We all have a family member, relative, or friend who loves to bake.
It’s a common scenario: What first started out as passion eventually turns to a side business to earn extra income along the way, usually after encouragement and positive feedback from those around them.
Home baking in recent years has been a booming business opportunity for many modern day professionals – both men and women, with some even leaving their day jobs and going into the business full-time after gaining a sizeable following.
Welcome to the age of social media where the ‘digital word-of-mouth’ is a powerful marketing tool for individual businesses.
Well what of those who are still in the process of building up their client and follower base? There just might be a solution that may help.
HomeBakee
“To connect home bakers and baked goody lovers through the love of artisanal and unique homemade baked goodies.”
That is the mission CEO Denis Edward has set to carry out when introducing his startup Homebakee to the local community.
While admittedly, he himself isn’t much of an avid baker, he still “desires to innovate in a way that improves people’s lives”, and because of that, hasn’t used any part of the funds raised to run his startup for income; describing himself as a “very simple fellow” who is “ready to live very lean so that I can keep (HomeBakee) running as long as possible.”
Since its launch in December 2015, Homebakee has grown in leaps and bounds, building up both followers and bakers to join its online platform.
Now home to 65 bakers, the community doesn’t just simply accept any baker who is applying to join. While it’s not compulsory for home bakers to be professionally trained in Singapore, potential applicants to Homebakee will need to be certified in some way related to the industry.
All of the bakers listed have gone through some sort of culinary education, or at least, commercial food hygiene and handling courses. Some bakers have even trained at world-renowned institutions such as Le Cordon Bleu!
As founder, Denis Edward, puts it with regards to bakers getting certified, “we make sure that they do so because it gives consumers the reassurance that they uphold hygiene standards.”
Have Your Cake & Eat It Too
If you are just a common man or woman with no sense of culinary direction in life but craves for the whiff of freshly baked cakes and bread, you will be glad to know that the ordering process is definitely simpler than baking yourself a loaf.
Bask in the almost endless variety of bakes available at your fingertips, and get them for yourself or for your entire family.
Prices range from a reasonable $3 for breads, to double figure prices for more sophisticated bakes and platters. Prices are pretty much in line with what you could buy at the supermarket bakeries, but with Homebakee, you get them freshly baked and right to your doorstep.
Filling In A Niche Market
Up until the creation of Homebakee, home baking business owners have needed to personally handle all the back-end logistics associated with starting a small company, thus taking away precious time that they could have spend what kept them going on in the first place – baking.
As Denis later added on in his interview with The Straits Times,
“HomeBakee allows home bakers to continue baking as a passion, and earn some money from it. They don’t have to spend thousands to open a shop or buy a new oven, just to do what they love.”
With grocery delivery services such as Redmart and Honestbee still not having artisanal bakeries among its merchants, and food delivery services like Foodpanda, Deliveroo, and UberEats known more for meals than baked goods, it seems that Homebakee definitely has its special place in the consumables delivery industry.
Image Credits: Homebakee