THE ULTIMATE PIT STOP: FORMER F1 ENGINEER CREATES WORLD-CLASS CROISSANTS WITH PRECISION

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - Selling nearly 40,000 croissants per week is a testament to the fact that Kate Reid is the queen of croissanterie in all of Australia. People, both locals and tourists, line up at her shop every day to taste her pastries. 

This is the reason why the organizers of the International Media Visit of the Australian government opted to schedule our tour less than an hour before the shop's closing time to avoid the large crowds. 

The well-known croissanterie is situated in a 440sqm-property in a Melbourne suburb, where customers can watch pastry chefs meticulously process different varieties of croissants by hand. 

Reid welcomed journalists from Southeast Asia to her flagship store and joyfully narrated how she started her business. 

As a child, her ultimate dream was to become a Formula One engineer. Her fascination with racing cars developed as she accompanied her dad watching the F1 race on TV every other Sunday night. 

It was in 1996 when Melbourne hosted the Grand Prix, when then 13-year-old Kate witnessed Formula One action in person. Witnessing the cars, the sound, and the speed was so transformative for her that all she wished for was to be a part of a Formula One team. 

“So from 13 years old, I started to work my way up studying all the master science at school eventually studying aerospace engineering at RMIT (University) here in Melbourne. And graduating in 2004 and one year later I was offered the job with the Williams Formula One Team as their dynamicists,” Reid recounted. 

She was living what she taught her dream career, but eventually, moving to the United Kingdom and packing her entire life to work in an F1 engineering environment in England took a toll on her mental health. 

“I imagined this incredibly dynamic exciting collaborative environment and what I found actually a very quiet, intense negative culture where you know, working for 16 hours a day at your computer not encouraged to talk to people around you and wasn't at all creative and innovative as I thought it was going to be,” she told. 

After more than two and a half years, she quit and admitted to herself that Formula One was not the career for her. 

During her lowest days, she started baking, a hobby that made her feel good especially when she shared her cakes with colleagues in the office. She then decided to return to Melbourne and explore a career change, from engineering to baking. 

Fast-forward to 2011, she had the wonderful opportunity to go to Paris to learn and work in a boulangerie (bakery) for one month, unpaid. 

It was in that boulangerie that she discovered her love for the crescent-shaped French pastry: the croissant. 

“And suddenly it was like the marriage of my truly favorite things that was incredibly complex and technically difficult to make but it also the transformative eating moment when you were biting into a croissant and still warm and the flakes and you get the layers,” she joyfully said. 

After her short stint in Paris, she returned to Melbourne, used her life savings, signed a lease on a shop, bought all the necessary equipment, and came up with a business name Lune — moon. 

Her engineering prowess came in handy as she spent three and a half months perfecting her croissant recipe. She tasted it everyday by changing one variable at a time to identify which ingredients made the significant difference. 

The result was a croissant tastier than any that she made in the Parisian boulangerie. 

"So finally, I landed on this product that was perhaps even better than what I’ve learned making in France and I took it out in the market and it was an instant success,” Kate declared. 

Initially, her business model was a small micro bakery that wholesaled to the best cafes in Melbourne. 

Eighteen months into the business, she asked her brother, who then worked in the hospitality sector, to help her set up a shop to sell and serve croissants directly to her customers. 

In 2015 they moved from their tiny hole-in-the-wall in Elwood to a much bigger space in the Fitzroy suburb. 

To date, aside from the flagship Lune store, Kate has two satellite stores in Melbourne, one in the CBD and one in Armadale. 

In 2021, Kate opened her first inter-state store in Brisbane amidst the pandemic. Despite the challenges, her pastries became a hit, leading her to open another store in the capital of Queensland the following year. 

By the end of 2024, Kate is set to open two stores in Sydney and the expansion might not stop there. 

“We are starting to consider the prospect of going abroad. I think for me, it’s not about the money it’s about looking at a completely foreign market,” she said. 

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Ian Cruz is a News Producer of GMA Integrated News. He is the lone Filipino journalist at the International Media Visit program of the Australian Government which was held before the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit in Melbourne.

This article The Ultimate Pit Stop: Former F1 Engineer Creates World-Class Croissants with Precision was originally published in GMA News Online.

2024-03-08T09:03:17Z dg43tfdfdgfd