SPUD.ca.

While the founders, who recently got engaged, first thought their customer base would consist of mostly European expats “looking to find the taste of the bakeries they left behind when they moved to Canada, like us,” Couderc says they’ve been pleased to discover their baked goods have found fans within a range of Canadians families.

“They might not have a good bakery close to them, and they are busy running around to their kids’ appointments and juggling their work lives,” Couderc explains of the draw. “Our ready-to-bake, pre-proofed products offer the luxury of freshly baked goods with minimal effort, fitting seamlessly into their hectic lifestyles.”

In addition to building its customer base — “referrals and word-of-mouth have played such a major role in our growth,” Navilloz admits — the Atome Bakery has also garnered some early accolades. The startup was recently named this year’s Company of the Year by the Vancouver Francophone Chamber of Commerce.

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As for a review, while I can’t claim to have tried the full range of Atome Bakery products, I can give a shout out to the delicious croissant bites. Popped into a preheated oven on a piece of parchment paper, a quick 20 minutes later I was enjoying a bite-sized chocolate croissant that was delightfully crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside.

“All without leaving my home.

Aharris@postmedia.com

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Source: vancouversun.com

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