UCLA alumna, Erica Dubreuil, opened her bakery in Claremont 30 years after graduating, a dream she had been cultivating since her time post-university. She explains how opportunities at the college opened doors to Washington, DC, where she eventually fell in love with food. Her passion for the business grows even nearly a decade after its conception, and she hopes that it continues for years to come.
BruinLife’s Emily Hsi sat down with Dubreuil to learn how this baker got her roll on.
BruinLife: How did your time at UCLA and your political science degree influence your journey through the food retail industry to open your own business?
Erica Dubreuil: It’s a journey over 30 years long — I graduated from UCLA in 1988 and the university still had a D.C. internship program where I interned for a senator the winter after I graduated. I stayed what ended up being ten years, working on Capitol Hill for a lobbyist and a think tank. On the weekends, I started working at this little bakery up the street from my apartment. That’s what introduced me to this whole vibrant world of food. I went to work for Whole Foods Market for 20 years, first in the D.C. area and then back home here in Southern California. Eventually, it was time for me to do something that I always really wanted to do and it goes back to those early days at that little bakery. I wanted to own one bakery in a community that I knew. I grew up in Alta Loma. Claremont, as you know, is a vibrant, educated, culturally significant community. And Crème is a very intentional, intimate space, where my family comes in, my children are still around here, my mother is still living in Alta Loma and my father was still alive when we first opened. I see friends of my children and their teachers from junior high and high school. And I love every minute of it. It’s a gift. It’s a lot of work. But it’s my magic world, really.
BL: Why did you decide to return to Southern California after being in DC?
ED: We had a baby boy and I wanted to be near my mom. My folks were still here and I wanted to raise our family in this environment because Southern California is different. You get to swim year round, you can wear shorts most of the time, you know? And I love DC, I loved being a young adult in DC in my 20s and 30s, but I really wanted my family to be raised back home. I’m a third-generation Californian and I wanted my two boys to experience that as well. I had a fairly large extended family in this area, and that’s awesome. I wanted to be near all that again. I missed it and that’s what brought me back.
BL: What unexpected challenges have you faced since you launched Crème?
ED: You know, the big COVID, right? We manufacture food so we were allowed to be open with distancing. It was rough on everybody. Personally, if I didn’t keep the bakery open, I wouldn’t be able to support the people who worked here. That weighed heavily on me because I wanted to make sure that this really unique group of people who worked here had income and could support their families. It wasn’t something we could do remotely; we had to be here and present. I would never have expected that kind of challenge of all the things I experienced over the years in retail and food. And so aside from that, everything else has been the usual challenges of what we should make, what’s our menu, what’s the retail pricing structure, all that kind of stuff. But I have enough experience to work through all those things. So COVID aside, there really haven’t been any unusual events that were difficult. We were about a year and a half old when that happened, and people kept coming. I’m really forever grateful that this community supported us through that.
BL: What items do you typically have on the shelves? How do you distinguish yourself from other bakeries?
ED: We do a complete line of viennoiserie, the laminated dough that we use to make our croissant and our chocolate croissant. I think the plain croissant is the best thing we make as far as pastry goes. But then we have yummy muffins and cookies and scones because those are all delicious and then a small, but really pretty and flavorful selection of cakes and tarts. We also have a really admirable selection of hearth breads, artisan breads, which use a really fine kind of flour from Central Mill in Northern California. We happen to use the sourdough starter from the first bakery I worked for in Washington, DC. I’m still in contact with the original owner and he sent us a dehydrated disk of his starter when we first received power here at the bakery and we reconstituted it. So that starter now is 38 years old. Isn’t that amazing? So I’m very proud of that. There’s not a lot of bakeries that make hearth bread out here in this part of town.
BL: How did you come to formulate Crème’s menu? Did you have any specific influences?
ED: If you were to travel to most community-focused bakeries, you would find category selections like this. I have the fortunate gift of traveling all over the world for food. That was part of my job, so I’ve seen a lot of food retail. I placed those in that magic world I was creating, like, ‘I want to do that or that was super delicious.’ But I also love reading cookbooks, food journals, food literature and you say ‘oh, that looks interesting.’ We make something that I tasted in a bakery in Northern California one time and it stuck with me, so I researched it and we made that. We also make really good vegan cookies because we should. And then we can offer that for our customers because I think we should have a broad selection of things to offer.
BL: What is your personal favorite item to bake? What would you recommend to a first-time customer?
ED: I get asked that all the time because I work the counter: ‘what’s your favorite item?’ That’s hard because truly, if I didn’t think of it as awesome, we wouldn’t make it. And I know that sounds silly, but I really like everything that we do. I think the best things we make and something I’ll reach for consistently is the plain croissant or chocolate croissant. But we also make this ginger scone. This scone recipe I use is from this book my sister gave me back when I first had my own apartment in DC, a teeny tiny scone and biscuit book. I can make it with my eyes closed. It has this crystallized ginger inside of a flavorful scone, which gives it this little burst of unexpected flavor. But really I would eat anything. I would and do eat anything that we make.
BL: How has your dream of opening a bakery evolved over the years? Is it what you expected when you initially started out?
ED: I would say for the most part, yes, because you can’t leave much to chance when you put this much on the line. The design, the build-out, the investment, is such that I planned everything, really. For me, failure, it wasn’t an option. We would figure it out. But I think with a lot of good planning and thoughtful steps that you put into a production like this, you tend to catch any issues before it happens. I think that’s fair to say.
BL: How do you envision the future of Crème Bakery?
ED: I hope it goes on forever and ever. I’m going to be 60 this year. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop with my age or any of our other ages. It’s established to the point where it operates on its own and I hope that it does for a very long time.
