Perfect pastries

Patrick Novak is the Willy Wonka of frozen pastries.

Novak, chief executive officer of French Gourmet Frozen Dough, bustles about the company's manufacturing and distribution facility in Sparks much like the fictional candy-making genius Wonka: fine-tuning a temperature dial here, adjusting a flour mix there, and examining every process and action with a scrutinous eye.

French Gourmet makes a wide range of freshly frozen dough products croissants, puff pastries, strudels, muffins and bread for the food-service industry. The company's main customers include cruise lines, upscale hotels and gourmet food stores who bake the products for fresh morning offerings.

The French Gourmet brand, a Nevada entity formed in 2011, was first created in 1984 on the island of Oahu.

The company has 65 distributors throughout the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore and Guam. The United States is the company's largest market, primarily because of the costs of shipping.

Shipping costs, along with extremely high energy rates, led Novak to shutter operations in Honolulu. He says the difference in power costs are about 26 cents per kilowatt, and Reno-Sparks also is ideally located near the company's strong West Coast customer base.

"Coming to Reno-Sparks is going to help us recapture market share that has been really weak for us," Novak says. "The Reno-Sparks region makes sense for any business."

Novak scouted several locations to house the new French Gourmet plant. Building in California was out of the question, he says, so he looked hard at the Reno area and at Texas. Shipping costs from the Lone Star State to West Coast customers would have been prohibitive, though, so he began looking for warehouse locations in Reno-Sparks with Mike Hoeck of NAI Alliance.

After settling on an empty warehouse at 245 Coney Island Drive, Novak estimates he spent about 14 hours a day for a solid week working with Stan Thomas and the team from Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada to line up financing for new equipment, a business bank, refrigeration and trucking companies, and contractors to perform the extensive renovations required to transform an aging industrial building into a modern pastry production center that's on pace to turn out more than 150 million pastries per year.

Novak says he had not been to the Reno-Sparks area in more than 20 years, and he hardly recognized the town after its many changes over the past two decades.

"I was pleasantly surprised," he says. "I was amazed at how clean the town was no graffiti, and the biggest impact was how kind and polite people are."

Novak purchased the 78,000-square foot warehouse building, but the company currently is using just 50,000 square feet. French Gourmet has two expansion plans in the works over the next five years to occupy the entire facility through the installation of two more pastry production lines.

Nine employees packed up their surfboards and leis and made the transition to northern Nevada. The company currently employs 64 and expects to hire up to 18 additional employees by the end of 2012.

The transition to Nevada was difficult on several fronts. One of the biggest challenges was the scope of tenant improvements and new equipment a roughly $18 million tab that were needed to modernize the drab building. First Independent Bank financed the project, Novak says.

Devcon Construction was the general contractor on the buildout of French Gourmet's facility. Devcon made a big push starting in June of 2011 to get much of the improvement work done before the end of that year so French Gourmet could qualify for tax credits on its equipment purchases and get them placed into service.

"There are some great contractors here, but Devcon really took the lead," Novak says. "If it wasn't for Devcon we wouldn't have made the deadline."

Doug Browne, Reno branch manager for Devcon, says the tight time frames and certain characteristics of the building made the job one of the more challenging in his long construction career.

Devcon employed a full-time architect and two project managers on the design-build job. Browne says Devcon was awarded the job in mid-July and had to quickly come up with plans, permitting and an elaborate equipment matrix.

Complicating the buildout was the fact that the building slab included an additional four feet of concrete to counter flooding from the Truckee River. Installing all the sub-floor plumbing meant demolition of five-and-a-half or more feet of concrete and dirt. Devcon also had to upgrade the building's power, install a grease interceptor, patch the roof and remove asbestos material. A great deal of waste piping and roof drainage also had corroded over time.

"Every layer we peeled back on that onion was more problems," Browne says. "We had a very brief design period and had to bring it into budget and still make it all mesh within a six-week period to get the final go on construction."

Construction crews worked 10-hour shifts six days a week to make project deadlines.

Plumbing alone was an exercise in coordination. Some equipment needed hot and cold water, steam, and normal and chilled ingredient water lines. Complicating installation was the fact that Novak purchased technological equipment from Europe, used a French engineering firm for installation, and had a Japanese firm install all the main equipment. There were 88 pieces of equipment that had to be coordinated with delivery and installation with all the right water, air, gas, pluming and piping for set up.

"We had an incredible architect and management team here, because that was something that could have fallen apart easily," Browne says.

Some manufacturing equipment was moved from Honolulu, but the majority of the production line was purchased new to modernize a host of manufacturing processes. French Gourmet began a two-phase move last year, establishing a warehousing, distribution and R&D presence in Reno by December before bringing the production process online this June.

A specialty engineering firm from France installed the dough-making operation, pastry production line, and dough rising and flash freeze rooms temperatures of minus 40 degrees quick-freeze the pastries prior to packaging. RHP Mechanical Systems performed the refrigeration work in the cold storage room, which is a constant minus 10 degrees. TME was the electrical contractor.

Many long-standing recipe formulas also had to be altered slightly to account for the additional 4,500 feet in elevation.

"It is a huge difference," Novak says.

SIDEBAR

French Gourmet by the numbers:

Tons of butter used per month: 120

Tons of flour used per month: 400

Average pieces of pastries shipped per year: 150 million