Melbourne-born baker Kate Reid shifted gears from engineering at a British Formula 1 team to formulating some of the best pastries in the world.
Before founding Lune – and creating a croissant the New York Times posits might be the best in the world – Kate Reid worked 16-hour days as a Formula 1 aerodynamicist. The engineer spent her days churning out designs in the Williams factory, earning $24,000 and fulfilling a teenage dream to work in F1.
At age 13, Reid’s father took her to a practice day during the Melbourne Grand Prix. After finishing high school, she studied aerospace engineering at RMIT University and landed a role at Williams Racing in the UK soon after. In her early 20s, she worked in the Williams team responsible for the dynamic design of the front of the car and quickly realised her role wasn’t nearly as glamorous as the sport.
It was, in her words, ‘quite dull’.
“I had a decade to build up my expectations of what a role working in F1 would be like,” Reid tells Forbes Australia during an interview at Lune’s packed bakery on Collins Street in Melbourne’s CBD.
“I just imagined that it would be incredibly collaborative and exciting, and it was not nearly as exciting as Drive To Survive makes Formula One look.”
Kate Reid
While she loved the colleagues she worked with, Reid had few opportunities to work outside the office and found the intensely high-pressure environment difficult to cope with. Baking at home became her avenue to unwind and distract herself from the stresses of her role.
She left Williams and returned to Australia wanting to lean further into the science and technical side of baking. Reid honed her craft working at bakeries and cafes in Melbourne creating biscuits and tarts, and then undertook a month-long internship at a boulangerie in Paris. It was here that her love affair with the croissant was born.
Each day brought new techniques to master, more intricate recipes to perfect, and a new language to learn. The work was relentless – pre-dawn starts, hauling 25kg bags of flour up narrow staircases – but in the rhythm of it all, Kate found something unexpected. “One of the happiest months of my life,” she would later call it.
Upon returning to her home kitchen in Melbourne, it took three months of trial and error for Reid to create the croissant she knew she was capable of.
After three months she had achieved the croissant that she dreamed of, the croissant we now know as the Lune croissant. It takes three days to make, and ironically, is very different from the traditional French technique
She initially supplied Melbourne’s top espresso bars, but operating as a wholesale business meant she rarely witnessed the small moments of joy her creations sparked. Longing for that connection – and the freedom to experiment – she partnered with her brother Cam to open their first bakery in 2013. Tucked away in Elwood, Melbourne, their tiny hole-in-the-wall shop had a singular focus: croissants.
Word spread fast.
“It got to the point where customers were lining up from two o’clock in the morning,” says Reid. By the time the croissanterie opened its doors to customers, “there were 120 people lined up around the block.”
Even after a limit of six pastries per customer was instituted, the brother and sister duo couldn’t keep up with demand, selling out of croissants within 45 minutes each day.
“We had to figure out how to make more pastries,” Reid says. Lune subsequently moved into a 440-square-metre warehouse in trendy Fitzroy, which became the company’s flagship location.
Engineering the growth of the company
Today, Lune has seven stores across three states and produces over two million croissants per year. The menu features an array of croissants as well as finger buns, birthday cake croissants and cruffins – a croissant and muffin hybrid.
It made its long-awaited debut in Sydney in December 2024, opening two locations just days apart. The first in Rosebery’s Engine Yards precinct which showcases the brand’s signature glass-walled cube. A second outpost (with equally long queues) followed in the CBD at the new Martin Place Metro.
Each croissant served in Melbourne is ‘incubated’ in the Lune Lab over three days, and then served to customers 10 minutes after coming out of an oven. A three-course set menu is also on offer at the Lab in Fitzroy, featuring Lune’s signature piece de resistance as well as experimental sweet and savoury croissants.
There are nods to Reid’s time in Formula 1 sprinkled throughout Lune organisation too. Staff working in the pastry shops are known as the ‘croissant pitt team.’ Ever the engineer, Reid says that recruitment at Lune is akin to ‘training for the pastry Olympics,’ due to the focus and precision needed for the role.
In 2024, Reid was named as an official Australian Grand Prix Ambassador and her croissants were available at a Lune pop-up at the Albert Park track.
“Having previously worked in Formula 1 in a technical role, I think I’ve got a unique perspective which gives me an even greater appreciation for the all the work that goes into bringing this incredible spectacle to Melbourne,” says Reid.
