Sucre made a call for itself with sweet treats and excessive style because the New Orleans food scene made over after Hurricane Katrina. On Monday but, the local dessert emblem suddenly closed the lid on the chocolate container for proper.
Sucre’s three shops and the wholesale operation that furnished confections for the retail marketplace have all close down, the organization said in a quick press release.
“Over the beyond yr, our govt crew has operated in an accountable manner and has tried to carry the employer to financial profitability,” it said, in part. “It is with profound sadness that we should notify you that we’re last effective Monday.”
Hans Baumann, Sucre’s CEO, did no longer reply to a request for a similar comment.
The selection to shut appears to have come quick. As currently as a final week, Sucre turned into posting employment commercials for “qualified, committed tough employees to enroll in our chocolate group and pastry crew.”
On Monday morning, people may be seen thru the glass doorways of the business enterprise’s Metairie area, getting rid of inventory from cabinets and beginning to dismantle fixtures.
Once an online catalog of its products and present containers, the company’s web page clearly has a message saying the closure. It says the organization “will paintings diligently to return payment for any order that has been placed on our internet site within the final seventy-two hours.”
The news marks the give up of a 12-yr run for Sucre, founded in 2007 by way of local caterer Joel Dondis and pastry chef Tariq Hanna, who have become the general public face of the employer.
The closure comes on the heels of tumult for Sucre. Hanna resigned in August, blaming, at the time, a loss of “creative juices.” In December, but an investigative record from The Times-Picayune delivered to mild sexual harassment allegations in opposition to Hanna, with a few Sucre employees claiming abuses of electricity with the famous chef’s aid. Other employees, however, portrayed the allegations towards Hanna as a “smear” activity. Dondis had left the employer years earlier, consistent with that document.
When Sucre started, New Orleans was still suffering in the aftermath of Katrina. However, in the food world, it changed into a fertile time for brand spanking new expertise and new manufacturers to make their mark.
Sucre debuted at 3025 Magazine St., in a former garb boutique. After a suggested $1 million maintenance, the building becomes a jewel box of cutting-edge style, with sinuous contours and instances filled with confections and gelato.
The idea turned into pitched as a dessert emporium, a vacation spot for midday treats or plated cakes after dinner, and as a supplier of distinctiveness confections via the container. French macarons, puffy little sandwiches of meringue, have been the calling card. Soon Sucre positioned its stamp on king cake, serving one with an iridescent icing.
Broader retail goals were baked in from the start. In 2008, 12 months after its debut, the enterprise opened a brand new manufacturing facility in Gert Town as a part of what is defined at the time as “section II of its country wide rollout plan.” It announced plans to deliver hotels and food provider stores and expand new shops in Baton Rouge, Houston, and Dallas.
The brand’s footprint could eventually grow but might stay neighborhood, with expansions in 2010 in Metairie and 2014 within the French Quarter, where it operated a dessert parlor. Additionally, a full-provider eating place is referred to as Salon by way of Sucre. The logo mounted retail kiosks at Louis Armstrong International Airport, and its products have been broadly stocked in groceries together with Rouses and Whole Foods Market.
In 2013, the corporation experimented with exporting its confections, checking out the Singapore marketplace first below Sucre New Orleans’s name.
Closer to domestic, the agency frequently partnered with different manufacturers. During Carnival season in 2016, as an example, Sucre struck a deal with United Cabs to supply its king desserts around the metropolis.
As a non-public business enterprise, details about Sucre’s operating situation have been scant. A 2016 profile through Inc. Mag mentioned the agency’s revenue for 2015 at $five.Eight million.
Last 12 months, the fallout from the fall apart of New Orleans-primarily based First NBC Bank ensnared Sucre in a complicated lawsuit, although it would not seem to have played a direct part in the corporation’s death.
Normand Pizza, a lawyer at Milling Benson Woodward, which represented Sucre in the dispute, said Sucre had at the beginning leased its French Quarter area, at 622 Conti St., from Gregory St. Angelo, First NBC’s former pinnacle lawyer.
