Today we’d like to introduce you to Melissa Murphy.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My journey with Mielou began with a simple but very intentional goal: to elevate what a macaron could be and to bring a level of precision, creativity, and hospitality typically reserved for fine dining into a format that could live in retail, events, and everyday celebration.
At our core, Mielou is driven by quality, hospitality, and premium, handmade products that deliver a truly distinctive experience. Everything we produce is entirely house-made—from our raspberry jam to our “Oreo” crumbs, crafted from Guittard Rouge cocoa shortbread cookies. Our goal is to be the best French macaron on the East Coast, available for purchase in retail settings. We aim to transform expectations of an American-made French macaron and raise the standard for local craftsmanship in this classic French cookie.
My inspiration comes largely from chefs I admire and from the elements of fine dining that I love most. I closely follow chefs and restaurants on the cusp of earning their first, second, or third Michelin star, because innovation, precision, and storytelling are at their peak in those moments. Travel plays a significant role in how I think about flavor. Ingredients like perilla leaf—known as purple mint in Vietnam and widely used in Korean cuisine—have influenced how I approach herbal, aromatic profiles. Experiences such as eating szarlotka in Poland during winter or their summer wildflower honey have shaped my understanding of warmth, comfort, and balance in dessert. I’m also deeply inspired by cookbooks written by legendary chefs and by international cooking shows, such as Culinary Class Wars, which highlight technique, cultural context, and bold flavor expression.
I find inspiration in walking through specialty international food markets—studying unfamiliar ingredients, bringing them home, and experimenting to understand their textures, flavors, and how they translate into pastry. That curiosity is at the heart of how our flavors are developed.
Lastly, I’m inspired by every aspect of fine dining—the service, systems, techniques, menu design, pairings, and, of course, the extraordinary flavors. Petit fours are a staple of the fine-dining experience, and macarons have long held a place on tasting menus as a refined, memorable finish. When I founded Mielou, my goal was to make the magic of those experiences more accessible. Dinners from legendary chefs—such as Thomas Keller at The French Laundry, Sungchul Shim at Kochi and GUI in New York City, Patrick Kriss at Alo in Toronto, or Buddha Lo at Huso at Marky’s Caviar—are unforgettable, but they are also expensive and often difficult to access. At Mielou, we craft our flavors with the same level of care, intention, and design that define a fine-dining meal. While we are far from the world of Michelin stars, we hope that our ingredients, techniques, and flavor compositions deliver the same sense of joy, immersion, and emotional connection that makes food such a powerful and beautiful medium.
As the brand grew, so did the demand for more customized, experiential work. We naturally expanded beyond macarons into fully custom dessert concepts and hospitality-driven collaborations. That evolution led to the creation of our newest division, Lumière Hospitality Atelier, which we are soft-launching this summer as our custom development arm, focusing on building dessert programs and signature offerings for hospitality environments. A large part of our work now includes supporting weddings, private events, and brand activations, where dessert becomes an extension of the overall experience rather than a final course.
A key part of this next chapter has also been the growth of our pastry team, now led by our Head Pastry Chef, Jordan Kase. Jordan brings a strong background in both refined pastry technique and high-volume execution, having worked at several highly respected hospitality institutions, including Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery in Yountville, CA, as well as serving as Pastry Chef at Del Frisco’s and Oak Hill Country Club. Her experience has been instrumental in shaping both our creative direction and our ability to scale custom work while maintaining consistency and precision.
Today, Mielou exists in two worlds that continuously inform each other: our core macaron program, rooted in craftsmanship and retail accessibility, and our custom hospitality work, which allows us to push creativity, storytelling, and experience design at a much larger scale. Both are ultimately about the same thing—creating moments that feel intentional, memorable, and emotionally connected to food.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The continued success of any business is often defined less by whether challenges arise, and more by how quickly and effectively you respond to them—because there will always be problems along the way. We feel incredibly fortunate for where we are today, and for the level of support we’ve received from both our customers and hospitality partners throughout that process.
We are endlessly grateful for the strong and consistent demand from both our customers and hospitality partners, which has been a major driver of our growth and allowed us to expand in ways we didn’t initially anticipate. We’re especially thankful to Sam Chung and MOGO Korean Fusion Tacos for providing us with access to a larger commercial kitchen space, which has been instrumental in scaling our operations and supporting both our retail and custom hospitality work. Equally, we feel very fortunate that our pastry team has continued to rise to meet that demand, consistently exceeding expectations as the complexity and volume of our work grow.
That said, growth has also come with real operational challenges. One of the most difficult aspects has been creating a climate-controlled production environment required for high-end pâtisserie inside a shared commercial kitchen space—especially on days when heat, humidity, and weather conditions are far from ideal. There is a saying that if you can’t stand the heat, you should get out of the kitchen, but it rarely accounts for the fact that you’re also producing delicate items like buttercreams and temperature-sensitive components in that same kitchen, which can break down when the temperature exceeds 76 degrees farahenit.
A significant amount of our early learning came from solving exactly that problem. It required investing in equipment like dehumidifiers, restructuring our production flow, and reworking processes to ensure we could cold-stage components effectively and consistently, regardless of external conditions. It was a technical and operational challenge that forced us to become far more disciplined and intentional about how we structure production from start to finish.
