Redwood City resident Azarmeen Pavri’s journey into the world of delicate, precise meringues began back in 2016 with a simple desire: to introduce her young children to the dessert she’d grown up loving as a kid in Pakistan. But when she couldn’t find a good source for the fluffy beaten egg-white delicacies, she started making her own.
As a scientist who studied food safety and public health, she says, the precision and attention to detail needed to craft the finicky desserts appealed to her.
“A bakery is very much like a lab,” she says. “Everything has to be controlled.”
She quickly realized her meringues tasted better than others on the market, and started doing pop-ups around the area at shops like Williams-Sonoma, selling meringue cakes, then smaller cookie-sized treats. They were initially sold frozen, which is how the business got its name — Delice Glace translates roughly to “delicious frozen treat” in French, and a nod to the treat’s French origins.
After starting initially as a cottage food operator, she switched into wholesale operations in 2019, and was quickly blown away by the demand, especially regionally. She moved into an industrial kitchen and expanded her team, and now sells her meringues via local grocers like Whole Foods, Mollie Stone’s, Sigona’s, Robert’s, Bianchini’s and Draeger’s.
The desserts appear to have resonated with health-conscious customers of the Bay Area, given the “pretty clean” nature of the sweet — they contain no dairy, gluten, butter, shortening or common allergens, she says. “Other than the sugar, there’s really no evil to the meringues,” Pavri says.
And since the bakery operates at the small-batch, artisanal level, she and her small team are able to experiment with seasonal creations, like Christmas wreaths and Easter meringue nests, as well as try new flavor combinations, like lavender, pumpkin spice and Bulgarian rose. Her passionfruit meringues made it to the finals of the Good Food Awards in 2024.
Today, she also ships her products nationwide and is working on expanding availability throughout the West Coast.
Details: Find the full list of Bay Area-based Delice Glace retailers or order online at deliceglace.com.