What Ever Happened To Starbucks' Partner Bakery, La Boulange?

Starbucks has a long and mostly winning history as a company, but its foray into the world of bakeries with La Boulange is one of its stranger failures. While the chain has long hung its hat on coffee and other seasonal beverages, food has always been a bit of a weak spot. It's not that all of Starbucks' pastries and sandwiches are lackluster, although plenty are, it's just that all the prepackaged food feels like its lower on the priority list compared to its more creative drink offerings. And that's exactly what Starbucks' 2012 acquisition of La Boulange was supposed to change. 

Founded in 1996 by a French baker named Pascal Rigo, who Starbucks also hired, La Boulange was a popular Bay Area bakery chain with fewer than 20 locations that was respected for its high-quality French breads and pastries. It was a move Starbucks explicitly stated was meant to improve the food offerings in store, and it also planned on expanding La Boulange as a separate brand under its umbrella. Unfortunately, the weight of Starbucks ended up dragging La Boulange down instead. 

The acquisition was pretty much bad news from the start. Customers and reviewers panned the quality of the new pastries, while loyal fans complained about discontinued old favorites that were replaced by expensive new options. It didn't help that Starbucks paid a massive $100 million for what was a relatively small local brand with no name recognition outside of San Francisco. Despite modest growth in food sales after the acquisition, things soon went south.

Within two years of the 2012 La Boulange purchase that was touted as the future of the company, Starbucks was pulling back on the line and reintroducing old items. The next year, in 2015, Starbucks made the shocking decision to shut down the 23 separate La Boulange stores entirely, with Pascal Rigo leaving Starbucks at the same time. It was not an unmitigated disaster, as Starbucks food sales were finally increasing at a good rate, but Starbucks clearly felt there was no value to the separate brand anymore and had also begun partnering with other outside food suppliers to some success. 

The big loser was San Francisco and La Boulange itself, as the city lost a popular local chain that was still making good sales, but not reaching the lofty revenue heights expected of a corporate-owned chain. Thankfully, La Boulange's story got a happy ending. Not long after leaving Starbucks, Rigo resurrected La Boulange in the Bay Area with a slightly tweaked name: La Boulangerie de San Francisco. 

He has kept the chain small — there are now only four locations in the Bay Area – but refocused on core quality values over large-scale growth. In the end, Starbucks kept some of the La Boulange recipes, although they were altered slightly to maintain corporate quality control. While Starbucks customers' desire for more affordable food ultimately made the duo a bad fit, at least for once, a beloved brand shut down by a big company got a second chance at life.