23/09/2026
Anyone remembered my Normand Egg Sandwich when I first started my bakery?
I remember having a steady stream of regular customers coming back for this white, dense, soft bread with egg. What many probably didn’t know was that the bread was actually a disguise. It came from a very old historical bread from Normandy called Pain Brier. Instead of making it in its traditional form, I shoved the dough into a toast box. Why? Because I was trying to make bread look like bread in my hood. Back then, the bread most people around me recognised was square, soft and came out of a tin. So rather than spending all my energy explaining what Pain Brier was supposed to look like, I borrowed a familiar shape. The outside spoke a language people already understood; inside was still the bread I wanted to make.
Many years later, I’m bringing it back for quite a different reason. We now have a vending machine. When my manager first bought it and dressed the whole machine up with our logo and pictures, I became quite excited—not so much about owning a vending machine, but about having something new to bake for. Our first experiment was inspired by the Tunisian chapati fold I encountered during my travels. We made ours with chicken, thinking it would work well as a quick snack at the tennis centre where the machine is located. It was okay, but perhaps not immediately relatable to local customers. Meanwhile, our sourdough breadcrumb muffins quietly did better. Sweet, cheap, filling. People understood them without needing us to explain anything.
That made me rethink the machine itself. A vending machine shouldn’t simply be a smaller version of our bakery, filled with whatever we already happen to make. It has its own conditions. Somebody is hungry, perhaps rushing for a train, finishing tennis, going to work or heading home. They don’t necessarily want a bakery experience. They want something cheap, fast and filling.
And suddenly my old Normand Bread made sense again. So Pain Brier is going back into the toast box, this time to kiap egg and tuna. Normand Egg Sandwich is coming back, together with a Normand Tuna Sandwich. I’m seeing more vending machines sprouting around MRT and LRT stations, and I’m curious about what these machines could become if we stopped treating them merely as another place to sell things. Having one to test-drive gives me a little laboratory: make something, put it inside, watch what people actually choose, learn, change it, make again.
Don’t make something and hope people need it. Make it until people need it.
