School for fulfilling dreams of French baking

By: Shi Yu, Ye Pengyu (Intern), and Wan Miao (Intern); Editor: Hong Li

Seven years ago, soon after a group Shanghai-based French volunteers returned to France, a “foodie” among the group of twelve complained that the flavor of Shanghai’s bread wasn’t up to standard. [Translated directly from Chinese article. Note that the volunteers actually remained in Shanghai while founding Shanghai Young Bakers, working for a year and a half before returning to France.] This seemingly meaningless comment developed into a meaningful project. The group decided to teach China’s disadvantaged youth to become French bakers, and the project concept was dubbed“Shanghai Young Bakers”. The scale of the project has already expanded from an initial 16 students per cohort to the past few years’ current 30 students per cohort. This is not a bakery, rather it is a school fulfilling dreams. It not only provides students with a professional skill, but also changes their outlook on life, allowing them to face challenges with renewed courage and confidence.

A compassionate beginning

The Shanghai Young Bakers (SYB) baking center is on the outskirts of Shanghai, set up in an old building in an industrial neighborhood straddling the border of Shanghai’s Putuo and Jiading districts. As soon as I got of the elevator, I followed the scent of freshly baked bread that immediately assaulted my senses until I found the baking center. Even before I reached the entrance, I heard the rise and fall of a woman’s voice.

The inner room of the baking center where class was being held was the oven room, while the outside was the work space. Various kinds of bread covered four polished steel tables, giving off the light buttery scent of croissants. The female teacher, Wang Li, was leading a batch of about 15 students, leaning against a table and explaining how to discern well-baked bread: “Inside this pocket the chocolate has already completely melted. You obviously didn’t use a full chocolate stick.” The student who baked the chocolate croissant nodded as he hesitantly discarded the broken chocolate stick.

Executive Director Cecile Cavoizy laughed as she pulled me aside, motioning to do the interview in the break room next door. The break room was simpler than the bright, clean workspace next door.

“For a lot of people, the first time they come here they will complain about how inconvenient transportation is. But here there’s a lot of quality for a relatively low price, if we were to rent a 330 square meter baking center in the city center, we would be broke.” The French manager frankly stated, “The reason we picked this location was primarily because it’s close to the student dorms. Our students’ other classes are held at Caoyang Vocational School in the area.”

At this point in the conversation, a playful laugh came from the work room next door, signifying that the students’ class was over. Shortly after, there was a knock at the door, and a student entered carrying a large tray of various breads, sliding right back out after setting it down. Cecile casually grabbed a slice to nibble on. “Do you bake?” I asked. “No, but I can eat,” she replied laughing. After a few minutes, a girl entered to clean the room. When she saw we were recording, she tiptoed around us, continuing her work. “You don’t have to wipe down the table,” Cecile said to her in Chinese, “And don’t worry about Wang Li coming to inspect your work. I’ll tell her that today I’m in charge of the cleanup in here.” The student laughed, mumbled goodbye, and withdrew from the room.

“Many of the students come from families with lots of children, so they’re sincere and love to help others, which makes me grateful. But at the same time, children from rural areas are also different in some aspects: sometimes they’re relatively shy and not good at expressing themselves, and don’t have a solid concept of time, for example, when it comes to punctuality. We tell them that in the countryside being late usually isn’t a problem, but in internships at five-star hotels, if they are told to arrive at 9:00, arriving at 9:05 is already late. This is professional development,” Cecile said.

According to her introduction, besides studying French bakery, Shanghai Young Bakers students also attend life skills classes such as English, financial management, and professional communication skills. The life skills class teacher is recommended by other volunteer associations.

Cecile speaks very fluent Chinese, almost to the extent that one can’t distinguish a foreign accent. After graduating from Sciences Po Paris, Cecile came to Shanghai in 2002 to study sociology and journalism at Fudan University, afterwards going on to find a high salary position at a French industrial group in Shanghai. When she coincidentally found out about Shanghai Young Bakers, she offered to volunteer, completing any miscellaneous tasks SYB needed. After two years of volunteer work, she decided to resign from her former job, joining Shanghai Young Bakers.

