Sweet Beat

La Boulange Pastries Debut Next Week at Bay Area Starbucks

You probably heard about the big $100 million deal last year in which local chain La Boulange was swallowed up by Starbucks to become the company’s main vendor of baked goods. Well now, as the Chron reports, after owner Pascal Rigo has spent the last year building a bakery infrastructure to serve every Starbucks store in the nation, with a few test runs last fall, it’s time to start those ovens going. Northern California will be the first market to see the La Boulange goods appear in all 420 Starbucks locations here starting Tuesday morning, April 16. That will be followed by the Pacific Northwest in June, L.A. in July, and New York and Boston in September. The scale of the operation is pretty mind-boggling, actually, and involved putting new freezers into every Starbucks store in which to receive the new pastries. As Rigo says, “It’s the biggest, largest rollout of refrigerators in the history of the world, to the point we couldn’t find enough stainless steel to build them.” [Chron]

La Boulange Pastries Debut Next Week at Bay Area Starbucks