French kiss

Wedome savors its success as a culinary bridge between China and France as the bakery chain gears up for national expansion, the founder tells Mike Peters.

Twenty-plus years after launching Wedome, the French bakery that has become ubiquitous in Beijing, it seems that the fun for founder Huang Li is just beginning.

With about 350 stores, 300 of them in the capital, the company is poised for a major expansion. Right now, Shanghai looms as the shining city on a hill.

"In our Beijing stores," says the company's managing director, "we sell about 50 fresh baguettes every day. In Shanghai stores, we sell 300."

Long an international city, Shanghai is also a far more competitive market for Western food, but that doesn't faze Huang.

"The competition is big, but the market is bigger," he says with a grin.

"With the base and infrastructure we have in Beijing," he adds, "we are ready to do things on a big scale."

Many would say the company already does just that, with a new store opening every week and an average of 100,000 customers flowing through the entire chain daily. Wedome reported sales of 1.14 billion yuan ($168 million) in 2016.

Upgraded stores with casual seating offer customers a chance to rest and have a quick bite, but Huang acknowledges that even these stores don't have quite the feel of the French cafes he loves when he visits Paris. "There it is a big pleasure to sit outdoors and linger over coffee and pastries," he says. "In Beijing, it's much harder to do that."

In every other way, however, Wedome has proved adept at bringing the French bakery culture to China.

Wedome's base and infrastructure includes a prestigious pool of suppliers who provide cream, fruit jam and yeast from France, cranberries from the United States, cheese from Australia, yellow peaches from South Africa and eggs from China. The imported ingredients give Wedome's products a stamp of both quality and authenticity, Huang says.

"We were the first company to introduce real French-style bread - in China," he says. The first store, which opened at Fuchengmen in Beijing in 1996, featured an open kitchen, and the big windows allowed customers to see how baguettes and other breads and Western-style pastries are made.

"The experience of the bread is very important," Huang says. "We want our customers to see - and smell - the entire process. That makes them more likely to buy, and more satisfied when they do."

Wedome's patina of authenticity has earned national prizes for its baguettes, "gold brick" bread (with cheese filling), French-style mooncakes (with chocolate-cheese filling), natural cream cakes and other goodies.

But such recognition hasn't come only from China.

Huang was awarded the Knight of the Order of Agricultural Merit (France) by French Ambassador Maurice Gourdault-Montagne on June 2. In March, Gourdault-Montagne named Wedome the promotional ambassador for French bread in acknowledgment of its promotion of French bread in China.

Every year, Huang's team makes a study tour to explore bakery trends in France and to visit Wedome's suppliers, and the brands roll out the red carpet. On recent visits, Wedome received cooperation medals from President, Elle&Vile and Lesaffre, the premium yeast brand that wowed a young Huang when he was an apprentice baker in Guangdong many years ago. He has maintained and profited from those relationships as he's built Wedome: Today, for example, the company is President's third-largest cream client in the world and the largest in China. Last year, Huang was presented with a special honor by the French MOF Association, and Wedome was awarded the international elite bakery in the 2016 World Bread Cup.

Huang says it's not surprising that Chinese embrace French traditions easily.

"Many European countries have industrialized to a point where they become rather alike," he says, "while France clings to a profound sense of its culture. That resonates in China, where there is a 5,000-year-old culture. We pay a lot of attention to civil life here, so we appreciate that in others. "We share a sensibility about food and art with the French," he says, adding that Wedome has organized a French bread festival complete with a fashion show every year since 2013.

The event coincides with new bakery introductions, which this year include the sacristain, which is an almond puff-pastry cookie, and the napoleon, a traditional French favorite made with layered puff pastry and cream.

Much has been said about Chinese taste for sweets, or the lack of it. Huang says Wedome's research team never changes the traditional ingredients when developing a new recipe, but they cut the amounts of sugar and butter a little.

He laughs when asked about the company's French-style mooncakes.

"It's a little bit of magic, really - there are no mooncakes in France," he says. But there's more to it than simply filling a mooncake with French ingredients like chocolate, blackberry and cheese. "The technique is important, too: We make the mooncake in a truly French way, with a crispy cookie shell."

Huang is energized as he describes mooncake-making or his fascination with the French yeast Lesaffre as a bakery apprentice years ago. I ask him if he ever dons an apron himself these days, to train new bakers or test a new pastry recipe.

He quickly shakes his head. He's busy with administrative duties, he says, adding that his role in the company is not in the kitchen.

But he still enjoys sinking his fingers into pastry dough at home.

"I do it to relax," he says, smiling. "Deep in my heart, I am still a guy who loves to make bread."

Contact the writer at michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn

Wedome's new introductions this year include L'allumette de Lyon.