Our quest for constant improvement goes hand in hand with our period’s new demands.
At Chez Paulin, we are increasingly demanding about our society’s actors, our daily life, the corporate world, commerce, skilled trades because each of us is convinced that he or she can play a role, even a tiny one, in the construction of more virtuous models.
The baker’s trade as we have chosen it, with conscience and abnegation, only has meaning if it takes an active part in these issues.
At the heart of this raison d’être, it’s how we make bread that’s the basis of our approach. In fact, being a craftsman means accepting irregularity, making mistakes, experimenting, creating, trying to improve, working ever harder, paying particular attention to each detail.
And to go even further, we question ourselves on everything: our work environment, the bread calendar, our communication, our impact, the choice of our supplies…
In this way, we thank our customers, friends, partners and suppliers for helping us, each and every one of them, to give our best in the business that we love.
Research, Pain Paulin-style, is when the whole team starts to invent.
Each week, we rack our brains to improve our recipes, our leaven, we do research to imagine new products, new procedures, to unearth new sources of ingredients.
The workshop is transformed into an experimentation studio where we give free rein to our inventiveness as baker-creators. Each team member can make the bread that inspires him or her during these indispensable creation times. We then propose it to our customers, like the ephemeral bread of the moment, sold at a single price. It changes regularly according to the team members’ inspiration.
The new breads and sweet treats are also made with the involvement of the suppliers and who allow us to make good products. Behind our creations are a host of exchanges and tests with them. Each time, all our efforts center on taste, pleasure and quality.
We are among the city’s actors who work on a daily basis to improve the impact of what we eat on our health.
On our scale, as craftsmen and a neighborhood business, we can act as leverage.
We have a tacit commitment of loyalty to our customers, who are also men and women of our time, concerned about their health and well-being. “ It’s impossible for me to offer a product loaded with pesticides, oxidizing agents and stabilizers. ” Paulin
For us, taking care of yourself and your health corresponds to a state of mind combined with dietary habits but also a life-style. The whole provides balance. We humbly take part in it. So, if how we make bread arouses curiosity, raises questions, enlightens people on its virtues, both on human beings and their environment, then yes, we’ll be proud to contribute on our scale to cure the ills of our period.
In our bakery, a light shine on our whole team. Everything is open. The bakers’ work can be seen by the customers, in contact with life. We’re happy to show the reality of our work because we do everything on a small, human scale, in our workplace and by ourselves. Being “exposed” in this way invites excellence because the state of the workshop and the gestures made in it become public. “ Seen by everyone, each person has his or her own role, as though we were on stage, it’s gratifying, it reminds us why we practice this trade. ”
Matthieu, baker
This transparency is cardinal for us so that we can offer another view on the baker’s work. We want to show that it’s possible to avoid clichés, that it’s possible to run the bakery with light, with joy, in contact with real life, exchanging with the daily life of the city and passersby. Sometimes customers say hello to us and directly compliment the bakers who are working, poetizing or laughing, depending on the moment.
For Pain Paulin, the bakery is a conversation. An atypical bread, an atypical bakery, an atypical relationship with the other: we propose a singular experience focused on bread.
We follow our own philosophy through a way of living together, which connects the earth, the product, the craftsman, the bread-lover who enters our workshops. We have made this originality a uniting force.
Explaining our approach and our products to new visitors is a chance to create a privileged contact. A whole dialogue is created, which highlights the richness of our business, its actors, its know-how and also our customers’ expectations and desires, their perception of bread, the role that a baker can have confronted with new food challenges.
This proximity is our social cement. From these shared moments we learn, we understand, we create a community that encourages us to go even further.
The culture of pleasure reigns here and we share it to the maximum.
At Pain Paulin, we celebrate the love of everything that’s beautiful, that’s tasty and that does the body and mind good.
And above all, we love to share with all our customers during moments of exchanges and the discovery of our products. Since it’s in the crust that all the aromas are concentrated, our bread is well-baked and we don’t want to slice it. All this is exclusively for pleasure. This pleasure allows each visitor to caress the texture of a slightly charred crust, breaking it as he or she wishes, smelling the fragrance and the freshness of the aromas that it reveals and discovering the irresistibly tender and firm inside of the loaf.
