Ever since I had my first daughter I became very conscious of what I feed my kids. I am a believer of you are what you eat. After I gave birth to my first daughter, my mother prepared very nutritious food for me during my confinement period. After 2 months, everyone said I was glowing. I saw it myself too. I felt very good too. I have always enjoyed cooking and baking and started to bake more ever since my daughter was born. I would prepare all her birthday cakes myself. I also started experiment with different ingredients to improve the overall nutrition profile of the cakes. Feeding my kids with healthy food has always been very important to me. I didn’t want to feed their kids with refined sugar and try to avoid highly processed food. I try to feed them with organic products as much as possible and I know a lot of parents were doing the same thing. I saw there was a need for healthy desserts and decided to launch The Cakery in 2016. At the beginning, we only had 8 cupcake flavors where we were more focused on gluten free, refined sugar free and organic products. As I under the food and the market more, we started to develop more products that carter to different people with different dietary restrictions e.g. vegan, dairy free, egg free, keto etc. 

Coming from a banking background, building a cake shop from scratch without any F&B knowledge was tough but I thought it was important to keep going because of my customers. The happy faces I see from our customers and the photos they share with us kept me going. We receive a lot of messages from customers thanking us for making healthy desserts as some of them were not able to eat any desserts. I remember one customer told us her daughter never had a birthday cake until they found it because of her dietary restrictions. I feel like I was giving people hopes and that’s what kept me going.

One of the biggest challenge in Asia to run a healthy cake shop is the cost of ingredients and the availability of these ingredients. Many ingredients are actually readily available in Europe/ US but it is very difficult for us to source them here in Asia. 

In 2018, we also launched a conscious living campaign aiming to promote conscious living. Our goal was to share with our community about clean eating. Another goal was to help promote sustainability. We have changed our cookie packaging from plastic to glass. Rather than plastic straws, our straws were made to the highest quality from natural fiber derived from corn starch. We encouraged our customers to bring their own container or recycling their cookie/ granola jars and in exchange they will receive a discount from us. We also extended our vegan menu as well as did some vegan baking workshops. Having said that, we are still not a100% zero-waste company. We try to do as much as we can with the lack of recycling infrastructure, it makes our it much more difficult for us to help build a better place for our next generation. 

I think it is very important to have a toxic free life as much as possible. We are actually surrounded by them. The food we eat, the skin care we use, the cleaning products we use etc is not only harmful to us but also the environment. High processed food also lead to serious health issues like obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. Toxic products is the underlying issue for many health issue e.g. including cancer, reproductive and neurological harm, and developmental delay etc. This is one of the reasons why I decided to launch our second platform – KIRR (www.kirrconcept.com). KIRR stands for keeping it real and raw. Our goal is the make sustainability more accessible to our community. On KIRR, we offer a range product sustainable products that is better for us and the environment. 

Global warming is real. Every little step we make counts. Together, we build a better place for our next generation.