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Louis Le Duff
A real trade
based on dough :
bread dough, brioche dough,
pastry dough,
pizza dough...
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Page 3 of 6
A new formula which combines the strengths of the restaurant, bakery/pastry-shop and caterer, serving handcrafted food made to traditional recipes, those of his grandmother on the farm. From pitchfork to table fork – a winning combination!
The snag was that when he was looking for a site for Brioche Dorée, he realised that the investment required represented about eleven years of his salary as a university lecturer. Without a penny to his name, he fell back on a sector which needed no investment, just grey cells and hard work, and in 1974 set up Restaurel in Brest, a tenant-management collective catering company. Canteens in companies, schools, hospitals, etc. were the exclusive preserve of the big players Borel (since bought out by Accor) and Sodexho, but he found his niche – more upmarket head office restaurants. His initiative soon appealed to important clients in Brittany: Banque de Bretagne, Crédit Agricole, Crédit Mutuel, Assurances AGF, etc. If you have no money, you have to have ideas.
And there he had a fantastic idea because what he did was to create his own “business bank”. The logic was plain: he sold luncheon vouchers 10 to 15 days in advance and negotiated payment of his suppliers’ invoices at 90 days. |
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In the time it took to say it, he was at the head of a cash-flow worth about two months of his sales. Fifteen months later, in late 1976, he was ready for the great venture. He sold his Renault 4L for the princely sum of 10000 francs, about €1500, and, with the cash earned by Restaurel, had enough money to open his first Brioche Dorée. The people of Brest remember it well. The shop on the corner of Rue Jean Jaurès was a sign of modernity where appetising smells of pastries filled the air at all times of the day, every day.
Nantes followed in 1977, then Rennes in 1978, Lille in 1979, opened by one of his first colleagues from Brest, followed in 1980 by Nancy, Toulon and Lyon. Right from the start, his strength came from the quality of the people he surrounded himself with: Bretons opening in the North, Lille people moving to Lorraine, Lorraine people moving to Lyon and the south-east…
In 1980, he finally decided to give up teaching, though not before his university colleagues had started to call him the P and MD – “President and Managing Director”. |
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