Another ongoing challenge—like with any highly delicate, high-end product—is delivery. We take enormous ownership over ensuring that what leaves our kitchen arrives exactly as intended in the hands of not just our customer, but our customer’s customer. That has required significant learning, testing, and investment in packaging, logistics, and handling protocols to protect the product’s integrity from the kitchen to the final presentation.
While these challenges have been real, they’ve also been formative. They’ve pushed us to refine our systems, strengthen our team, and ultimately build a more resilient operation capable of supporting the level of detail and quality we expect from ourselves.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Mielou Macarons?
Mielou is a French macaron and dessert company built at the intersection of fine dining, hospitality, and modern experiential design. We specialize in premium, fully house-made macarons, crafted in small batches with an emphasis on precision, flavor development, and ingredient integrity. Our macarons are available year-round in retail locations, seasonal collections, and catering offerings, allowing us to serve both everyday customers and hospitality partners. This balance between accessibility and high-touch execution is a core part of who we are.
What sets Mielou apart is that we don’t approach desserts as individual products—we approach them as part of a larger guest experience. While our retail program continues to grow, a significant part of our work now lives in custom dessert development through our hospitality division, Lumière Hospitality Atelier (LHA). LHA creates fully customized dessert programs, signature offerings, and experiential food concepts for hospitality environments.
We are known for translating fine-dining principles into scalable dessert experiences that directly support our clients’ business goals. With extensive experience in hospitality and consulting, we focus on maximizing revenue and engaging guests through dessert. That means designing products that are not only intentional and elevated, but also engineered to perform—whether that’s increasing dessert attachment, enhancing menu performance, or creating standout offerings that drive repeat demand and guest interest.
In cases where there is no direct resale component, our focus shifts to highly customized, experiential applications—such as a bride-and-groom cocktail macaron pairing, a bespoke petit four course for a high-end restaurant, or a fully tailored plated dessert moment. We bring elegance and luxury to life through product design, through final plating and presentation, so the dessert feels like a seamless extension of the overall experience.
Every detail—from flavor development to production systems to delivery and execution—is built to perform consistently in real service environments while maintaining the highest level of quality and care.
One of the things we are most proud of is the trust we’ve built with hospitality partners who rely on us not just for product, but for execution. Whether it’s a retail customer purchasing a seasonal box, a catering client, or a brand launching a custom activation or dessert program, we deliver the same level of precision and hospitality at every touchpoint.
Ultimately, what we want readers to know is that Mielou is not just a macaron brand. It is a hospitality-focused dessert atelier that bridges retail craftsmanship and full-service custom culinary development, where creativity, precision, and experience design come together in a way that is both highly intentional and highly scalable.
Do you have any advice for those looking to network or find a mentor?
For me, the most effective approach to mentorship and networking starts with how you think about the role of a business owner in the first place. The role is ultimately the same regardless of the medium—whether you are making cookies, installing windows, or running a hospitality company. The objective is to build a successful business. The craft, product, and industry may change, but the responsibility does not: you are accountable for creating something that works, sustains itself, and supports the people who depend on it.
One of the most important habits that underpins this is reading absolutely everything you can about your industry and adjacent fields—books, operators, chefs, case studies, and any expert whose principles can be applied to your work. Over time, this builds what I think of as a mental encyclopedia that you can draw from when solving real problems. I may not have gone to culinary school, but I’ve read everything I can from chefs and operators I respect, and that knowledge becomes practical very quickly in real situations.
That level of preparation changes how people respond to you. Other professionals, operators, and potential mentors are naturally drawn to people who clearly take their craft seriously and can speak about it with depth and context. When you can solve problems, reference ideas, and engage at a higher level, relationships form more organically because you are contributing something meaningful—not just asking for guidance, but actively participating in the work.
The best advice I’ve ever received in business—and something I continue to hear repeatedly in different forms—is that sales is the only thing that matters. It sounds simple, but it reframes everything. It also reframes mentorship, because strong mentors and strong networks tend to form around people who are actually building momentum, not just talking about it.
What has worked for me when seeking out CEOs or senior operators as mentors is that I had to first act like a CEO in practice, not just in title. That meant understanding the mission of the business deeply, taking full ownership of outcomes, and operating with the same level of responsibility and clarity as the people I hoped to learn from. When you do that, mentorship becomes far more natural—because you’re no longer approaching people as someone asking for access, but as someone already aligned with how they think and operate.
One of the hardest parts of building a business is understanding that your responsibility is not just to customers outside your organization, but to the people inside it as well. The team members who show up every day are relying on the business to support their lives—their rent, their childcare, their families, their future.
As a founder, you are ultimately a custodian of that responsibility. It may be your dream, but for others it is their livelihood, and it is your job to ensure the business succeeds in a way that meets those shared goals and aspirations. The only way to do that consistently is through sales and sustained demand.
This is something echoed by Susan Wojcicki when she said: “At the end of the day, both men and women who become CEOs have shown tenacity and hard work to succeed in their careers. It takes not just skills but also extreme dedication and commitment. And regardless of gender, CEOs are measured by the same criteria—the growth and success of the business.”
That principle is ultimately what ties everything together for me—mentorship, networking, and growth all come back to the same thing: building something real, doing the work consistently, and letting that work speak for itself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mieloumacarons.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mieloumacarons/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MielouMacarons/
