Bakerzin founder resigns; plans to offer “nice gourmet cakes at very, very affordable prices” to consumers, but will not be opening a retail shop due to high rents

Bakerzin founder resigns

By Rebecca Lynne Tan

The Straits Times

Sunday, Nov 03, 2013

Patisserie-cafe chain Bakerzin’s founder and chief executive Daniel Tay has resigned from his post, and has set up a new food supply company. The 43-year-old, who founded the home-grown business in 1998, has started Foodgnostic to offer baked goods and other food to restaurants and hotels which cannot make them from scratch because of the labour shortage. He also has plans to offer “nice gourmet cakes at very, very affordable prices” to consumers, but will not be opening a retail shop due to high rents.Mr Tay stepped down from his position as Bakerzin’s chief executive on Wednesday and is also no longer a director of Bakerzin Holdings and its holding company Pacific United Holdings.

He had made a name for himself and the chain through his French-style cake creations and macarons, among other confections and savoury food.

Bakerzin currently has nine outlets in Singapore, including ones in Paragon, United Square and VivoCity, and another five outlets in Indonesia.

Its board of directors has since appointed the company’s current chief operating officer Lawrence Lim, 41, as interim chief executive. Mr Lim assumed his chief executive role of overseeing the management of Bakerzin on Wednesday.

According to Mr Mark Tan, a spokesman for Bakerzin, Mr Tay submitted his resignation letter in August. In it, he had explained that the time had come for him “to move on and to pursue other personal interests outside of Bakerzin”.

Mr Tay tells Life! that he saw potential in going into the wholesale food supplies business because of the widespread labour contraints in the industry.

Bakerzin had been sold in 2007, and he no longer had a share in it and wanted to venture out on his own.

He plans to invest about $2 million in machinery and a central kitchen. He said: “If I were to have a retail shop, it would be very difficult to be profitable. If I add rental, labour and other costs, the cost of the product would keep increasing and it won’t do any good for the industry.”

The Bakerzin chain had started out as Baker’s Inn, a single shop in a Sembawang condominium in 1998. It changed its name to Bakerzin in August 2004.

By 2005, there were five outlets in Singapore and another eight overseas, including Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

Mr Tay is an alumnus of the UFM International Baking Institute in Bangkok. He later trained in France at the Cocoa Barry Chocolate School and the Valrhona Chocolate School, among others.

His father had owned Seng Choong Confectionery, a popular traditional bakery in Marine Parade, which Mr Tay converted into the retail arm of a wholesale bakery business that supplied frozen bread dough to restaurants and hotels in 1995.

A year later, the wholesale business he started with a few friends ran into financial trouble and shut down. He lost the $500,000 seed fund his father had lent him, as well as the shop, which had to be sold off to pay debts.

But he bounced back and worked as a pastry chef at upscale French restaurant Les Amis, before starting Baker’s Inn.

On why he thinks his new wholesale business Foodgnostic will be successful, he says: “With the availability of grants from the Government, the risk will be shared. Operators have to realise that we can no longer depend on labour. This is the reality.”

He plans to hire about 20 people but says it will be challenging, given the manpower crunch. Normally, he would need 10 to 15 people to operate one retail shop but the 20 staff, together with machines, would produce a greater output.

He adds: “With the investment in machinery, we will be able to triple the productivity and output.”

rltan@sph.com.sg