From F1 to Lune: How Kate Reid engineered the perfect croissant
Lune founder Kate Reid takes us on her journey from F1 to baking and how she applied her engineering expertise to perfecting croissants.
Sometimes in life, a certain career or vocation is your dream job, until you live it. For Kate Reid, the founder of the beloved Lune Croissanterie, her lifelong dream wasn’t to weave magic through pastries, but to get into F1.
And she did, as an aeronautical engineer for Williams Racing. It was a far cry from The New York Times declaring her croissants the best in the world, but it was the beginning of the rocky road that got her there.
F1 was the dream, until it wasn’t
“When you’re laser-focused on a particular career from 13 years old, by the time you get there, you’ve built up a pretty beautiful dream of what that job is going to look like,” Reid told SmartCompany at Blackbird VC’s recent Sunrise Festival.
“The reality is probably 99% of the time going to be different to what you’ve built it up to look like. And series like Drive to Survive really glamorises Formula 1.”
Reid was based in the UK with Williams and describes her days as mostly being office-based and working 16 hours a day. In the dreary winter, she was leaving for work in the dark, and coming home in the dark too.
What Reid most hoped to get out of F1 was innovation through collaboration and brainstorming with other people to become best in class.
“I thought that working in F1 would be the best in their field being given an opportunity to have an endless budget and resources to push the bounds of style and technology, which might end up cascading down into commercial automotive. That would be an incredibly exciting creative environment to work in,” Reid said.
But the reality was very different, particularly because Williams wasn’t winning.
“We were in the middle of the pack and when you’re there, you’re not the ones innovating, you’re just pushed to try and figure out what the team who is winning is doing.”
For Reid, a sunk-cost fallacy settled into her mind when it came to F1. Rather than pivoting or leaving, she worked harder.
“Because I’m stubborn and I’d worked so hard to get there, I didn’t really want to admit to myself that maybe the picture that I painted in my mind didn’t match the reality. So I stuck at it to my own detriment.”
Reid became depressed and developed an eating disorder. It was another thing to switch her focus to because diet and exercise were things she could control.
The restriction led her to think about the food she wanted most, which was baked goods. For Reid, it wasn’t just about craving these things, but the happy childhood memories attached to them, such as baking with her mother.
“I’d go home after work and I would bake. So I’d have this beautiful interaction with the ingredients and live vicariously through that. Then I would take the baked goods into work and share them with everyone in the office,” Reid said.
“I’d see how happy it made everyone and my focus started to shift. Leaving work at the end of the day to bake became the part of the day that I was looking forward to.”
The road to Lune
Reid left F1 after three years. At this point, her health was seriously threatened and her family wanted her to come home.
The very day she landed in Australia she found an ad for a local bakery in Armadale looking for a counterhand, and she took it.
From there, her path began to intertwine with baking further. She found herself working in the back. Falling in love with the craft. Seeing opportunities to innovate.
“Most bakeries don’t question or critically analyse their processes. They’ve been taught how to make bread, a cake or croissants and that’s the process that they follow religiously day after day,” Reid said.
To Reid, this didn’t make sense. That desire to improve and perfect was now part of her DNA.
“In F1, if a car had decades-old technology, it would be half a lap behind everyone else. Every day, when you go into the office, you have to critically assess every component of the car and understand how changing one thing affects everything else. And then you test it,” Reid said.
“If it’s better than it was yesterday, that becomes the new design of the car. If it’s not as good, you try to understand why because there might still be an opportunity for development there.”
It would be a few years between working in the Armadale bakery and opening the very first Lune location. And this included a trip to Paris to train and develop her skills.
But she noticed that even being where croissants were born and among some of the best pastry chefs in the world, corners were being cut for the sake of efficiency. Her laser focus returned. She knew she could fix this.
Reid returned to Australia and began experimenting with proving time, butter solidity and temperatures, even down to just half a degree at a time.
She learned how every minute detail of the process impacted the others, as well as the end product.
“Suddenly I was getting croissants the same size as other bakeries but half the weight. And they were just like clouds of butter and when you bit into it, it shattered,” Reid said.
“I remember thinking, this isn’t like any croissant that I’ve eaten in France. This is next level.”
Because that’s the thing about baking. Unless you do it a lot, you may not realise just how similar it is to a scientific process. And in Reid’s case, to engineering.
Engineering a croissanterie
Even before the doors opened at the very first — and tiny — Lune location in Elwood, which she lived above, Reid’s goal was to apply innovation to her croissants and the entire business as a whole. There’s always room for improvement in every aspect of the business — from the coffee, to how the website looks, to how front-of-house is run.
And of course, how each croissant is made.
“At Lune we approach it with an engineering mindset, which I know isn’t standard for a bakery,” Reid said.
“We break down the entire three-day process of making a croissant into every single tiny element and step that needs to be considered.
“Each of those steps is open for critical assessment, improvement and innovation.”
And it’s not just senior pastry chefs or long-time staff who have a chance to make a difference. Reid wants to hear from anyone who has ideas.
“The thing that makes me happy is we have really smart pastry chefs working with us and they have the ability to change and impact and improve the process,” Reid said.
“So if one of our kitchen hands has an idea that could potentially improve the product, the efficiency, the cost, anything — they’re allowed to present it and test it.
“If it turns out to be better than what we were doing, it becomes the new baseline for how we do something.”
Ten years later, Lune now has multiple storefronts across Melbourne and has also opened a Brisbane location. Every day there are long lines of eager diners waiting in anticipation for that first crunchy, buttery bite.
In 2023, Lune will be opening its first Sydney croissanterie in Darlinghurst, with plans to open a CBD store 6-12 months later.
Reid is eager to join that pocket of Sydney, which is a hot destination of culinary delights.
“Exciting and delicious things are happening and I’m excited to be part of the fabric of that.”
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