You Don’t Need To Be A Professional Baker To Bake – Instant Premixes To The Rescue!
Bake With Yen (BWY) helps novice bakers to make cakes, cookies and breads with no hassle.
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Baking can be a stress-releasing hobby for some and a full-paying job for others.
If you’re new to baking or not even an experienced baker, sometimes, baking serves more stress on a plate than joy. Instead of buying expensive cakes, you just wanna bake a simple affordable cake for someone’s birthday and you want it fast, right?
That’s where premixes come in. Why take the long run when you can take the shortcut?
Bake With Yen
Established in 1987, Bake With Yen is currently the no 1 baking ingredients retail store in Malaysia. With an aim of making baking easy, affordable, and enjoyable for everyone, they also have the largest selection of cake premixes easily available at their stores!
The idea of having these premixes is to help you bake better and quicker, with the cheapest price available. Even if you don’t know how to bake, you can definitely try one of these premixes and your job will definitely be easier.
(Credit: Melissa Suraya Ismail / TRP)
Of course, some premixes will require you to buy wet ingredients such as butter, eggs and milk but for the dry ingredients, you don’t have to scratch your head measuring how many teaspoons or grams of sugar and baking powder you need to add in.
Imagine if you put too much or too little of that baking soda, aiyoo the cake will be bitter and they’ll either sink or not have enough volume! With premixes, you’ll definitely have a perfectly balanced taste and texture of the cake (just mind your mixing speed and oven temperatures).
A Little Story On Their Journey
BWY started as just a store supplying baking ingredients in Taman Tun Dr Ismail and also Chow Kit, by a female entrepreneur, Yen Khong Moi or known as Madam Yen in 1987. As the business grew stronger and stronger over the years, the family-run business expanded to around 15 stores all across the Peninsular and also Sabah.
This attracted the investment of a company called Creador, a Malaysian-based private equity fund and they acquired a stake in the BWY group for approximately RM57 million in 2017. With an aim to further take BWY to greater heights, they’ve successfully expanded the company up to around 90 stores currently, all in Malaysia.
Current Key Baking Trend
Apart from current baking trends like plant-based diets and reduced sugar trends, people are also looking at more affordable and easy baking methods.
READ MORE: 4 Food Trends Coming In 2022 That You Should Know About
During the pandemic, BWY has seen a steep incline in the baking scene where people are becoming more and more interested in working with their hobbies. Due to the lockdowns, a lot of budding bakers emerged and they also opt for cheaper ingredients as most people are struggling financially.
This is when they turn to BWY to buy ingredients for their newfound hobbies. BWY found out that their sales were doing quite well during the pandemic and concluded that people are becoming more and more dependent on affordable and easy ingredients.
What Kind of Premixes Do They Have?
Their bestselling premixes are, of course, the basic flavours like Chocolate cakes, Vanilla cakes, and also Pineapple tarts.
Some of their flavours for cake mixes include butter cake, marble cake, fruitcakes, red velvet, moist, lava and sponge chocolate cakes, bahulu cakes and more.
(Credit: Melissa Suraya Ismail / TRP)
For cookies, they have quite a few selections including gingerbread, double chocolate chip, red velvet, walnut choc chip, gluten-free cookies, wholemeal snow cookies, sourdough scones, and so on.
Additionally, they also have choices for bread too such as the focaccia bread, breadstick, chocolate bread, foldover pau, potato bun, sweet bun, honestly, the list goes on.
Besides that, they also experiment and innovate new flavours of premixes every now and then. Last Eid, they launched their Nasi Lemak Cookies that have a bit of your spicy sambal flavour to them. Can you believe that they also have a recipe of curry laksa cookies? How Malaysian can you get?
(Credit: Melissa Suraya Ismail / TRP)
This coming mid-autumn festival or Mooncake festival, they’re planning on developing a mooncake premix for customers to celebrate with their loved ones.
One of the ways they get to be innovative is by getting constant reviews from their wide range of customers. Being a big baking retail company, BWY focuses on certain focus groups and gets their valuable input on their products.
“If some of them suggest ideas on new flavours, we’ll R&D and turn to our chefs to create the desired recipes. In some cases, if some of them do not like the premix, then we can also discontinue it after thorough discussion”, said Alex Rosso, the French-Italian Group CEO of BWY to TRP.
(Credit: Melissa Suraya Ismail / TRP)
They Also Help In Other Ways
Apart from having premixes to help both beginners and professionals alike, BWY also provides another alternative to help out their customers.
They’ve carried out surveys and found that they are serving three types of segments. The professional bakers (commercial businesses), the part-time bakers (home bakers or people who do a side hustle apart from their main job) and the hobbyists (people who bake occasionally during the weekends with kids or during festivities).
What sets us apart from other baking ingredients retail stores is that we cater to all types of customers. We provide the best prices, a variety of choices, convenience and plenty of services.
Alexandre Russo, Group CEO of BWY to TRP
Being a big retail product of baking goods, BWY provides a wide array of choices for their customers by having both local and imported goods. They also produce brands of their own too like Ausicows and Butterich (butter), Cottura (chocolate and cheese), and Good Earth (seeds and nuts) to provide a more trusted, halal and affordable brand for consumers.
(Credit: Melissa Suraya Ismail / TRP)
BWY controls its prices too especially the fast-moving items like butter, icing sugar, chocolate, yeast, and others. For these types of ingredients, they can help B2B customers by putting them in the everyday low prices sections. For B2C customers, BWY helps them out by giving discounts when they buy stocks in bulk.
With 90 stores all around Malaysia and counting, this is their way of bringing convenience to Malaysians. For the service, some that they offer are online shopping, recipes, baking classes as well as demonstrations for customers.
They Provide Baking Classes Too
Their baking classes are available across selected retail outlets with the aim to share the latest recipes and baking techniques with the customers. When new recipes come out, the chefs at BWY will do demonstrations in their studio bakery above the TTDI superstore and have them available to customers in the form of video tutorials on their social media pages.
(Credit: Melissa Suraya Ismail / TRP)
For details on their baking classes, keep a lookout for announcements on their main social media page and websites.
The Superstores
So far, they have two superstores in TTDI and also Taman Megah. Their superstore hosts a lot more products than the regular outlets and is bigger in size to elevate a better shopping experience for their customers.
They’re hoping to expand more BWY stores into superstores as well as add new outlets to unfamiliar places so they can be closer to their customers.
If you’re in the area, come and have a look at their superstores and grab some unique premixes while you’re at it. The nasi lemak cookies mix just piqued your curiosity, didn’t it?
Bake With Yen Superstore @ TTDI
Address: No.50-G (GF), 52-G (GF), 52-A (1ST FLOOR) & 54-G (GF, Lorong Rahim Kajai 14, Taman Tun Dr Ismail, 60000 Kuala Lumpur
Operating Hours: 9 am – 8 pm
Bake With Yen Superstore @ Taman Megah
Address: 57, Jalan SS 24/8, Taman Megah, 47301 Petaling Jaya, Selangor
Operating Hours: 8 am – 8 pm
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