Before she joined SYB, all management work basically relied on one French man—Thomas Meron, making Cecile only the second full-time employee. Other than Cecile and Thomas, SYB consisted of three teachers, one social educator and a few volunteers.

“Since I was a student, I’ve always been interested in NGO work. And while I was volunteering for SYB, I realized that it’s very hard to sustain charity work with only short time volunteers. I thought this had a negative impact on the program, so I decided to join full-time,” Cecile said.

Of course, her job choice also led to a huge economic sacrifice: her salary shrank before her eyes. But she was not concerned: “My salary now is about a fourth of what I was earning at the French firm before—this is using 2010 as a base line. I think if I would have continued working at that company, my current salary would definitely be much higher.” In spite of this, she has no regrets because working with SYB gives her a sense of achievement, “I don’t need that much money. I don’t have the financial burden of raising children. As long as I can pay the rent and eat month to month, it’s enough. Thinking about how what I’m doing can change the fate of these children is what motivates me.”

During those first few years, Cecile has always had to worry about SYB’s next source of funding, but even so, she and Thomas were most worried about the lack of qualified teachers. The baking teachers were all professional bakers sent by sponsor companies. Despite their stellar traditional French baking qualifications, they were ultimately part-time teachers with a high turnover rate that would affect the continuity of the classes.

So Cecile and her colleagues decided to hire full-time baking teachers. But as they soon found, at that time in Shanghai, the demand for qualified French bakers was scarce to none, so the cost of hiring the ones they could find was very high. They had to figure out what was most economic and practical, which ended up being training SYB’s own students to become the very teachers they desired, waiting until they were qualified as professional French bakers to pass the torch. SYB chose three students who yearned to go abroad from the inaugural cohort, Zhang Zhenghai, Xiao Jinjin and Wang Li.

After establishing the program, they chose the prestigious Ecole Francaise de Boulangerie D’Aurillac (EFBPA), a famous French bakery training institution. With such a reputation, tuition at EFBPA was not cheap, one term of study (six months total) was as much as 7,000 euros. For a newly established charity organization, this was not easily written off. Fortunately, when SYB was down to the wire, the French institution gave the three students a very attractive offer: fully-waived tuition! Air France also agreed to sponsor their round-trip plane tickets. Everything was ready, except for one crucial missing piece—French language skills. The three students had displayed innate talent in baking center classes, but progressed slowly when it came to speaking French, even with regularly scheduled French lessons at Alliance Francaise language center.

“We were all nervous in the weeks leading up to their visa interviews. But Cecile was the most nervous of us all. She was worried we wouldn’t pass the interviews, so on the weekends she tutored us herself. We all ended up passing without a hitch,” Xiao Jinjin, a member of the first group of SYB students to study abroad.

The three students lived up to expectations, and after completing 6 months of study at EFBPA, passed the French vocational baking test, fulfilling the promise they made before going abroad—coming back to teach at SYB for three years. “Cecile seldom got involved in our studies, but we regularly updated her on our studies and life in France over QQ. Every month she transferred everyone’s spending money to my bank card, then depended on me to divide it up and give it to the others. Our monthly spending allowance was 300 euros, not including rent. The school helped us find housing,” Wang Li reminisced about her study abroad experience.

Two newly-certified professional French bakers

Wang Li and Xiao Jinjin are the same age, hailing from Zhumadian, Henan Province and Fuyang, Anhui Province respectively. In the early years, they each received funding from Chi Heng Foundation, based in Hong Kong.

Wang Li’s family has three people, herself, her father and her younger brother. Her mother passed away as she was beginning middle school. To help shoulder some of her family’s financial burdens, after she graduated from middle school, Wang Li went to Dongguan to work in a furniture shop, earning only 610 yuan per month. After six months, her unit manager tapped her for a pay raise, but even still, the burden of repetitive work left her without a sense of accomplishment.

“I was awaiting my fate: to return home during Chinese New Year so my family could find me a husband, then get married and have a child. I would wait until the child was two years old, then go back to work. When the child was of the age to start school, I’d return to my hometown. I felt my life slowly slipping away, and I was terrified,” Wang Li said.

