What is it about Canal Bakery's croissants that has made them the most award-winning in history?
They are made with six layers of dough and nine ingredients, are baked in two batches and are sold for 2.20 euros each.
BarcelonaIf we had to give a technical definition of the croissants from the Canal bakery in Barcelona (with workshops on Calvet and Muntaner streets), we would say they have nine ingredients: flour, yeast, sugar, salt, honey, eggs, powdered milk, water, and butter; they are baked in two batches, at 7 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., and they have up to six turns of the fermented dough, rolled in on itself, ending in the characteristic final ridge. Each piece costs 2.20 euros, and the price will not increase today despite the fact that they are the most awarded croissants in the history of the competition organized by the Barcelona Pastry Guild.
A few hours after receiving the award, the pastry chef explained how everything had gone.Still thrilled with winning again and with a vivid memory of how she'd done everything, she said that the twelve croissants she'd submitted to the competition at 10:54 in the morning weren't her best twelve. "Of the twelve, I didn't like the symmetry of four; however, a friend had sent me a photo of his twelve, and I'd told him his were better than mine," she explained. Beside her, another worker at the Canal bakeries, opened in 1970 by Mercè and Xavier Canal, Marc Muñoz, told her that aesthetics weren't everything in a competition, that taste had a lot of value in the scoring.
Toni Vera is a demanding pastry chef, and instead of acknowledging what his colleague was saying, he was more intent on commenting on how much he'd suffered over those four croissants that didn't have the exact symmetry he would have liked. "It's true that when I arrived at the Pastry Guild at 10:54 a.m., I showed up with fifteen; there I immediately chose the twelve I liked the most, and the three I discarded I gave to some pastry chefs in the courtyard, and they all told me they were very good," says Vera.
If the recipe wins, it is not changed
The fact is that Canal Bakery has currently created an unwritten law that ensures that every three years they win the Pastry Guild's Best Croissant in the State competition. According to the regulations, the year after the award is given, the baker must be part of the jury, so they cannot enter. Then, in the following edition, in 2027, they can participate again, and as these years have passed, they won't win. At least, that's what has happened in recent years, because their croissant was the best in 2016, 2019, 2022, and now, in 2025.
In all these years of competition, has the recipe changed? I ask them, and the answer is clear, quick, and forceful: "No. Why should I change it, if it works, if it wins competitions and sells in stores?" What's more, the baker believes he can't make changes because he has a commitment to the neighbors who buy his croissants every day, who eat them for breakfast. "And it's a bigger commitment than winning a competition, because if they come back, it's because they like them the way we make them," Vera points out.
The day after winning the competition for the fourth time, the bakery had decided not to raise the price. They will sell it for 2.20 euros, as they did on Monday and Tuesday morning when they still didn't know the verdict. They will continue with the same steps and the same ingredients, but they will change the quantity they will make: for today, Wednesday, they will double the quantity. "If on Tuesday we made a total of 300 between the morning and afternoon batches, tomorrow we will make 600, and by the end of the week we estimate we will make around 2,000," Marc and the baker explained. In fact, they are already experts at winning the prize and know that the next day the impact will be high. "We're also afraid that maybe one day the contest won't have as much impact, because this is the fourth time we've won it, and therefore there are many people who at this point know us from past editions," they said.
They also mentioned another common market behavior, which is the increase in demand during the first months after the prize, perhaps even the first year, and over time it decreases and stabilizes into constant sales. In their case, they were making one hundred and fifty a day until today.
Finally, among the pastry chef's curiosities is the fact that, for the photos we took to illustrate this article, he had to bite into a croissant. "I never do it; or very rarely, because I eat an apple mid-morning for breakfast." More interesting facts: the prices of Canal croissants are a frequent topic of conversation among the team. They sell them for 2.20 euros; and 4.70 for filled ones. "But those are the prices they should have to provide a profit margin if you take into account the costly production process involved, and especially if I explain that we are a young team in the bakery, who want to do our work hours and two days off, which we try to alternate on the weekend," says Vera. Regarding the retail price of Parisian croissants, priced between €1.20 and €1.50, he doesn't say anything, but he believes that "the croissant will be like the baguette, which is socially protected." In Barcelona, and in Catalonia, because the pastry chef knows the prices of croissants from other towns, they are more expensive, yes, but the quality is very high. And one last thing: "I would like to be able to put a label indicating that our croissants are made with local ingredients, but we don't have Catalan butter, so we buy it in Normandy, and we don't say it."