Ladurée and Pierre Hermé: two different businesses now
Ladurée's own history page traces the house back to a bakery opened at 16 Rue Royale in Paris in 1862, with the double-shell macaron credited to Pierre Desfontaines, a cousin of the founder, some decades later. What that history page also confirms is what changed since: the Holder family took over Ladurée in 1993, expanded it into a global retail chain with close to 100 addresses including Harrods, New York and Tokyo, and the house joined the LOV Group in March 2021. Ladurée today is a well-run, quality-controlled international pastry brand, but it is a retail group first — the macaron you buy in a Paris boutique or an airport counter went through the same commercial supply chain either way.
Pierre Hermé is a different model: a working pastry chef's own signed brand, built on Hermé's own recipes and technique rather than a licensed heritage name. The meaningful difference for a shopper is not which tastes better, since both are genuinely well-made, but which price you are paying for a brand-managed product versus a chef-led one. Both are sold at similar prices per macaron, so choosing between them is a matter of taste, not value.
Fauchon: an épicerie fine that became a license
Fauchon traces itself to Auguste Fauchon, who opened his shop on Place de la Madeleine, with the house's own social pages dating the founding to 1886. Fauchon's official description positions it around épicerie fine (truffle, foie gras, caviar, and now a broad sweet and savoury range), but like Ladurée, the name today operates as a branded retail and licensing business with stores well beyond its original Paris address, including a recent expansion into New York. A Fauchon product bought at the flagship, at a French supermarket under license, or abroad is manufactured to the same brand standard rather than made on-site in small batches, which is worth knowing before paying a Madeleine-address premium for something also sold elsewhere.
Maille, Bonne Maman and Président: honest mass production
These three are the clearest case of a well-made, entirely legitimate French product that is also, unambiguously, industrial food production owned by a multinational or a large agri-food group.
- Maille: Unilever's own brand page states the mustard house dates to 1747 and is now a Unilever-owned brand; the Dijon boutique still offers mustard drawn to order from a tap, but the jars on supermarket shelves are made at industrial scale.
- Président: Président's own site states the brand was founded in 1933 in the Loire Valley and describes itself as France's leading Brie brand; it belongs to Lactalis, one of the world's largest dairy groups, and several Président products carry a genuine AOP designation (Brie de Meaux, for example) even though the parent company is a large industrial producer.
- Bonne Maman: made by the Andros group, a major French food company; it is a genuinely popular, well-liked jam across France and widely exported already, so it rarely counts as a distinctive find.
None of this is a quality complaint — Maille's Dijon original mustard and Président's AOP cheeses are both good products. The point for a shopper is that none of these need to be bought at a tourist-facing boutique or airport shop, since the identical product, made in the identical factory, sits on a nearby supermarket shelf for less.
Here is a quick comparison of where each brand actually sits.
| Brand | What it is today | Where to buy it |
|---|---|---|
| Pierre Hermé | Chef-led specialist pastry | Boutique, eat within days |
| Ladurée, Fauchon | Heritage name, global retail brand | Any branch; airport price is a premium |
| Maille, Bonne Maman, Président | Industrial brand, large parent group | Ordinary supermarket, cheapest |
Valrhona: the one genuine industry specialist
Valrhona is the exception worth knowing. According to the company's own 100-year history, it began in 1922 as the Chocolaterie du Vivarais in Tain-l'Hermitage, in the Rhône valley, founded by a pastry maker who roasted his own cocoa beans and supplied other confectioners and pastry chefs. Valrhona has grown considerably since, but it remains fundamentally a couverture chocolate maker built to supply professional pastry chefs and chocolatiers, which is why its bars are sold in fewer, more specialist retail locations than Ladurée or Fauchon products.
What survives the trip home
Fresh pastry items — macarons, éclairs, delicate boxed cakes — are the weakest souvenir choice regardless of which house made them, since they are formulated for consumption within days and do not tolerate a long-haul flight's temperature swings or luggage handling. Packaged goods travel far better: a sealed jar of mustard or jam, a vacuum-packed hard cheese, or a boxed chocolate bar will generally survive checked or carry-on luggage without special handling.
Airport, supermarket or specialist counter
Where you buy matters as much as what you buy, since the same jar or bar can sit at three very different prices within a few kilometres of each other in Paris. An airport boutique carries the highest markup of the three, driven by rent and a captive, time-pressured customer rather than by any difference in the product itself; treat it as a last-resort option for something you forgot, not a planned purchase. A neighbourhood supermarket (Monoprix, Carrefour, Franprix) sells Maille, Bonne Maman, Président and most Valrhona baking bars at close to the manufacturer's intended retail price, which makes it the rational default for anything on a shelf rather than behind a counter.
A specialist counter — an independent fromager, chocolatier, or wine merchant rather than a branded boutique — is worth the premium specifically when the product is not available packaged at a supermarket at all, such as a cheese cut and wrapped to order, or a chocolatier's own small-batch bonbons rather than a mass-produced bar. The decision rule is simple: buy branded packaged goods at the supermarket, and reserve specialist-counter spending for products that genuinely cannot be bought any other way.
Customs rules for dairy and meat leaving the EU
Rules for carrying French dairy or meat products depend entirely on your destination country's customs authority, not on France, so confirm the current rule with your own government's customs or agriculture agency before packing either. As one widely used example, the United States' Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service states that solid hard or soft cheeses (excluding anything that pours like a liquid, such as ricotta) may enter the US from any country, with no special documentation required — a useful baseline given that a wheel of French Comté or a wedge of Président Brie is exactly this kind of solid cheese.
What this guide does not cover
This is a guide to brand reputation and border rules, not to specific store locations, current prices, or the many smaller Parisian producers (a neighbourhood fromager, a small chocolatier) that fall outside these well-known names entirely. It also does not cover customs rules for entering other EU countries, since goods generally move freely within the EU without the restrictions described above.