Hoi Yan, and the start of Yummy Bites bakery
How one home baker, a borrowed oven, and a stubborn belief in second chances grew into a small bakery making cookies you'd queue for.
Hoi Yan didn’t plan to start a bakery. She started by baking a batch of cookies for a community fundraiser, with a borrowed oven in a borrowed kitchen.
The cookies sold out in an afternoon. Someone asked if she could do another batch the next week.
A small kitchen, a stubborn idea
Yummy Bites, as it would come to be called, began with three things: an electric oven that worked when it felt like it, a notebook of recipes Hoi Yan had collected over a decade, and a quiet conviction that the work people can do, given the chance, is always more than the world expects of them.
She brought in two community members who needed steady hours. They started with one bake day a week. Then two.
What we’ve learned watching it grow
It would be easy to make a tidy story of this — but the truth is, the bakery is still finding its feet. There have been bad batches. A delivery that arrived late. A week when the oven broke and no one wanted to bake anything ever again.
What’s held it together is the same thing that runs through every part of Life2Life:
- Trust people with real work. Not a programme. Not a workshop. Actual orders, actual customers, actual consequences.
- Stay close. Hoi Yan is in the kitchen every bake day. Mistakes get caught and corrected the same morning.
- Tell the truth about the numbers. Wages get paid before anyone takes a profit margin.
Yummy Bites now ships hampers across the Klang Valley, and supplies a couple of cafés. Hoi Yan still answers every customer message herself.
If you’ve ordered a hamper from us this year — chances are, you’ve tasted her work.