Answer:
Ever since Apollonia Poilâne was a young girl growing up in Paris, she always knew what she wanted to do when she grew up: take over the family business. But she didn’t anticipate how quickly this would happen. When her father—Lionel Poilâne—and her mother died in a helicopter crash in 2002, France lost its most celebrated baker, and Apollonia stepped into the role. She was just 18 years old at the time with plans to matriculate to Harvard in the fall, but the moment her parents had prepared her for had come. As her Harvard admissions essay said, “The work of several generations is at stake.”
With organization and determination, Apollonia managed one of the best French bakeries in the world—based in Paris—from her apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She would usually wake up an extra two hours before classes to make sure she would get all the phone calls done for work. “After classes I check on any business regarding the company and then do my homework,” she says. “Before I go to bed I call my production manager in Paris to check the quality of the bread.” Because the name Poilâne has earned a place with a very small group of prestige bakers, the 18-year-old was determined to continue the tradition of customer satisfaction and quality her grandfather established in 1932. When her grandfather suffered a stroke in 1973, his 28-year-old son, Lionel, poured his heart into the business and made the family bread into the global brand it is today. Lionel opened two more bakeries in Paris and another in London. He developed and nurtured a worldwide network of retailers and celebrities where bread is shipped daily via FedEx to upscale restaurants and wealthy clients around the world.
Experimenting with sourdough is what distinguished Poilâne’s products from bread produced by Paris’s other bakers, and it has remained the company’s signature product. It is baked with a “P” carved into the crust, a throwback to the days when the use of communal ovens forced bakers to identify their loaves, and it also ensures that the loaf doesn’t burst while it’s baking. Today, Poilâne also sells croissants, pastries, and a few specialty breads, but the company’s signature item is still the four-pound miche, a wheel of sourdough, a country bread, pain Poilâne.
Explanation:
