SF slice of life: French bread from a vending machine

Changing the world has never been easy, said the latest fellow seeking to do it, one loaf of French bread at a time.

“It will take a while,” sighed the man from France.

Benoit Hervé was standing in front of his newfangled Le Bread Xpress vending machine inside a Market Street food court the other morning, while a steady stream of new customers stubbornly refused to materialize.

The bread Hervé is seeking to sell is not particularly newfangled, but the vending machine dispensing it seems every bit as revolutionary a contraption as the guillotine. A customer inserts $4.25 and the machine whirrs and clunks and makes a lot of other noises. Then it either bakes a loaf of French bread on the spot, which takes nine minutes, or dispenses a warm loaf that it just baked, which takes only seconds.

The machine is about the size of one of those French coin-operated pay toilets just down the street. Inside its metal frame is a refrigerator to store the chilled dough, an oven that bakes the 22-inch loaves at precisely 446 degrees and a series of Rube Goldberg contraptions that move the bread from the fridge to the oven to the delivery chute.

“That’s the technology part,” said Hervé, who is the company founder and CEO, and often the fellow who restocks the machine with fresh dough at night. “That part doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is whether the bread is any good.”

By now, a quarter of an hour had elapsed while Hervé had been talking and still there were no customers. In sympathy, The Chronicle inserted $4.25. Moments later, a warm loaf of bread appeared in the delivery window. It tasted good, even though reporters will eat anything. It didn’t taste as good as if it had come from a boulangerie on the Left Bank, but that could be because nearly everything on the Left Bank tastes better than nearly anything anywhere else.

The machine uses a secret recipe, from France. The chilled loaves are prepared in a Burlingame bakery to the company’s specifications. Hervé won’t say what those are, but he did say that he considered 100 different varieties of flour before making his selection.

Speaking in low tones, the CEO said the other ingredients are water, salt and leavening. Exactly how much of each is one of those things that the French guard more closely than that painting in the Louvre of the smiling lady.

As for opening the machine to show off its inner workings, Hervé didn’t want to do that either. There were secrets inside. People don’t like it when you show them too much, he said. The French have a mystique about mystique.

Inside the machine, just visible behind the window, was an unsold loaf from the day before. The machine had dropped it into its trash bin — it’s programmed to throw away any bread that hasn’t sold within two hours of baking. Hervé said he’d be taking that loaf home.

“I’ll eat it myself,” he said. “It’s still good.”

The machine has been open to the public inside the Myriad food court at 2175 Market St. for about a month. So far, it’s the only one in the U.S., Hervé said, although there are a few dozen in France. After it catches on, he plans to install more, all over the place. Assuming it catches on.

It was then that Karen Konecky spotted the machine and paid a visit. Hervé spent several minutes explaining the concept and Konecky listened politely, nodded and smiled. Then she left, without buying a loaf.

“I was on my way to the hardware store to buy a wrench,” she said. “A wrench is what I’m interested in today. It’s not the same as a loaf of bread.”

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com