It’s a pleasure of collaboration and the pooling of our know-how in which our collaborators use all their senses, perfect their culinary references and refine their bread culture.
“ Traditional bread is an infinite universe in which you always discover new flavors and sensations. ” Jules, apprentice baker
At Pain Paulin, aesthetics is a signature that carries our messages.
From architecture to music, not forgetting our teams’ uniforms, the choice of a setting is a full-fledged ingredient of our bread. It’s a quest for simplicity, composed of high-quality and natural materials with a contemporary angle.
We combine a creative approach with a whole community of complementary trades and professions, which through their art, provide new aesthetic, auditory, visual and sensorial sensations. This quest for emotion and inspiration, provided by the elegance of authentic, untreated, natural and simple elements relays the experience that we propose in each of our bakeries.
It’s an invitation to discover our bakery’s poetry.
Architecture also echoes our history and the anecdotes we like to share. We’ve chosen a charred wood façade that recalls the crust of the well-baked breads that we love.
Our resistance is derived from our resilience through a new model.
Our entire process is characterized by a virtuous chain, which runs counter to the dominant model of the semi-industrial bakery. We defend another vision, that of a healthy bread, full of taste, made with sourced ingredients whose history and the people who produce them we know. It’s Pain Paulin’s DNA. It’s also thanks to changes in our habits: less sugar, less salt, uncut bread so that it keeps longer… everything that is more virtuous.
Industrial marketing created the need to renew the daily purchase of bread and its life span is calculated on a single day. As it doesn’t keep well beyond that, it isn’t always totally eaten: another form of food waste.
We make a bread that allows the customers to only come twice a week because our products keep for a long time, like the bread of yesteryear. We have people discover this other bread by creating meetings, like that for einkorn, a gluten-free or a Khorasan-type bread that we propose once or twice a week.
This is the meaning that we like to give to our business: believing and participating in another economy, another life rhythm, another quality bread accessible for everyone, even if it’s hard to break well-rooted consumption habits.
The human dimension remains a major cornerstone so that each person can flourish in practicing his or her trade.
At Pain Paulin, everyone is valued in the same way. If the baker’s work is central, the sales teams are responsible for communicating all our know-how and our approach to the customers. Each trade and each personality is essential.
It takes time to transmit our bread culture to new collaborators. The team then takes on all its human dimension when it communicates a strong and unique message that promotes our approach and the men and women who are behind it.
We actively take part in reinventing our trade, which is physically and morally hard. We fight to create new conditions so that it’s gentler, more accessible in the eyes of the new apprentices and society in general. At Pain Paulin, we do everything possible so that our work environment carries another message: saying to what degree being a craftsman is noble, can be experienced differently and is part of a life-style that is harmonious and positive for society. It’s the key to the upcoming world.
Bread is a strong symbol of the link and shared pleasure, whatever our differences. “ I chose the bakery because bread is a product that is addressed to everyone. ” Paulin
We work at making a more nutritious, healthier and more economical food that keeps longer.
Whether it rains or snows, our workshops are open 365 days a year. We assume our role in the city and will continue, whatever it costs, to serve this sacred food.
Our work as a baker, as we do it, takes on another key issue: it creates the link between our peasants and the city.
This is an essential commitment for Pain Paulin: improving the peasants’ working conditions and reasserting the worth of the agricultural transition.
The Pain Paulin adventure started thanks to one man’s determination. Paulin’s determination is best described by Thomas CHAMBELLAND.
“
Who could have imagined that behind this young dandy, specialized in finance with well-groomed hands, a chief was hidden. A baker-chief, detail-oriented, attentive and sensitive to the murmurs of dough.
A company chief, a worker, resilient, an aesthete and creative, knowing how to bounce back in the most difficult situations.
If Alexander hadn’t usurped the nickname before him, he could easily be called Paulin the Great! The only baker I know able to swallow 10 pastries in a row, to iron his boxer shorts at 11 p.m. after a 15-hour work day, eager for scrumptious experiences, introduced to the greatest chefs but also gratified by the simplest things. Paulin never tires of praising the tomatoes or beans from his grandfather’s garden. In the end, not all of us have been lucky enough to meet men of his caliber.
Hats off, Mr. Paulin for this magnificent and inspiring bakery itinerary.
” Thomas CHAMBELLAND
