Dominique Ansel, Author of Everyone Can Bake

In this episode of Talks at GS, Dominique Ansel discusses building an international bakery business known for its inventiveness (including the legendary Cronut), how he is evolving his business in the midst of the economic shutdown and his new book, Everyone Can Bake.

On growing his business: “We started with not much and we built every single day caring for every single customer one at a time… And we started changing the pastries. We started showing different ways of approaching, different ways of creating and changing with seasonality, changing all the time—introducing new pastries. I think that's what made us really different. It's harder, of course, to change all the time and to show new things than to keep the same menu all year long. Most bakeries will keep the same menu all year, but I wanted to do something different.”

On why his baking has resonated around the world: “I think it's the flexibility of creating what I do. I think it's understanding different cultures and adapting based on where I am and what I do. For example, one of our huge successes after the Cronut was the Frozen S’more… Growing up, of course, most people go to a campfire and cook a marshmallow to make a s’more. It’s not something that I knew about when I first came to the US. It’s something that I discovered, but it's something I thought was a beautiful way of thinking—of bringing people together. You take the emotions—the memories. You take the bonding time. You take the time that you have with people and you appreciate that time you spend together and you build it into a new memory. And this is what I do through my creations. I create moments.”