Give Us This Day Our Global Bread

Poilâne is a stickler for many of those details, but he's surprisingly lax about others. The flour is a combination of wheat mixes from four different mills, and the sea salt absolutely must come from Brittany. The water, however, comes from the tap at the three storefront shops and from a well at the larger bakery. The bakers shape the loaves loosely by hand, paying no mind to the odd bumps and imperfections that emerge. The wood-fired clay-and-brick ovens, however, must be perfect -- and Poilâne has spent years designing the specifications. "They take one month to build, one month to dry, and one month to heat to 240 degrees Celsius," he explains. "If you try to warm them up more quickly, the clay cracks: Pop!"

As the business has grown, Poilâne has begrudgingly added croissants, tarts, a brioche, and a few other breads to his repertoire. While all are high-quality products, the old-fashioned, oversized, wood-fired country loaf still far outsells all of the other products combined. "If you start to make too many things, that's extension," he says. "My motto is, Do things with intention, not with extension."

Loaves and Fedexes

When it comes to bread, Poilâne is set in his ways. When it comes to distribution, however, he has a more innovative operation than any other baker on Earth -- which is to say, he is one of the few bakers on Earth to take his bread global.

Poilâne's desire to ship his bread stemmed initially from his lack of interest in owning more stores. Last June, Poilâne finally opened a bakery in London -- but there probably won't be too many more such openings soon. "I can get on the train and be in London in three hours," he says, explaining why he decided to open there. "But I'm not eager to have a business card that says 'Paris, London, New York' on it. We thought about opening in Japan, but we couldn't have a wood fire there. It's important in business to be able to say no when you feel like saying yes would mean losing your soul."

Instead of building little bakeries all over the globe, Poilâne built one big one on the outskirts of Paris. When it first opened 18 years ago, it was designed to fill orders from other shops and restaurants in Paris. "We wanted to take an ancient product and reproduce it on an industrial, multiplied level," explains Ibu Poilâne, 52, Lionel's wife, an artist and designer who helped him design the building.

To the Poilânes, the round structure is anything but a factory -- and one visit makes the difference clear. Instead of building a production line, the Poilânes simply put 24 identical ovens -- duplicates of the 100-ton ones in the basement of the storefront bakeries -- in a circle. In the middle is an atrium with enormous piles of wood to heat the ovens. Workers use a ceiling-mounted remote-controlled crane to pick it up and deposit it in chutes that lead to the ovens.

Poilâne's global bread business developed as a natural response to customer demand: Stores and individuals started calling from abroad to ask Poilâne to ship them bread, so he started to take advantage of the large FedEx hub at nearby Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport. FedEx allows Poilâne's bread to leave the bakery in the early morning and be on dinner tables in the United States the next night. All it takes is a quick warm-up in the oven to make the bread taste as good as it does in Paris. And the size of the basic Poilâne loaf -- about 4 pounds -- helps the bread travel well and last longer. Global bread sales are growing: Last year, exports were up 30%. Poilâne has also long sold his loaves over the Internet.

Poilâne's bread has won him famous fans over the years: Frank Sinatra and Lauren Bacall used to enjoy a loaf from time to time, and Robert De Niro is a customer. The most devoted patron, however, is a gentleman in New York who wants to remain anonymous. In 1997, he agreed to pay Poilâne $100,000, asking that his children and grandchildren receive a loaf a week for the rest of their lives. "Can you imagine?" Poilâne says, with obvious pride. "In 50 years, he'll be dead, but his grandchildren will be feeding our bread to their children and explaining how they are eating the bread of their great-grandfather!"

As the business has gone global, Poilâne has become an ambassador of sorts. This suits him fine, since 10 or 12 years stoking the subterranean ovens was plenty for him. "When I first started as an apprentice, I was a very bitter boy stuck down in the basement with the bread," he says. "I thought I was outside of the world." Now people from all over the world seek him out. He keeps his office in a lofty space on the top floor of the building that houses the original bakery and store, so he can come down and meet customers when they visit. "The pleasure of life is in meeting people, and the shop is open to the street, so it's a great social space," he says.