Gagné Foods has shown phenomenal growth over the past four years, and our planned expansion for the near future has us poised for growing our national distribution.

In the beginning, while cooking some 30 years ago and 600 miles south in Virginia, Chef Michael Gagné wanted to add a biscuit to his restaurant's nightly bread basket. His recipe evolved from a traditional southern lard-based "beaten" biscuit to a "dropped" biscuit, neither achieving the desired quality. Chef Gagné thought the problem might be the ingredients and changed the lard to cream cheese and butter, arriving at the flavor he wanted, but not the texture. He tried folding the dough, taking the lessons learned from the French croissant and puff pastry production and arrived at 72 layers, a magic number. He achieved the fluffiest, most scrumptious biscuit in the world.

The first biscuits to be sold from Chef Gagné's Robinhood Free Meetinghouse restaurant in Maine were a baker's dozen, wrapped in butcher paper. The only clients in the biscuits' early days were neighbors out walking their dogs and, of course, the restaurant's patrons. As interest grew, the talented chef obtained a loan from a local bank, developed packaging, and earned contracts with a few nationally distributed catalog companies like Stonewall Kitchen. Gagné Foods had found its way into the regional retail market.

The "Biscuiteers" hit the road and made deliveries all over Maine to Bed and Breakfasts and small purveyors. The biscuits became very popular along the coast, and Chef Gagné saw an emerging business opportunity. Maine summer time visitors started asking their local markets back home for the biscuits. Simultaneously, the biscuits caught the eye of gourmet catalog and on line retailers and the Gagné Biscuiteers began shipping biscuits nationwide. Orders grew from a few a week, to a few a day, to hundreds a day over the Holidays.

After the success of his Classic Plain Biscuit recipe, Chef Gagné created his savory Five Herb Parmesan Cream Cheese Biscuit and sweet Cream Cheese Cinnamon Roll. Winning the 2006 gold award at the NASFT Fancy Food Show in New York propelled the humble biscuit onto the national culinary map.

In 2006, Gagné Foods gained the additional help of Michael's father René (Pepere), brother David and daughter Somerset to form a true family-run company. In January 2007, Gagné Foods moved the biscuit operation from the back kitchen of the Meetinghouse to a state-of-the-art custom manufacturing facility in Bath, Maine. Today, all three of Chef Gagné's products are being distributed from coast to coast. America's love affair with our sinful biscuits has officially begun.

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