Wang Li knows her strengths. She has an appetite for learning and a strong work ethic, only at the time she lacked one essential that would allow her to maintain a stable life—a diploma.

In 2008, she contacted Chi Heng Foundation, who had sponsored her in the past, and poured out her grievances. At the time, the newly founded Shanghai Young Bakers had coincidentally commissioned Chi Heng to recommend students suited for the program. Wang Li filled out the application, passed through the selection process easily, and moved to Shanghai to begin her studies. Her teachers showered her in praise during practical classes, but was misfortune struck when her name was missing from the list of students chosen to study abroad. She knew why she wasn’t chosen: she didn’t have a high school diploma. But undeterred, she went to Cecile over and over again, expressing her longing to further her studies abroad. Cecile was moved by her perseverance, and in the end, added Wang Li to the roster. At this point, Wang Li was far behind the other two chosen students, who had been learning French for over six months, so as was her character, she doubled her efforts to catch up with her peers.

In France, the first part of her daily routine after classes was to look up new words in the dictionary. After only a month of religiously following this routine, her troubles understanding practical classes were basically over. She was also fortune to find a sympathizing classmate, who would help explain things every time she didn’t understand. The same classmate also invited her to Marseille over a vacation. The six months of class were full of material, not lacking in science, hygiene, law and economics behind bakery training. After fully mastering French, she confessed her academic situation to her role model Loïc Ledru, Lesaffre’s Technical Director, saying “While studying in Shanghai, we rarely communicated with our teachers outside of class, and hardly ever talked about our personal lives.”

Throughout the process, the ever strong and competitive Wang Li met the challenges. In exchange for six months of hard work, she received a bakery diploma from EFBPA recognized worldwide. Now, Wang Li is confident and uncompromising in her baking approach, which is all due to the foundational skills she built while in France.

“In a lot of places, the bosses will tell us to use additives, but whether or not we do is at our discretion. Additives can help stabilize the bread’s shape and maintain its color and luster, which ensures superior results that are up to the boss’s standards, and because of this many bakers are dependent on additives. But the way I see it, this is a fundamental weakness. I would personally eat the products I make, or give them to my family to eat, so in any case, I wouldn’t give products I wouldn’t personally eat to other people, that’s the industry’s bottom line,” Wang Li said. When discussing the basic principles of her industry, the former study abroad participant is very serious.

“I can tell at a glance whether or not bread has additives. Bread with additives looks really great and smells really great, but lacks in flavor. For bread without additives, the appearance might have some minor flaws and a more subtle aroma, but the more you eat, the more flavorful it becomes,” Wang Li described to me.

The attitude and confidence Wang Li exudes about the baking industry is also evident when talking to Xiao Jinjin. On the day of the interview, Xiao Jinjin had no scheduled classes and wore a refined grey dress. Xiao Jinjin and Wang Li’s professions have a slight difference: Wang Li specializes in bread, while Xiao Jinjin specializes in pastries.

Since her sophomore year in high school, Xiao Jinjin was determined to become a baker. That year when one of her classmates celebrated a birthday, she and a group of girls went to order a cake. At the store, the baker handed her the icing tube used to scrawl designs on the cake’s surface. With no experience whatsoever, Xiao Jinjin drew a breathtaking design, eliciting the baker’s sighs of admiration. “I can’t stand it when people praise my work,” Xiao Jinjin laughed, “But that’s when I started liking Western style pastries, I felt that they were a type of artwork.”

When Chi Heng Foundation introduced the Shanghai Young Bakers program to her, she applied without hesitation. Now, Xiao Jinjin represents SYB, canvassing China to conduct interviews with potential students. “To participate in our program, an interest in baking is the most important thing. The student also has to have a strong work ethic and see things through until the end,” she pointed out.

Xiao Jinjin modestly denies having a gift for baking, but she has quick and dexterous movements, so when she was studying in France, her speed soon surpassed her other classmates. “When we were using the mechanic dough roller at school, we had to go in order according to our student numbers. I was number 13, the last student of the group, so I was usually near the back of the line. Sometimes when I couldn’t wait, I would flatten the dough by hand to the point where I only had to use the machine for a very short time. The products I made by hand ended up the same as those made using the machines,” she reminisced.

