In case you haven’t indulged in a slice of Gula Cakery cake, now is the time to head to your nearest outlet. Today, the inspiring founder of this tasty homegrown bakery speaks to PrestigeOnline Malaysia about how she turned her passion into a flourishing business, and now, on how she intends on staying ahead of the curve.
At 31 years old, Arieni Ritzal is already the owner of an empire of cakes and pastries, a business she started right out the gate upon graduating at 25 years old. Her time in the kitchen started in her early childhood days when she and the matriarchs of the family would spend time making the meals for the family. But the cherries on top are the desserts.
From a home-run Gula Home Bakery, Gula Cakery is six outlets strong, with locations across Klang Valley — with plans to head to Melaka for its first out-of-state location. While the brand is famed for its decadent slices, Arieni is someone who is constantly on the lookout for what’s next, and likes to have a finger in every pie. Even during the nationwide lockdown, the founder continued to grow the brand, venturing into the creamery game with cake-flavoured ice creams. As of May 2022, she began offering roti jala, and at the beginning of the year, Arieni entered the Mexican eatery space with the launch of El Ocho.
So if you ever feel a hankering for some quality cakes, flavourful Peruvian chicken, or a scoop of yummy ice creams in the Malaysian heat, just head over to any of Arieni’s eateries for a taste of homestyle food. But today, we talk to the founder on her most successful venture yet, and it’s Gula Cakery.
I have a bachelor’s in early childhood education, so I graduate to teach kids. I think when I was small the dream was really to have children, since I just loved playing with kids. I wanted my life to be like that, and I even wanted to have a kindergarten.
But there are a lot of things I need to consider if I were to open a kindergarten. I first started by teaching kids to bake. But now with more outlets, my main goal is now to ensure the quality at Gula Cakery. However, I’m still passionate about teaching, and I’ve been teaching for about 12 years already.
I graduated at 25, and in the same year, 2015, I opened my first outlet in Kota Kemuning. It’s a two-floor situation, where one floor is the café, and another is my baking studio where I teach for almost five years. I stopped teaching for about two years now to focus on managing the business, assuring the quality, and making new recipes.
I’ve been baking with my grandma since I was about four or five years old for Hari Raya. Everybody in my family loves sweet stuff. We always need a dessert to complete a meal. For me, it’s like a celebration — everyone needs a cake for a birthday, anniversary, or even graduation. I just feel like it connects everything together.
It’s crazy! When I first started, back at home, I burnt brownies because I fell asleep. There are times when I don’t sleep at all because it was just me; I didn’t have a team. It was just me and my mom.
When I opened up my first outlet, the police came to the kitchen because I stayed there till 3:00 AM baking. They came because I had the lights switched on, my car was the only one in the parking lot, and the policemen came to check out the store. In the end, I gave them cakes. It was a funny moment.
When I was four, I actually baked a moist chocolate cake, and the recipe was my grandma’s. She’s 86 years old now, and we do a lot of things together. A lot of my childhood memories were in the kitchen.
Now, she’s calling and checking on my work at Gula Cakery. I start with her basic flavours first, and now in our seventh year, I already have 200 flavours, with more coming.
She’s not a professional baker. She was a nurse. She keeps this recipe book filled with recipes she saved from newspapers. But in there, she also includes her dos and don’ts. From there, she would tell me which recipes were good and not so great from her experience.
She has four of these recipe books. They’re like my treasures and I still have them with me today. While these books worked great to create the foundation of the menu, I still create new recipes to keep up with the trends and keep our customers excited.
This changes a lot over time. I started with teaching, and now with more outlets, the focus is really to ensure that our customers are happy with Gula Cakery. I still want to keep the homemade quality, so my goal is to offer the best fresh cakes for customers. Right now, I keep my nose to the grindstone to grow the company while maintaining our high quality.
Our cakes are baked fresh every day, and we do not keep the cakes overnight. We make sure that every piece is sold out. We have promotions in the evening so we don’t waste the cakes or have to keep them overnight.
We also aim to be a one-stop-centre for our customers, where they don’t have to go to another location to eat. In fact, you can just bring your family, and Gula Cakery has everything from cakes to coffee to ice cream (under Gula Creamery).
For me, it was winning a pitching competition. It was sort of like Shark Tank, and I was one of the winners. I came with my cakes and my ideas for my outlets, and we won RM500,000. I was the only F&B winner because everybody else pitched tech.
Apart from that, even being able to create 200 flavours is already an achievement for me. I have 150 staff working for me right now, and that’s already a huge deal for me.
Of course, the hardest part is maintaining the quality. Even with outlets spread across town, I still struggle with this because I can’t be at multiple places at once. I think this is why I’m not yet ready to open a store in other states since I want to be able to be hands-on with my operations.
Aside from that, technology also presents a challenge for me, especially since it is ever-changing. With social media, marketing is just not the same anymore. I feel overwhelmed with all the different platforms and the different kinds of content we need to work on for Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. While I believe that my products speak for themselves, the marketing ideas still need to be on point.
This is going to be difficult. My favourite is the double chocolate since that’s what I have when I got started. I would eat it every day if I could. I do have to restrain myself since I taste a lot of my cakes for the quality control and whenever there’s a new flavour. While I like my cakes a lot, I think I enjoy watching people eat the cake even more — it gives me great satisfaction to watch people relish it.
After the lockdown, I think people are getting even choosier. They no longer splurge as much, but this makes them even more discerning when they do.
I also feel like the competition is tighter now, so that’s why our quality is always on my mind, on top of expanding the cake menu with more exciting offerings. During the lockdown, everyone was collectively looking into supporting smaller brands. Now, our job is to gain back our customers’ trust in Gula Cakery. I believe that if I give it my best, it will show and our customers would be able to see that.
I’ll be opening my latest outlet in Melaka. I also hope to be able to expand into Johor, but as I said earlier, I want to be able to reach my outlets just in case my team needs me.
While we do look into expanding our offerings, we always go back to the current ones and see if we can do it even better.
Made in Malaysia is a series by Prestige Malaysia that showcases homegrown talents across various sectors. Through interviews, we strive to highlight the work put in by these individuals while supporting their craft.
All images credit: Gula Cakery
A fan of all things beauty, Najihah Rashid has written for Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. As an English Literature graduate, her hobbies include reading and tuning in to Taylor Swift.
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