Sweets firms bake tale of two expansion recipes

AFP, New York :
Laduree chairman David Holder is a man on the move. His summer itinerary includes Brussels, Luxembourg and Monaco. In the fall, he heads to Canada, Chile and Mexico.
The 152-year-old Paris-based bakery, best known for its iconic macaron, unveiled a new boutique last week in Rome near the Spanish Steps. New sites in Dubai and Bangkok will open in the coming weeks.
“It’s really exciting,” Holder said in a telephone interview en route to Vienna. “Everywhere we start the week and we have new adventures.
“There is no limit and this is very exciting.”
While Laduree plots its arrival to elite global metropolises, Crumbs, the once-hot New York-based gourmet cupcake chain, is toiling in a considerably less glamorous venue: a US bankruptcy court in New Jersey.
There, Crumbs Bake Shop, which grew at a pace now seen as reckless, is trying to get approval from a bankruptcy judge to sell itself to an investor group that aims to revive the bakery and unite its gooey confections with other treats in what it calls a one-stop “sweet and snack destination.”
The contrasting statuses of Laduree and Crumbs underscore the importance of expansion, a key juncture for any business but one that can be especially crucial in the modish world of retail sweets.
After going public in 2000, doughnut chain Krispy Kreme spent too much building too many stores that ended up competing with each other.
But the company, which nearly went under following an accounting scandal in 2005, has recovered under different leadership and notched profits the last four years with more than 800 stores in two dozen countries.
Crumbs was started with a single shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2003 by Mia and Jason Bauer. Mia Bauer, who worked previously as an attorney, has described the venture as a labor of love born from a life-long passion for baking.