John’s Cake Decoration & Bakery Service is a modest home-based enterprise, a typical local micro-business, run from 347 Recht-door-Zee, La Parfaite Harmonie. It is owned and operated by a 38-year-old mother of two, Andrea Douglas-John, a bustling young woman whose talents for cooking and baking have won her a still modest, but growing reputation in the neighbourhood where she lives.
John’s Cake Decoration & Bakery Service turns out an impressive range of ‘sweet mouths’… cakes, pastries, ice creams and custards, as well as ‘bellyfulls’ like roti, curry, bake and salt fish, egg balls, black, and white puddings and souse… there are pickles too… golden apple, and mango-flavoured ones. All of these can be ‘washed down’ with the range of fruit-based juices that she offers.
Micro and small businesses like Andrea’s have come to form the financial foundation that sustains the lives of working class families across the country. Sustaining what, in effect are risky enterprises, amount for the most part, to back-breaking assignments that frequently bring only marginal returns.
Andrea is a graduate of the Healthy Bites Cakes Decoration Course. She trained under an instructor named Paula Blunt and started a business of her own in 2018. It began with her and her sister-in-law, pounding the streets of Parfait Harmonie with their white, and black puddings, pine tarts, and pholouri. In the afternoons and on weekends she sold homemade ice cream and custard from her home.
Businesses of this nature can grow pretty quickly. These days, Andrea displays her offerings from a sizeable caravan in front of La Parfait Harmonie’s Jesus Restoreth Supermarket, about half mile from her home.
She reflects that 2018 and 2019 were good years, and says 2020 was “reasonable”, the coronavirus notwithstanding. There were bad days too, so bad that on those days she was unable to compensate her long-suffering sister-in-law for her efforts. On disappointing days the prices of unsold perishables are reduced significantly, or else, gifted to friends and relatives.
Up until now, 2021 has not been particularly kind to her but, she says, she is ‘hangin’ in there.’
Beginning in March 2020 her business experienced something of a downturn. The closure of schools, a decision taken to check the spread of the pandemic, was a considerable setback. Eatables like egg balls, channa, pholouri, ice cream and pickled fruit are immensely popular with school children.
In December, Andrea strategically added Pepperpot to her offerings. That helped. Needless to say she also took advantage of the increased seasonal demand for the popular range of cakes eaten at Christmas. This is when her longstanding customers kick in meaningfully.
The Small Business Bureau notwithstanding, Andrea is of the view that state support for small businesses should not only be broadened but that food businesses with a potential for growth should be taken far more seriously. In instances like her own, she believes that where sound business plans and proven track records are in evidence, reputable food-vending establishments should, in the first instance, be afforded grants of least $1 million for initial expansion.
She believes, too, that a great deal more needs to be done to provide information that offers a guide to issues like small business growth and diversification. Here, she concedes that along the way, she may well have made some less-than-sound decisions in the absence of good business advice.
Andrea’s current pursuits are very much linked to her past. She grew up in a home where family members took turns at cooking. It was during her tenure as a cook at the Best Hospital that her present enterprise took root through a number of private requests for cakes and pastries. She recalls that she made a start on her own with an initial investment of $300,000.
All that is history now. Her focus, these days, is on continued growth and expansion.
