The Patissier's Chronicle

Customers have often asked us about how do we decide and come up with new cake flavors. Our chefs typically create between 2 to 3 new cake recipes every year. And this is excluding the new Christmas and CNY cakes. Not all of these cakes will eventually turn out to be winners though. A couple of our new recipes, the Laksa cake for example, are deemed a tad too exotic for the common palate. But many have become personal favorites and even made it onto our staple list. So, what are the typical considerations that go into the development of our new cake recipes? Foremost, we always attempt to do a flavor not done before. Our Mother’s Day cake in 2019, which we had incorporated ingredients such as birds’ nest and Chrysanthemum, is a prime example. Next, we wish to be able to excite and delight our loyal customers that have been supporting us for all these years. And finally, we like to create a flavor that customers of all ages are able to relate to. For this Mother’s Day, our chefs hav...

  ChatGPT is all the rage these days. For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot. The language model can answer questions and assist you with tasks like composing emails, essays, and code. So how much does ChatGPT “know” about The Patissier? We were curious and decided to put it to the test. 1. First off, we fired ChatGPT a direct question about The Patissier:   The response was pretty much accurate except for the bit on the founders. So, not bad. 2. Then we asked ChatGPT about our operating hours: ChatGPT seemed to think that we operate at multiple locations. And the operational timing (10am - 8pm) was also inaccurate. Then again, there was a time when we did operate till 8pm. But this was some years ago. 3. We then asked ChatGPT about our products:   Now this was the one that it did poorly. Other than Strawberry Shortcake, the other ...

  Being in business for the past 22 years, we have been fortunate in that many of our business decisions turned out okay. But being human, we have also seen our fair share of wrong decisions. Our foray into Taiwan in 2019 was probably one of them. The decision to venture abroad seemed right at that point in time.  We had a desire to expand our business but given our small domestic market, the best way to do so is to go overseas. And Taiwan had made perfect sense given the circumstances. But things did not quite go as planned and we had to close our Taiwan flagship store after 2 years. We can always pin the fault squarely on Covid. But the pandemic is but half the spanner in the whole scheme of things. With every wrong decision, we make it a point to learn from our mistakes and then strive to do better. And here are some “takeaways” from our failed Taiwan venture, which may be helpful to small business owners (like ourselves) who are pondering to venture overseas.   1. Y...

  The Patissier embarked on our journey to become a “greener” company in 2019.  When we first decided that we should do our part for the environment, there were some pushbacks from within. Will our efforts make a difference, given that we are just one small shop? What will it cost us? Will customers appreciate what we are trying to do, especially if it affects their wallets? But management was convinced that this is the right thing to do and well, the rest is history. We started off by looking at changes that we can make relatively quickly. These include -  Our new candle policy, where we stipulate the number of complementary candles that we provide based on cake size. Previously, we give whatever number of candles that customers wanted. This resulted in more than 150,000 candles being given out every year. We now charge 10 cents for each additional candle that customers want. And this has resulted in a 50% drop in the demand for candles. Some may feel that paying 10 cent...

    After spending almost 2 decades at our current location, we are finally moving out of Mohd Sultan Road. This is not an easy decision, especially when we have become quite the establishment where we are at. But with our lease coming to an end this year, we have been liaising with our landlord on renewal matters since 3 rd quarter of last year. And after almost 18 years and 5 lease renewals later, we did not expect the “take it or leave it” ultimatum that was handed down to us. To be fair, the relationship with our landlord has always been amicable for the past years. So the latest renewal negotiation (or the lack thereof) really took us by surprise. We always pay our rental on time and have been quite the model tenant. But we reckon they must have their rationale and well, it is what it is. This, coupled with leaking aircons and corroding pipes (as these fixtures predate the time when we first took over the unit), as well as our desire for a larger space (not an absolute n...

Things are getting even busier at the shop what's with the festive season fast approaching. Given such, our blog post has taken a back seat. But we will continue to write about interesting stuff that we may have come across this month, time permitting. And speaking of interesting stuff, we chanced upon a Straits Times piece last week on an interview with the incoming President of SATS,  t he chief ground-handling and in-flight catering service provider at Singapore Changi Airport.   What caught our attention was a quote  made in the interview, when he spoke about his third priority (as President & CEO) in finding the right customers and partners. "I know the old adage that the customer is always right. But in this day and age, the right customer and the right partner are (also) critical. With the right customer, you can do a lot more and when you put global solutions together, it becomes a very powerful thing. It has to be the right kind of growth; growth for growth's...