Munchery Names La Boulange Founder Pascal Rigo 'Chief Customer Experience Officer'

Pascal Rigo is on top of his game. Less than a week after triumphantly bringing La Boulange back to San Francisco, Rigo is adding another title to his list (right after "hero"): Munchery’s Chief Customer Experience Officer. As CCEO, Rigo will focus on the company’s food quality through bringing in more chef talent for partnerships, developing original recipes himself and even making La Boulangerie products available to the brand. "What we’re trying to do is figure out is, how do you bring great food to people at home at scale?," he told Eater. "That’s really why I'm here with Munchery today; it’s how do we go to the next step? How do we go from talking about thousands of deliveries every day to tens or hundreds of thousands of deliveries every day?"

If the move seems somewhat confusing to you, here’s how to make sense of it: Two of Rigo’s former La Boulange colleagues joined Munchery in the last year — Nicolas Bernadi as VP of Food and Robert Cubberly as Head of Research and Development — and Rigo served as SVP of Food at Starbucks while he was there. Combined, the three men have major experience taking a small brand and making it very, very, very big — after founding La Boulange in 1996, Starbucks bought it for $100 million in 2012. And now Munchery wants them to do the same for the fledgling start-up that’s competing in a very crowded field of Blue Aprons and Plateds.

"As soon as I left Starbucks, they [Munchery] were the first people to call me, and I was thrilled about the opportunity. Great food delivered, made by chefs and with a great mix of technology — I think that’s really how we'll bring great food to a lot of people in this country," Rigo said. "For me it’s not two different things where I need to have two hats. It’s really thinking about bringing wonderful food at the right price to the people of San Francisco, and that's what drives me."