Is Paris Baguette really any better outside Korea?
EDMONTON, Canada — Despite its worldwide proliferation, the Korea-headquartered Paris Baguette (PB) bakery chain still gets a lot of flak in Korea, especially among foreign residents. Overly sweetened, inauthentic, low quality, these are the most frequent complaints lobbed at the 1988-founded company. Who puts sugar on garlic bread? Shouldn't pretzels be covered in salt, not sugar? Does PB even have baguettes? My first visit to a PB was probably in the late 2000s. I gravitated, as a stereotypical white person, toward a pastry with a hot dog sticking out of it and condiments that resembled ketchup and mustard on top, seemingly baked into it. After that experience, I only ever went a few more times, then stopped going to PB for a very long time. Many, like me, scoffed when PB began its overseas expansion, arriving first in Shanghai in 2004, then Los Angeles in 2005 and, after many other markets along the way, Paris itself in 2014. An audacious move that many consumers expected would not end well. But it must be doing something right, after celebrating the opening of its 600th overseas s
Jun 30, 2025By Jon Dunbar
