Aug 6, 2012
The owner and developer of a unique style of cafes, Laurel Watson, was recently interviewed to discover the reason behind the company’s sweet success.
The Petal Cupcake Company has two vibrant cafes which are situated in New Market and Ponsonby are breaking new ground with flavour and style.
When setting up the business their goal was to have a point of difference that would define them in away that their customers will remember and promote to their friends.
“We set about utilising non standard methods in food production as opposed to the ones used by the majority of cafes throughout the industry; we were after baking goods - just how your grandmother would have made them.” Says Laurel Watson
Laurel has spent the last two and a half years developing the perfect cupcake but she would rather eat a good piece of cheese. “I am firstly a chef and not a baker however I did enjoy the process of decorating cakes and they may have been the connection point” says Laurel.
Laurel’s background has consisted of nearly 30 years in the food industry, which includes ten years as a TV chef for TVNZ’s Good Morning – incidentally on which she spent time telling the audience that she was terrible at baking. Concurrent to this she was teaching at Wilton Cake Decorating Courses at Milly's where she gave very successful cupcake classes that were always sold out. She also worked at Essential Foods magazine helping to edit and produce articles for the publication but this was eventually forced to close down so she decided to work for herself.
She thought that if she can make cakes that she likes to eat then she can make ones that the general public would love to eat. “The ones you get in the supermarkets are designed to last, they tend to be just like cardboard boxes and that have a bland appeal, where they tended to be dry in texture and that the icing is often very gritty. – I wanted real fresh and full of flavour” states Laurel.
“I have a brother who lived in New York at the time of developing the products and he was surrounded by the food industry where they produced very popular cup cakes. So I got him to assess the quality and appeal of our cupcakes and asked him to bring back real velvet cupcakes for comparison. This helped to confirm that we were on the right track.”
“In my preparation of developing a sellable product I was icing a cupcake one day and I noticed that one of the finished iced cupcake tops came out unusual. I was about to reject it but I had a closer look and the appearance and shape was that of a rose – This was a moment of serendipity which gave birth to the ‘Petal’ name of the business – in reflection it really was at a time of confluence between people, place and quality of ingredients like the Givaudau Company which provided the essences for the different aromas and Fresh As who provided the dehydrated powdered flavours”
The company has gone from using 12.5Kg amount of fine icing sugar to over 260kg a week in their production facility. That is growth due to the moment that has occurred over the last two and half years.
As with any successful businesses there is always a story of the battles fort and won to establish their place in the industry.
“Setting up a food business is not for the soft hearted as we had our fare shear of walls to break through – we were trying to get the idea out of the box and onto the market but this was at the height of the global financial crisis in 2007 where banks had closed their pockets to start-up companies with little evidence of future success. Another challenge we had was to develop safe food handling practices that satisfied the local council regulations. OSH was another government entity to please, however it was us who proactively approached them to discuss options and methods and whom we actually found to be a great resource and force for making it happen. We then had to coordinate staff to help with the output and production of our baking product range. We were fortunate to be introduced to Tim Aspinall the new Head of Academy at North Shore International Academy in Auckland. He then contacted one of their pastry chef tutors who introduced us to a highly motivated baker (NanHa) for our business. From there is has been a wonderful relationship of expansion and creating further employment opportunities for the graduates coming out of the Academy. We now have six highly skilled staff members from the culinary training academy NSIA who make up a good proportion of our production team. We look forward to seeing the growth both in the business and the relationship with the training academy” Says Laurel.
Laurel with some of the NSIA Bakery staff
You can find further details on Laurel and the variety of cupcakes in her cafes on www.petalcupcakes.co.nz