Sugar-dusted pâte de fruit pieces molded as half apricots and half pears on pale limestone, beside a fresh halved apricot, a ripe pear and a few raspberries

François Doucet and the Half-Fruit Rule of Provençal Candy

François Doucet makes pâtes de fruits in Oraison, a village in the Alpes de Haute-Provence, and has since the early 1970s. A pâte de fruits is a French fruit jelly, fruit pulp cooked with sugar and pectin until it sets firm enough to cut, and the French confectionery trade has a written rule for what may carry the name: at least half the finished weight must be fruit. Our pâte de fruit guide covers the confection as a whole. This page covers one maker, the rule, and what four Doucet ingredient lists show when they are read against it.

A couple in Oraison

The company dates itself to 1969, when Maggy and François Doucet settled in Oraison. The regional tourism office describes the business as starting when the Doucets took over one of the region's last almond-cracking works, in a part of Provence where almonds, apricots, pears, apples, quinces and figs grow in quantity. The first pralines came early, and in 1972 the Doucets made their first glazed fruit pastes, shaped as apricots and pears.

By the company's own timeline, production capacity doubled in 1982, followed by the first chocolate-covered dried fruits. In 2009 a new workshop tripled the size of the original site and brought in molding for the fruit pastes. The house describes itself today as a family business and a confiseur créateur de Provence, a Provençal creator-confectioner, and it still makes its candy in Oraison. It sells into Japan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

The label on the door

In 2017 François Doucet received the Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant label, Living Heritage Enterprise. It is a French state label, created in 2005 and awarded for five years at a time, that distinguishes artisanal and industrial companies with rare, exceptional know-how. About 1,300 companies across France hold it. The label recognizes skills and heritage, not food quality. Doucet pairs it with FSSC 22000, a food-safety certification it obtained in 2025, the same year it replaced its sachets with cardboard boxes made in France.

Doucet says that 75 percent of the fruit in its pâte de fruits recipes comes from Provence, that it colors with natural sources such as paprika, beetroot and spirulina rather than synthetic dyes, and that it has replanted 10 hectares of almond trees since 2018. Since 2023 it has been a member of 1% for the Planet.

How the cubes are made

Doucet describes its fruit-paste workshop with a French saying: il ne manque que le noyau, only the stone is missing. It lists four steps. The first is harvest, drawing the fruit from stock and weighing it. The second is cooking, the third casting and drying, the fourth sugaring and packing.

The trade code describes the process in general terms. Fruit, sugar and pectin are cooked together until the mixture gels. The paste is then flavored, colored and acidified, and either formed into a slab and cut or cast in molds. Pectin is a gelling agent found naturally in fruit, and all four Doucet labels read here list citric acid as an acidifier.

The half-fruit rule

France's confectioners keep a Code d'usages for pâtes de fruits, adopted in 1965 and last updated in December 2019. It is a trade code, not a law, but it sets the terms the industry uses. Its core rule is that a confection called a pâte de fruits must contain at least 50 percent fruit relative to the finished weight, measured before any finishing coat of sugar. The fruit has to arrive as pulp or purée.

The code then grades the name by the fruit. A pâte de X, such as pâte d'abricots, must take all its fruit from that fruit, or from one fruit family such as red fruits, and contain at least 50 percent of it. A pâte de fruits à X, pâte de fruits with apricot, needs only 12.5 percent of the named fruit. A single-fruit pâte may also say pur on the label, as in pur abricot.

One detail makes label reading harder than it looks. The code measures fruit against a standard dry extract of 11 percent, so a thicker purée counts for more. In its own worked example, 15 kilograms of apricot purée at 13 percent dry matter counts as 17.7 kilograms, which in a 35-kilogram batch gives 50.5 percent. Doucet's ingredient lists do not say whether their percentages have been adjusted to the code's 11 percent standard, so a label figure and the code's threshold may not be the same measurement.

Four Doucet labels, read against the code

These are the fruit figures Doucet publishes for four of its French products. The last column is this page's arithmetic: the share of each box's fruit that is apricot and pear combined.

Product Fruit pulp on the label Fruit breakdown Apricot and pear as a share of the fruit
Apricot squares, 90 g bar 51% Apricot, of French origin, only 100%
Fruit shapes, 200 g 50% Apricot 22.5, pear 12.5, mandarin 5, strawberry 5, raspberry 5 70%
Dix Fruits squares, 200 g 51% Apricot 15.3, pear 13.1, peach 5.1, clementine 3.6, blueberry, strawberry and passion fruit 2.6 each, raspberry and sour cherry 2.5 each, lemon 1.1 56%
Billes, marbles, 140 g 38%, plus 7.5% lavender honey Apricot 19, raspberry 6.5, pear 6.5, blueberry 6 67%

The single-fruit apricot bar is the only one whose label lines up with the code's top tier, pâte d'abricots: 51 percent fruit, all of it apricot. The assortments lean hard on the two fruits Doucet started with. A 200-gram box of the fruit shapes holds about 100 grams of fruit pulp, and 45 grams of it is apricot. Even the ten-fruit box draws more than half its fruit from apricot and pear. Doucet does not say why, but apricot and pear were the first fruit pastes the company made, in 1972.

The marbles are the outlier. The box mixes three fruit pastes with a fourth piece set from Provence lavender honey, so its 38 percent fruit figure is an average across a box that is partly not fruit at all. Pear pulp also appears in the ingredients, though pear is not one of the named flavors. Doucet does not publish the figure for each marble separately.

The Doucet boxes, and where they fit

The François Doucet pâtes de fruits box (shop François Doucet pâtes de fruits) runs through apricot, pear, mandarin, raspberry and strawberry, the same five flavors as the fruit-shaped assortment in the table. The pâte de fruit marbles (shop pâte de fruit marbles) are the four-flavor box of apricot, raspberry, blueberry and lavender honey. Both work at the end of a meal, a few pieces on a plate with coffee. For another old French house that sells its sweets in a tin, see the Les Anis de Flavigny guide.

The jam, preserves and marmalade piece covers the spreadable side of the family. Upcoming Dispatch pieces cover how to buy pâte de fruit from other makers, how it keeps, and gummy candy, its gelatin and starch cousin.

The Doucet boxes are sold at The Ambrosian Pantry, 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Visitors can ask staff questions in the shop.

Sources & Further Reading

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