Young bakers bring in the dough
New bakery enjoys quick rise to success after trio seizes a business gap
A group of young people from Mthatha, who seized a gap in the bakery business baking bread and delivering it to clients’ doorsteps, are encouraging young people to get out of their comfort zones and follow their dreams.
The youths, between 26 and 32 years of age, opened the doors to the Slice Bakery in Northcrest four weeks ago and now employ four permanent employees.
They believe if you want something done, you have to go out of your way to get it done – and use your last cent if needs be, without depending on funding.
Slice Bakery director, Khanyiso Ndamase, who started the business alongside Yanga Mtintweni, Sonwabise Mtwa and Thandiswa, said for over a year they used to buy bread from a local bakery and deliver it to clients to see if their method of delivering bread would work.
Ndamase, who quit his job as a production manager at one of the biggest retail shops in the country, said they used every cent from their pockets to start the business, and had no other form of funding.
He said their business was prompted mostly by people’s struggle to find bread during the holidays, like the Christmas season, as bakeries would be closed over that time.
“And yet people would be in need of bread. We wanted to do something unique and meet our clients halfway,” said Ndamase, adding that they already had 800 clients on their database.
They deliver freshly-baked bread to private clients, to local spaza shops and even to the Mayfair Hotel in Mthatha.
They forked out more than R300,000 to start the business, including buying the baking machinery.
“We had to use money from our own pockets and even from our savings but it was all worth it. This is a dream that we wanted to see realised,” said the proud youth.
They bake 1,000 brown and white loaves of bread and receive over 200 calls from all over Mthatha from people in need of their freshly-baked bread.
Ndamase believes this was a good initiative with a prospect for growth. He said they would like to open bakeries across the province and employ more young people and equip them with skills.
“This is a good initiative because people need bread and we want to make a mark in this industry. One of our biggest challenges was money, but we had a dream that we believed in that we needed to pursue and that is something we want other young people to have in mind.
Their next aim is to bake and sell cupcakes and muffins and they are confident of success.
All the bakery employees, mostly men, were unemployed before they joined the bakery.
Head baker Nkcubeko Notshutsha, 27, who moves between the machinery in the bakery with ease, said the bakery was his lifeline.
He used to work in a family business as a taxi driver and once worked in the pizza-making business. Before starting his new job as a baker, he used to spend time watching baking sites on the internet.
Notshutsha even attended a training course in Durban for three weeks where he learnt about the bread-making process. Notshutsha said his job at the bakery had given him a sense of purpose.
Notshutsha said he did not have time to laze around.
“I have bread I need to perfect to satisfy our clients.”
Client Nomakhaya Sodlala, 50, used to buy bread every day at local shops more than 8km away from her Zone 14 home in Mthatha.
“I would arrive in the shop and there would not be bread and I would then have to wait. Sometimes the bread would not be freshly baked.”
Now she says she gets her bread in less than half-an-hour after making a call to the bakery.
“They have made things easy. When they knocked on our doors and told us about the bakery, I was relieved as that meant I would not have to worry about waking up early to go buy bread.”