Our Story

Henry, founder of Exanas, at his bakery in Lyon, France

Your bread is fine. Your recipe is fine. It's the bag.

My name is Henry. For twenty-four years I ran a small boulangerie in Lyon, France. The bread was never the hard part. The question I could never answer fast enough came from customers at the counter: “Henry — how do I keep it like this at home?”

By the door of my bakery I always kept a stack of folded cotton cloths, pressed with real beeswax. People carried their bread home in them. It's what my mother used, and her mother before her. Long before plastic, this was simply how bread was kept — in France, in Germany, in Italy. The wax worked into the cloth lets a loaf breathe slowly: enough moisture leaves that mould never takes hold, enough stays that the crumb never dries. Crust crisp, inside soft — for days.

Then the messages started. Travelers who'd visited the bakery, home bakers from abroad — all saying the same thing. They'd gone looking for these cloths online and bought something that molded in three days, flaked wax onto the crust, or turned out to be plastic underneath. They'd decided beeswax bags simply don't work — when the truth is they'd never held a real one. In those bags the wax is sprayed on the surface, for the label. One fold cracks it. One wash washes it out.

That bothered me more than it should have. A two-hundred-year-old method, reduced to a coating sprayed on for a photograph.

So I started Exanas — to make the real thing, and put it back in the hands of the people who'd given up on it. We saturate organic cotton with real beeswax, pressed into the fibers at low heat until the wax becomes part of the fabric — not sitting on top of it. No surface spray. No hidden plastic. You can see the amber run all the way through the cloth. You can feel it the moment you fold one. It does not flake. It does not wash out. The cloth in my own kitchen is nine years old and still does its job.

I did not start this to sell bags. I started it because I spent twenty years watching good bakers blame themselves — their recipe, their flour, their oven — for bread that was only ever failing in storage.

Your recipe is fine. Your bread is fine. It was the bag.

Bake your loaf. Keep it real — crisp outside, soft inside, all week.

— Henry · Founder, Exanas · Baker, Lyon, France