Bridor celebrates its 40th anniversary in Quebec
The bakery goods company hosts an event in its factory to commemorate its fourth decade
Bridor celebrated its 40th anniversary on Oct. 5 with a cocktail luncheon and factory tour at its head office in Boucherville.
Numerous decorated chefs were in attendance, including 2021 Bocuse d’Or winner Davy Tissot and 1993 Meilleur Ouvrier de France winner Jean-François Girardin.
Bridor, a bakery product manufacturing company, supplies bakery goods to stores and restaurants in over 100 countries.
Though the company’s founder, Louis Le Duff, is French, with the biggest of their factories located in France—almost three times the size of the Boucherville site—the anniversary was celebrated in Quebec, as an homage to Le Duff’s start.
Le Duff came to Quebec some 50 years ago to study at Université de Sherbrooke. After finishing his studies for an MBA, he opened a creperie near the university. The first bakery he built was in Hochelaga. It measured 200 square metres but grew rapidly, to the point where Bridor now owns several factories across the world.
“It was small, but we believed in the project,” Le Duff said. “When you believe, there are no limits.”
During a speech, Le Duff announced plans to expand over the next few years by building new factories across the U.S., including in Dallas and Salt Lake City, to broaden the company’s reach. Bridor also plans to double the size of its Boucherville and New Jersey facilities, with a total investment of around C$1.6 billion.
Currently, Bridor supplies baguettes and pastries to shops across Canada, including Costco. The opening of new locales down south will allow the company to enter a new market with lower shipping costs.
For chefs like Elvis Miaoat, the event was an opportunity to network and connect with people in an interesting and often competitive culinary field.
“This is the first time I’m focusing on pastry and bread,” Miaoat said. “I usually work with seafood, barbeque, cheese plates. I want to do something new.”
As part of the event in Boucherville, guests toured the factory and observed how Bridor’s baguettes and croissants are made. Inside, visitors were first walked through the elaborate baguette chain, which transforms the dough from a formless mass to perfectly shaped loaves of bread. First comes kneading and shaping, then baking.
“This is what I call the stairway to heaven,” said Nick Tessier, Bridor’s logistics director and one of the tour guides, upon arriving at a large conveyor belt carrying freshly baked baguettes up to the next step of their journey. “If I die and I don’t see this, I must have done something wrong.”
After baking, the baguettes are cooled, frozen and finally packaged. The tour went on to showcase Bridor’s croissant-making facilities.
According to Tessier, the Boucherville branch produces between 6,000 and 8,000 baguettes, and up to 40,000 croissants per hour. Any scraps discarded by the machines during the process are reused to minimize waste.
Tessier believes it is by sourcing the best products and enacting routine quality assurance checks by line workers that Bridor manages to stay on top of the market and keep growing.
“Our recipes, our bread, have this artisanal quality, and we’re able to produce it on an industrial scale,” Tessier said. “That’s how, I think, Bridor sets itself apart.”