In Aurillac (which is home to the EFBPA campus), Xiao Jinjin not only studied the French teachers’ advanced machinery, but was also deeply affected by their dedication to the industry. What moved her most was the bakery masters’ extreme attention to detail.

“Actually, baking calls for strict adherence to the recipe, but in China, very few bakers are perfectionists in this area. There are two kinds of bakers that don’t strictly follow recipes: those who are just getting by, and those who have crafted their skills through practice. I believe that those skilled craftsman can estimate after years of observations,” Xiao Jinjin said, “But in France, all of the bakers used scales, including the most experienced bakers.” “Is that a custom there?” I asked. Xiao Jinjin thought for a beat, then answered with one word, “passion”: “Some people see it as a tool, and some people see it as their culture.”

Xiao Jinjin brought some of the French masters’ drive and passion back to her own classes in Shanghai, adhering to baking recipes with an acute sense of detail, because “in its essence, baking is following guidelines and standards”. Her classes call for an equally strict adherence to hygiene standards. “There can’t be dirty dishes in the sink, and rags can’t be left on the table. After finishing, students must clean the entire kitchen.”

SYB students’ dreams and goals

After I finished interviewing the teachers, I met the students who had just finished cleaning as I exited the office—a lanky boy and a tall girl. “Usually we clean right after class is over, but today we have a guest, so it can wait,” the boy said.

The boy’s name is Xiao Dong, and he looks to be only 17 or 18 years old. He is from rural Shaanxi’s Guanzhong pass. When I asked him why he came to SYB to study baking, he boldly blurted out, “More skills mean less pressure.”

Xiao Dong is 20 years old, and had already been working 3 years before he joined Shanghai Young Bakers. His parents passed away early in his life, so he was raised by his paternal grandmother. Shortly after graduating from middle school in 2011, he found a machine management job at a private oil exploration company in Baoji making 1500 yuan a month.

Xiao Dong actually stumbled upon SYB by accident. One day when Xiao Dong was at the Baoji Train Station preparing to go home, his entire set of luggage got lost. Xin Xing, another charity organization based in Gansu, ended up buying him another train ticket home, and in a stroke of luck, also recommended the Shanghai Young Bakers training program.

“My aunt was always hoping I’d study a vocational skill, and in the past, she’s given me a few recommendations, but I was always conflicted. But afterwards, when Xin Xing Baoji talked with me about this program, I decided to apply. I thought, at least a baker would never starve,” Xiao Dong said. When he left Xi’an, he helped his grandmother settle down at his aunt’s house and left his bank card with his three years of savings in his grandmother’s safe keeping.

After a year of study, Xiao Dong also takes the tone of a professional baker. “One kilogram of flour can make one 300 gram loaf of French country bread and six 60 to 70 gram croissants; baguettes are anywhere from 55 to 58 centimeters long when they go in the oven, baking at a maximum temperature of 245 degrees and a minimum temperature of 235 degrees for 22 to 25 minutes. 350 grams of dough can make one 55 centimeter long baguette,” he recited.

In terms of baking theory, he’s just as strict as Wang Li; in terms of recipes, he takes after Xiao Jinjin’s precision. “First, you have to be honest with yourself about the costs. Second, you must never perform sloppy work. If the teacher says you need one type of ingredient, you can’t replace it with another, traditional recipes have to be made using the traditional method. If in the off chance you do substitute ingredients, the outcome is another product that we can name, and that’s innovation. Last, you have to be very particular about hygiene. If the products you make are disgusting to you after seeing how they’re made, how can you feed them to others?”

On baking theory matters, the junior baker is almost ready to graduate, but admits that he still isn’t experienced enough in baking baguettes: “Our teachers are very strict. For example, when we are baking baguettes, the length and degree of homogeneity all have standards to be met. Standards that are higher, even, than our hotel internships. In the hotels, we strive for efficiency, unlike here where we make very few products, but striving for perfection.” The class that left the greatest impression on Xiao Dong was the Christmas bread class. “The nuts in Christmas bread have to be soaked in brandy for about 12 hours the night before baking, giving them a slightly alcoholic flavor.” He also enjoys the annual inspiration class: “Once a year, the students bring back ideas about specialty products from the hotels and share them in a baking class, studying tips to make the bread even better.”

