The True Costs of Croissant Mania

Welcome to Best Food Blog, a writer-run publication about eating by journalists Ali Francis, Anikah Shaokat, Anna Hezel, and Antara Sinha. You can check out everything we’ve published so far here. Today, we have a guest essay from Zoe Denenberg, a pastry chef who splits her time between Hawai'i, Alaska, and New York. You can keep up with her adventures on Substack or Instagram.

One of the benefits of being a professional baker is that, no matter what city I’m visiting, my friends always want to take me to the best bakery in town. On a recent trip to San Francisco, my friend insisted we go to Butter + Crumble, a bakery specializing in croissants. According to her, it’s one of the only establishments in the city where you’ll find a line around the block. We eavesdropped as the girls in line behind us planned their order: a bacon-egg-cheese spiral topped with a bursting egg yolk, a cruffin stuffed with coconut and passionfruit, and the “MortyP,” a croissant layered with mortadella and pistachio pesto.

Forty-five minutes and thirty dollars later, we finally secured our box of four pastries. The croissants were executed flawlessly — the pastry deeply caramelized, the fillings pleasantly jiggly. But even as I absolutely bodied my $9 corn cro-quiche (a croissant-quiche hybrid), I could not stop thinking about the sheer time and labor that had gone into the pastries. Prompted to provide a review, I told my friend: “They’re amazing. But making them would be my nightmare.”

Hype alone doesn’t pay the bills, and it’s difficult to build a viable business on such an expensive product.

Since Dominique Ansel debuted its croissant-donut hybrid, the now-trademarked Cronut, in 2013, America has been obsessed with the maximalist croissant. A decidedly European pastry, the croissant in and of itself is a study in extremes: Calling for exorbitant amounts of butter and a complicated layering technique called lamination, it’s one of the most difficult, time-consuming, and costly pastries to make. But in America, a claw of impeccably laminated pastry has never been enough. It must be adorned with even more bells and whistles. As a baker, the staying power of this trend concerns me, and not just because I don’t want to spend hours upon hours laminating pastry. Hype alone doesn’t pay the bills, and it’s difficult to build a viable business on such an expensive product.

Over 10 years after the Cronut’s original debut, almost every trend-forward bakery in New York City offers some form of tricked-out croissant. Lines wrap around the block for Librae’s pistachio-rose croissant. Droves flock for Lafayette’s custard-stuffed Suprêmes. Instagram goes bonkers for Supermoon Bakehouse’s “Croissant Croissant:” A croissant stuffed with croissant-butter crème pâtissière, laced with croissant crumbs, and topped with a croissant chip. Waiting in line for Dominique Ansel’s pastry du jour might have once been a tourist activity, but now, locals and visitors alike queue at Radio Bakery, hoping to snag a pumpkin cheesecake croissant before they’re cleared out. The sell-out culture is so well-established that croissant-focused bakeries like Tall Poppy need not advertise a closing time — they’re open “from 8 a.m. until sold out.”

In many ways, the public’s enthusiastic support of small bakeries is heartening, especially as more restaurants decide to do without a pastry chef. But the American demand for maximalist croissants feels insatiable — and endless demand does not necessarily create a sustainable business model.

Compared to non-laminated breakfast pastries, like scones or muffins, croissants are not a very profitable endeavor. To start, any industrial croissant operation requires a dough sheeter — a down payment of around $2,500. To keep the croissants cool, which is crucial to preserving their flaky layers, you’ll want to shape the pastries on a marble slab. It’ll cost $3,000 on average, according to Angi, a home repair service site. Depending on the location, other temperature controls might be necessary too. “In the dead of summer in a kitchen without AC, croissant shaping becomes nearly impossible, and doing it alone is out of the question,” says Grayson Samuels, the baker behind pastry pop-up Guest Check. 

Then there’s the cost of ingredients. The most expensive: imported, European-style butter, which runs at roughly $260 for a 36-pound case. “Most Americans can get local milk from within 100 miles. Why are we paying so much and emitting so much excess carbon to ship butter in from France?” asks baker and recipe developer Jordan Smith. According to Reuters, the value of European butter on world markets reached an all-time high this year, with prices up 83% year-over-year (American butter prices are up too, by a more modest 15%). By my estimate, a single croissant costs nearly a dollar in butter alone. 

But the most significant cost of croissant production rests in the labor. Executing perfectly laminated pastry also requires an intense degree of precision — difficult enough to achieve in small batches, but staggeringly so at scale. Kelly Leggett, formerly a baker at Lafayette, estimates that she made over a thousand croissants a year. She emphasized that without a skilled, well-supported staff, building a successful croissant program is a futile endeavor. “You have to dedicate your team’s time and energy to making them well, or else putting all that time into it is just pointless,” says Leggett.

The process is so time-intensive, it’s usually split across multiple days: typically, mixing the dough and the beurrage (the butter block laminated into the dough) on day one; laminating (a process of sheeting, folding, and chilling the dough, typically repeated two to three times) and shaping on day two; and proofing and baking the croissants on day three. With this prolonged timetable, croissants bill at five- to ten-times the labor cost of your standard scone or muffin. Most of New York City’s croissants are priced to reflect this, running at $5 to $8 each, but the margins are certainly slimmer than those on most other pastries. This makes a bakery less resilient to changing market conditions — say, the cost of eggs rising 28% in the past year — and ultimately more financially vulnerable. 

Plenty of bakers use the croissant as a canvas for innovative third-culture flavors, but the pastry itself still represents mastery of the French lamination technique, and that notion holds some colonial weight.

If the croissant is so difficult and costly to make, why has the trend endured? Unlike other cutesy desserts that garnered social media attention a decade ago (tie-dyed miniature cupcakes; milk ’n’ cookie shots), the croissant commands canonic legitimacy. Plenty of bakers use the croissant as a canvas for innovative third-culture flavors, but the pastry itself still represents mastery of the French lamination technique, and that notion holds some colonial weight. Simply put, the croissant is very European and very hard to make, which makes it all the more desirable. 

Plenty of professional bakers genuinely love laminating pastry, to whom I say: you do you. I commend your dedication and will certainly enjoy the fruits of your labor. But America’s enduring croissant obsession is frustrating for bakers like myself, whose passion lies elsewhere. “I personally don’t like to make croissants,” Smith says. “A lot of the bakeries that I’ve worked at have been obsessed with them, and other baked goods became the afterthought.” I call this “croissant blinders”: Some bakers fixate so acutely on perfecting the croissant that the rest of the pastry case suffers. 

Alternatively, it’s all too easy for a tricked-out croissant to overshadow some of its skillfully made neighbors in the pastry case. Sure, you’ve had Radio Bakery’s triple chocolate croissant, but have you tried the brown butter corn cake? It’s genuinely one of the most delicious pastries I’ve eaten all year.

For many small cafés and bakeries, maintaining a laminated pastry program is not financially feasible. But demand drives most coffee shops to sell them, “even if they don’t make them in-house or look all that good,” Leggett laments. One café owner I spoke to, who prefers to remain anonymous, makes most of the pastries in-house but buys croissants from Costco. “And you know what? People love them,” she tells me. “They always sell out.”

A few weeks ago, I received a PR email from a croissant bakery with a vision to expand nationwide. After citing the bakery’s “commitment to traditional French techniques and premium ingredients,” the PR rep rattled off the company’s executive leadership roster, including a CEO, CFO, and — instead of a baker or pastry chef — a “Chief Culinary Officer.” Where there is money to be made, the corporations will come. That might be the ultimate cost of the croissantification of America.