"With the capital I received from my first CGC financing I invested in my factory. We now make up to 100 cakes a day, and our sales and profit have also increased."

Ex-banker Siti Nur Fairus Wahab dreamt of starting a business with her husband. He suggested that, since she likes baking cakes, that should be the way forward. While he takes care of marketing the cakes and the cafe, she is in charge of production.

Siti’s mango cheesecake is renowned in Kuantan. “It’s our specialty, as ours is frozen, not baked. And it can last up to six months,” she affirms. Other popular cakes in her stable are Nutella, Oreo and Durian cheesecakes.

For more than four years Siti has been supplying her cakes around Kuantan, other parts of Pahang and, most recently, Terengganu. In 2018, she obtained her first CGC financing. “With the BizMula-i financing I invested in my factory. We now make up to 100 cakes a day, and our sales and profit have also increased.”

Last year, with her second BizWanita-i financing, she decided to finance the opening of a cafe. It’s just a year old and serves Western meals and local favourites in a comfortable, charming ambiance. “But,” she emphasises, “unlike other restaurants and cafes, Noha Cakes offers a lot of dessert cake options.”

However, the current Movement Control Order (MCO) has been very challenging. Siti has had to shut down her restaurant, as well as a large part of her factory. But for the first time they have started home deliveries of cakes based on Cash on Delivery (COD). “We don’t really know where we are all going with this. And when the MCO first came through, and cafes shut down, we were left with thousands of cakes sitting on our shelves.”

In this time, all their frozen cakes are available but other specialty cakes were on a weekly rotation. Just a way of managing the situation in the best way they could.

16/19