Xiao Dong came to Shanghai once before in 2013, when the private oil company he worked at shut down and he had to work temporarily for a car company in Songjiang.

Today, his biggest hope is to find a stable job and settle down. He also admits that the teachers ask about his love life, often encouraging him to find a girlfriend.

Compared to Xiao Dong, Xiao Ying is more vivacious and giggly. She comes from a family of seven, including her sister-in-law’s second child on the way.

This is Xiao Ying’s first time living on her own since she was born in 1992. Before joining SYB, she was working in Nanjing, but with an older brother to look after her. When she first arrived, everything was unfamiliar—she didn’t understand the Shanghai dialect and wasn’t used to eating French baguettes (she thought they were too hard). “At the very beginning, I would only eat brioche, croissant and other softer breads, and I still thought croissants were too expensive. Now after studying here, I understand the cost of bread more. Things are expensive for a reason: croissants use expensive ingredients and take a lot of labor, so they’re more expensive.” She said, “The teachers here are very strict during class, and even after class, they still look after us.”

After graduating from high school, Xiao Ying went to college to study nutrition, but because she wasn’t happy with the class content, she soon dropped out. Afterwards, she worked at a food packaging company. Like Wang Li, she rejected the path that would limit her life choices and determine her fate, instead choosing to study French baking as a vocational skill at SYB. Her dream is to open a bakery in Nanjing. “I like areas with mountains that are near the water. Plus Nanjing’s level of disposable income is similar to Shanghai’s, but relatively speaking, French bakeries aren’t as commonplace there, so there’s definitely a market opportunity.”

After another 4 months, Xiao Dong and Xiao Ying will be graduated, but their teacher’s aren’t the least bit worried about their graduation plans. “They’re very picky, places like Starbucks aren’t good enough,” Wang Li said. She also revealed that almost all the graduates’ income surpassed her own, to the point that she’s tempted to change jobs.

“Our students have a 100 percent employment rate, 35 percent have jobs lined up before they graduate, while the others receive two or three offers, almost all of which are 5 star hotels like Marriott, Sofitel, etc.” Talking about the students’ achievements gets Cecile very excited, “We are the only school in Shanghai that can train French bakers. If hotels want to hire French bakers, they have no other choices.”

Looking towards tomorrow

So with such a successful model, why not expand? Cecile states that they’re mainly constrained by a lack of funding and personnel, plus she’s found a better vertical integration model. SYB partners with other Chinese charity organizations to expand the “teach a man how to fish” model.

“Soon we’ll meet with ‘1 Needle, 1 Thread’ in Chengdu. It’s a charity organization that helps handicapped people find jobs. They plan on sending one of their members to Shanghai to study bakery. After getting the credentials from SYB, this student will return to act as the organization’s very own baking teacher in Chengdu, promoting employment opportunities for their handicapped members.”

In the past, SYB has also cooperated successfully with Braille Without Borders, training a blind Tibetan girl named Basang Lamu. After receiving SYB accreditation, Basang returned to Tibet to lead the effort to teach French bakery skills to other blind members of Braille Without Borders.

Cecile’s current job is still primarily finding funding for the next cohort of students. She’s not too worried about finding qualified teachers, as their new teachers currently training at EFBPA in France will graduate and return to Shanghai in June.

SYB is also expanding other social enterprise channels, including selling the students’ products to subscribers in bread baskets or cake boxes, as well as offering public baking classes at the SYB baking center.

“Students from the Shanghai community are very happy to study with us. They study basic baking skills while also giving to a greater cause.”

Cecile is thankful that more and more companies and individuals have started focusing on the industry, while her students also master the social enterprise model. This year, a Shanghai sugar trading corporation, Tanghui, also entered the ranks of sponsors, providing SYB with free sugar. SYB students themselves found the new sponsorship opportunity. Cecile has full faith in the future of Shanghai Young Bakers.

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