Ba-Le moves on to its second course - Business Courier of Cincinnati:

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Lam recently launched a bakery brane that he hopes to expand into a concept for anew restaurant. He’s also beefing up Ba-Le’x wholesale customer base to include more restaurantsand stores. And earlier this he bought the cavernous old Weyerhaeuset box plant on Nimitz Highwayfor $20 He plans to move Ba-Le’s main bakery and officesw into the space and to rent the rest to otheer restaurants. “I want to make it sort of likeRestaurangt Row,” he said. That’s prettyy ambitious talk in the shadow ofa recession, especially in the turbulenr restaurant business. Ba-Le hasn’t been immune; the company recently cut the hoursz of its80 full-time bakerty workers.
To Lam, that just means he has to find more busines s to keep hisemployees busy. “People have told me that a bad economyt is a good time to make said Lam, 51, whose privately ownedd company generated $11 million in revenue last year. Earlier this the company created the LaTour Bakehouse name to focus on healthietr and more upscale bakery suchas multi-grain breads, granola, sugar-free cookies and biscotti-like It’s a significant shift from Ba-Le’s cheapeer noodles-and-wraps fare. “People of Hawaii think of Ba-Lw as just sandwiches,” he said.
Ba-Le has two its chain of 21 franchisedd Vietnamese-style restaurants, and its wholesale business, which sells bakery items and pre-made sandwiches to restaurants, hotels and The European name stems fromthe company’s use of Frencj breads and croissants for its Ba-Le’s biggest customers include Papa John’s Hawaii — Ba-Le suppliee all the pizza dough for the chain’d 14 stores — and , which buys up to 2,50o sandwiches a day for in-flight meals. The compant started selling some of the LaTour Bakehouse products online and to wholesale including inKahala Mall.
Lam wants to open three or four shops on Oahu to carry the LaTour items andsell made-to-order foods including saladsd and soups. He also sees the new concepyt as an opportunity to create a more traditionalp franchise chain apart fromthe Ba-Le Despite the company’s success over the past 24 years, Lam admitse Ba-Le has struggled with inconsistent food and service at its There are no set standardds or menus and maintaining qualithy has been an issue. “When I started opening more andmore Ba-Ld restaurants, I didn’t plan to he said. “I was opening them for my friendsand employees, and it just happened.
I feel a littl e bit unhappy when I hear from customers that one restaurantr is not as good as He said the company recently closed a Kapolei store becausse ofinconsistent quality. Ba-Le now has 16 storezs on Oahu, four on Maui, and one in Kona on the Big Lam operatesthe Ba-Le shop on the campue in Manoa, while the rest of the store s are franchises owned mostly by relatives and former Rather than try to reinvent the Ba-Le Lam said it makeds more sense for him to staryt over with LaTour Bakehouse. He wants to creatr a standardized product line and store appearance for thenew “From the first it will have to be he said.
“They all have to be the same, follow ruleas and sell the same things. I want LaTourt to be a more traditionalo franchise.”