A crêpe left too long on the griddle.

Gavottes is a brand of crêpe dentelle, the very thin, rolled and crisp Breton crêpe. The name and the product are so closely linked that French Wikipedia says “gavotte” is used for the crêpe itself, a brand name turned into an everyday word. The crêpes are now made in the Côtes-d’Armor, near Dinan, but the brand’s story begins at the other end of Brittany, in Quimper.

The company tells that story in two dates. In 1886, it says, Marie-Catherine Cornic, in her crêperie in the centre of Quimper, left a crêpe on her griddle a little longer than usual, then folded it, rolled it and tasted it, and found it crisper and lighter than ever. In 1920, it says, came “the first Gavottes biscuiterie,” with production taken up by many crêpe makers who repeated her gesture by hand. In January 2020 the newspaper 20 Minutes marked the brand’s centenary, reporting that the Gavottes story began in 1920 in the Loc Maria quarter of Quimper.

French Wikipedia treats the 1886 account with more caution. Its article on the crêpe dentelle presents the accidental invention as a story that is told rather than a recorded event, notes that a book of 1835 already praised the “crêpes-dentelles” of Morlaix and Quimper — soft rather than crisp — and concludes that Cornic was more probably behind the crêpe’s industrial sale towards the end of the nineteenth century. It says the factories of that time stood in Quimper’s historic Locmaria quarter, where crêpes were baked on inclined griddles over charcoal before the first gas-heated plates, and that a street in Quimper is named after Katell Cornic, as she was known.

Loc Maria Biscuits and the Galapagos group.

Today Gavottes belongs to Loc Maria Biscuits, based at Dinan, which is part of Galapagos, a family-owned biscuit group of Breton origin with its head office in Rennes. French Wikipedia gives two starting points for the group: a founding by Christian Tacquard in 1983, and a creation in 1990, when he and his wife bought the Loc Maria biscuit factory at Dinan. The regional business title Bretagne Économique wrote in July 2019 that the group had been held by the Tacquard family since 1994. The sources do not agree on a single date, so we give all three.

The group has grown through acquisitions. It bought Traou Mad, the maker of the galettes of Pont-Aven, in June 2012, Le Monde reported. In July 2019 it brought its biscuit businesses — Traou Mad, Gavottes and the organic maker Moulin du Pivert — and their eight factories together in a new company, Galapagos Gourmet, led by Aurélie Tacquard, with Unexo, a Crédit Agricole subsidiary, and Arkéa Capital, part of Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, each taking 15 per cent, according to Bretagne Économique and, as cited by French Wikipedia, Les Echos.

Bretagne Économique reported that Aurélie Tacquard had taken charge of Loc Maria Biscuits in March 2019, that Loc Maria Biscuits then comprised Gavottes at Dinan, Traou Mad at Pont-Aven and the chocolate maker Mademoiselle de Margaux, and that the new company’s eight factories had a capacity of 16,000 tonnes a year, with Gavottes and Traou Mad its leading brands.

In April 2021 20 Minutes reported that the group, already the owner of Gavottes and Traou Mad, had bought Maison Fossier, the maker of the biscuits roses de Reims. In 2023 it sold its pasta businesses to concentrate on biscuits, French Wikipedia says, and in May 2024 Le Figaro and Le Télégramme reported its purchase of the Paris luxury grocer Fauchon. French Wikipedia, citing Ouest-France, puts the group’s 2024 workforce at about 600.

Biscuits and the French pantry.

The seven brands in this group all sell biscuits, and they all come from one country, France: Bonne Maman, Gavottes, La Mère Poulard, Fossier, Traou Mad, La Trinitaine and Michel et Augustin. French biscuits in general sit at many different points in the trade, from the packet on a supermarket shelf to the tin sold in a regional shop or a town’s own bakery, and a single company can work at both ends at once.

A biscuit brand’s identity is usually carried by a recipe, a packet and a place, because the name on the front often points to a town, a region or a person even when the biscuit inside is made somewhere else, by someone else. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its biscuits are actually baked and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its biscuits are made and how its packaging came about — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Quimper to Lanvallay.

Gavottes is no longer made in Quimper. 20 Minutes reported in January 2020 that the crêpes were produced at a factory at Lanvallay, near Dinan, which turned out several thousand tonnes of biscuits a year, and that a third of Gavottes sales were made outside France; that weekend the brand was to be featured at the Élysée Palace in the “Fabriqué en France” exhibition of French-made products. Aurélie Tacquard told the paper that the recipe had not changed, even if the product had evolved, and the range now runs from chocolate and caramel versions to a savoury line for aperitifs.

The company gives figures for its own scale. It says it uses 2,400 tonnes of flour a year, from wheat grown in France and milled in French regions, and 400 tonnes of butter, and that it produces more than a billion crêpes dentelle a year; those are its own claims. Its website lists factory shops at Taden and Lanvallay, near Dinan, and shops in Quimper and inside the walls of Saint-Malo, and it sells Traou Mad biscuits and Mademoiselle de Margaux chocolates alongside its own range. In March 2026 it announced two limited-edition gift boxes made with the cartoonist Riad Sattouf, featuring Esther, the teenage heroine of his series Les Cahiers d’Esther.

No source we checked documents who designed the Gavottes pack or logo, or when the brand moved from Quimper to the Dinan area, so we leave both open.

For a design guide, Gavottes shows a brand name that has become the common word for its product, and a regional speciality now made on an industrial scale. Compare LU, the Nantes biscuit maker, and Jules Destrooper, the Belgian butter-waffle bakery. For this guide we use Breton blue, toasted gold and lace cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Gavottes’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.