Report to half of our trip to Florida

As many know we are currently in Florida to prepare for the creation of our French pastry bakery. It’s been two good weeks since we arrived. We had good and worse surprises. We also had great meetings, which helped us well. But let’s start at the beginning.

Just before leaving (about a week), we were surprised to see a €100,000 provision blocked on the sale of our bakery . This was all about our trip. Because without a substantial contribution, it is very difficult to block a case and apply for a visa. However, our plane tickets and the rental of our apartment being not refundable or décalables, we leave for a month of studious vacation.

The Arrival:

We arrived on October 9th for a stay of about 5 weeks. Unfortunately, we had chosen our dates badly because our professional real estate agent (broker) and our immigration lawyer summers in France at that time! (And yes it’s good luck). In addition, Hurricane Michael (third most powerful in the United States) arrived in the direction of Florida. Fortunately for us, it didn’t touch the east coast (we stay in New Smyrna Beach), we only had a cloudy sky and a bit of wind. When we see the terrible damage he caused on his way to the northwest we were very fortunate.

Hurricane Michael

Visits:

Well, we haven’t been doing anything about these ten days. We took the opportunity to visit the city of Naples (south-West Florida) which is a very touristy seaside town. We had spotted a business for sale well placed, not far from a hospital which attenuated the high seasonality of this region of Florida. However, the broker (real estate agent for the shops) of the seller did not want us to visit because our funds were not yet available.

Then we discovered the city of St Augustine (in the northeast), a beautiful city. It is the oldest city in the United States, founded in 1565 by the Spanish settlers. It offers an ideal living environment, at the seaside, an enormous amount of leisure and history to discover really everything that is necessary to flourish. From the point of view of the bakery, there is only one French bakery of implanted, so plenty of room for us. We place it first on the cities that we like (in front of Orlando which was first since the beginning).

City of St Augustine

Appointments:

The second week we were able to make an appointment with our broker (Sylvain Perret of Objectif USA) and our lawyer (Maud Poudat). Sylvain has put us in contact with a French baker based in Sarasota for three years now. We’ve had a very good contact, and we’ll stay in touch. He gave us a lot of advice especially at the raw material level. On the administrative side, it also advances. We just created the company (this is the Fournil exists) and start to prepare nicely our visa file.

We also met Mr Frot of the company FBM for everything related to the equipment.

Halloween:

To end up on a more family side yesterday we celebrated Halloween, on the streets of Orlando. It was really beautiful, a lot of people (mostly families) and beautiful houses. The children do not ring at the doors of the houses, people wait outside their door and distribute the candies (or small toys for some).

So a lot of significant progress for this first half of the stay I will make you another article on our return to France, to tell you the end of our stay.