At TOC, the masterclass as a driver of community engagement

Recently, the TOC Paris Les Halles store hosted a pastry masterclass organised in partnership with De Buyer Industrieand VoilaChef, on the occasion of the launch of De Buyer’s new pastry sheeter. Designed and orchestrated by Lionel Debus, CEO of Epicuria, the company behind the TOC retail network, the event transformed the Parisian flagship—housed in an iconic Haussmann-style building—into a true laboratory of culinary experiences for one evening.

During the session, VoilaChef took over one of Paris’s most beautiful culinary retail spaces to give tangible form to its vision of transmission. Moving beyond the digital sphere, the platform brought its founding mission into real-life conditions: sharing gestures, techniques and the know-how of leading French pastry chefs and bakers with a community of both enthusiasts and professionals. With more than 120 structured courses, over forty recognised chefs and a catalogue of more than 900 educational videos, VoilaChef promotes a rigorous approach focused on precision of movement, technical understanding and attention to detail.

Led by pastry chef Desty Brami, the masterclass centred on De Buyer’s new pastry sheeter, recently introduced in-store. Guests were immersed in the techniques of laminated doughs and sweet pastries through two emblematic creations: a chocolate tart and a praline mille-feuille. Conceived as a live demonstration, the session allowed participants to fully grasp both the relevance of the tool and its practical benefits—through observation of the gesture as well as hands-on use.

The deliberately small group format encouraged transmission, dialogue and genuine proximity between chefs, clients, journalists and influencers. The initial ambition was to design an event rooted in the transmission of craft, highlighting the tool and its concrete use, capable of bringing together communities driven by a shared passion for pastry. Born from an initial digital connection, the partnership between TOC and VoilaChef here found a fully embodied expression through a physical encounter focused on essentials: bringing people together around living know-how.

The approach clearly resonated with professionals and amateurs alike. Organised outside regular opening hours, the event offered attending clients, brand teams, store management and journalists the feeling of being truly privileged. This configuration fostered meaningful exchanges, where individual paths and perspectives naturally intersected.

Buoyed by the success of this initiative, the TOC network is considering repeating this type of event. Through these masterclasses, the brand strengthens its positioning as a meeting place for enthusiasts, where transmission, product excellence and shared emotion take precedence over purely commercial logic. Broadcast live on social media, the event also extended the visibility of TOC, De Buyer and VoilaChef, prolonging the experience well beyond the store walls and embedding it within a coherent digital outreach strategy aligned with its origins.

400 km away, in the workshops of the De Buyer factory

A few months earlier, we travelled to the Vosges, at the heart of the De Buyer workshops. It was there that Philippe Laruelle, the brand’s Executive Chef and a member of the Maîtres Cuisiniers de France, revealed to us the genesis of this new dough sheeter, born out of a pragmatic reflection on real-world use. In a market still largely dominated by bulky, costly electric models—often priced around €2,000 and poorly suited to versatile use—De Buyer chose a different path: developing a manual, compact and durable alternative, made in France, capable of handling all types of doughs, from laminated pastry to pizza and more technical preparations.

Entirely made of stainless steel, the sheeter combines robustness with immediate ergonomics. Its adjustment system, inspired by the brand’s “Swing” mandoline, offers ten thickness settings per half turn—twenty levels in total—with sufficiently wide rollers to begin laminating gently. The deliberately oversized design, with tolerances of up to 4 mm, ensures strength and longevity, even in demanding professional environments.

Thanks to its stability, low height and ability to adapt to both narrow worktops and large professional kitchen counters, the sheeter meets the practical constraints of everyday use. Reversible in operation, it allows dough to be worked without unnecessary handling, preserving structure and consistency. With a working width of 24 cm, it accommodates tart bases of up to 30 cm, covering a wide range of pastry applications.

Designed for easy cleaning and fast maintenance, it also meets hygiene requirements. Each unit is hand-assembled in the De Buyer workshops from more than 90 components and requires an average of 22 minutes of production—true industrial craftsmanship, punctuated by precise adjustments and successive quality checks to ensure consistent reliability and performance.

Priced at a recommended retail price of €399 including VAT, the pastry sheeter reflects De Buyer’s commitment to making professional, durable and repairable tools accessible. True to its role as a manufacturer, the brand guarantees the availability of spare parts, each individually replaceable in case of wear, anchoring the product in a long-term logic free from planned obsolescence.

Source: Home Fashion News January26