Dominique Ansel, creator of the viral Cronut pastry, reflects on whether viral success can be engineered or planned.
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“Even if you give me all the money of the world tomorrow, you cannot plan for this. You cannot expect the same You know, kind of, like, frenzy. You cannot, like, you know, inception people into liking the idea or not. They like it or not, for X, Y, Z, and again, for a million reasons, it went viral. You cannot, like, give me all the money of the world and expect me to recreate something that goes viral. I have some great ideas, for sure. What goes viral or not, at the end of the day, it's not me who decides.”
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More from Dominique Ansel
Opinion
Ansel: Bread should be priced higher given the required labor
“By nature, in France, people think that bread should be cheap. And I, you know, I don't believe in that. I believe the bread should be a little bit more expensive. It takes so much labor and so much time.”
Ansel imported expensive French butter and flour during COVID to stand out
“During COVID, everything gone up.
All the pricing gone up everywhere.
And I decided to import my butter and my flour from France.
No, it's not cheaper.
It's a lot more expensive.
But you differentiate yourself from the competition because the quality of the in…”
The Cronut went viral because consumers could instantly visualize the product
“I think, first, like, the name is cool. The simplicity of, like, when you look at it looks like a donut. When you hear about it, It's croissant and donut, so you can visualize it without even eating.”
Ansel lost friendships enforcing a strict no-VIP line policy for Cronuts
“Yes, I mean, I lost a few friends in the process, but I wanted to be true to myself, you know. I was out of respect of people coming as early as two o'clock in the morning. If you want to try, you have to go in line.”
Ansel refused to mass-produce and ship frozen Cronuts worldwide
“I don't want to run a factory, you know, producing like a million cornets every day and ship it frozen around the world. It's, I don't believe in that.”
Ansel can diagnose baking and fermentation issues just from a croissant photo
“I can just, you know, just looking at a cross-section of a croissant, I can tell you if it was baked properly, if it was proved properly. If there's an issue with the baking, if there's an issue with the fermentation, I can pinpoint this by just looking at the…”
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