From Skopje, with flour from France
The story of the Pan Pan team's training in Paris with a Foricher master baker, and the Label Rouge flour that came out of that connection.
Pan Pan is a bakery in Skopje, but part of its craft has a starting point much further away - in Paris. The Pan Pan team trained there with a Foricher master baker, the French mill whose flour we still use today, part of it Label Rouge certified.
The connection isn’t a coincidence. Foricher isn’t just a supplier - it’s a mill Pan Pan has a direct working relationship with, close enough that their master baker personally passed on knowledge to our team. The training in Paris wasn’t just about recipes. It was about understanding the flour itself - how it absorbs water, how the dough behaves through different stages of fermentation, how it reacts to heat in the oven. That’s knowledge you don’t get from a book - it passes hand to hand, in a bakery, next to an oven.
Label Rouge, the mark carried by part of this flour, is a French quality system that exists independently of Pan Pan - a third party confirms that the raw material and the production process meet stricter conditions than the standard. For us, it’s a sign that the choice of flour isn’t arbitrary, but the result of a specific relationship with a mill whose process we know firsthand, through our own training there.
What came back from Paris to Skopje isn’t just technique - it’s a way of thinking about the craft: patience with the dough, attention to details that are easy to skip, and respect for the raw material above everything else. Every loaf and pastry that comes out of our production carries a trace of that training, even when it isn’t obvious at first glance.
Skopje and Paris look far apart, but in Pan Pan’s case, they’re connected through one concrete thing - a bag of flour and the knowledge of how to work with it. That’s the story behind every piece of bread that comes out of our bakery: local work, built on training and raw material that come from elsewhere, yet baked right here, in Skopje, every day.
If you’d like to learn more about the flour or the craft behind our products, feel free to ask in one of our shops - the team is happy to tell you more about the road that got us here.