Small Business: A French pastry chef in NZ

Guillaume Nicoli, founder of Ma Cherie.

This week, a look into a range of local French entrepreneurs about how they came to set up their businesses half a world away.

Guillaume and Hiroe Nicoli are the owners of Ma Cherie, which is a wholesaler and retailer of French pastries.

Where in France are you from and how did you end up in New Zealand?

I'm from Strasbourg, in the northeast of France, but I travelled all over France for my career; I worked in Paris, Luxembourg, Cannes on the French Riviera. It was actually when I was in Cannes that a friend of mine, who was in New Zealand at the time, gave me a call and said 'why don't you come to New Zealand?' I'd been in Cannes for a year and it was time to move on, so I bought a plane ticket, got a visa, and came here on my own with two suitcases. And I've never left. That was 10 years ago.

When and why did you start your business, Ma Cherie?

I met my wife Hiroe six years ago. She's from Japan, and a graphic designer by training, and after six months together we realised we had similar ambitions to start a business. I decided I wanted to be a pastry chef when I was 15 years old, and when I started working as one at age 17 I was apprenticed to a master pastry chef who taught me everything I know. Nobody in my family had run a business, but on my first day in that job I thought 'this is what I want to do with my life, and one day I want to be doing it for myself'.

It was 2009 when we started Ma Cherie and our idea was to start small. At that time I was working full time managing a shop in Remuera and then at nightime I would make macarons for Ma Cherie. At that time no one in Auckland was doing macarons - they were completely new here - which is why we decided to start with them. After about a year, I quit my fulltime job and took a small salary from the business while my wife kept working in her fulltime job for another couple of years to keep more income coming in as the business grew.

How did you find your first customers?

Farro Fresh in Lunn Avenue was my first customer. I was introduced to the manager there by some friends of mine who run a wholesale business called L'Authentique. At that time Farro only had that one store, but now that store manager is the general manager of the Farro group, and we supply all their stores. We've had a long and excellent relationship with them over many years.

I also supplied a lot of French businesses, who were very supportive. The French business community here is not very big, and we all help each other.

And then I had a major stroke of luck. I was contacted by the producers of MasterChef New Zealand to appear in the final episode of the second season - the series that Nadia Lim won. The response to that was unbelievable; after that our sales literally multiplied by four.

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What's helped you develop the business since then?

The fashion for macarons eventually dropped a bit, but by that time we'd developed a lot of new pastries, which we would test by having lots and lots of tastings at Farro stores. Four years ago we moved to a 200 square metre kitchen in Mt Wellington, where we make everything, and four months ago we opened our first retail store, in Ponsonby. We've now got nine employees across the business.

What factors do you think have helped you connect your French offerings with a New Zealand market?

It's about adapting to where you are. Some of the pastries I've done in the past may have failed because they've been a bit too complicated for Kiwis. So I've learned about some New Zealand traditions and used that to change my way of creating pastries.

Some simple examples are I've included hokey pokey, ginger and rocky road into some of my pastries. Those aren't French at all, but I like to call it a fusion between our cultures, and the response has been pretty good. Even if I'm creating authentic French pastries, why not add a local flavour?