Conny Gwai is a graduate in Hospitality Management and an accredited skills development facilitator.
Not many people emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic feeling positive about the experience.
Pastry chef Conny Gwai is one of those who launched a business during the turbulent period after starting Yours Truly KayGee’s Confections in 2020.
“I realised there’s a need for my craft and that’s when I realised ‘okay, I can actually come up with this business idea’ because I’m quite creative,” Gwai told The Citizen.
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Booming through Covid
The idea for a business came one day after Gwai decided to take a batch of cookies she had made for her family to work and share with colleagues.
“And one of my colleagues told me ‘you really need to sell these because they’re so good’ but I was not into business. I never thought I’d be an entrepreneur one day.”
After posting some of the orders she received on her WhatsApp status, more orders flocked in.
“Almost the entire time of Covid, it’s been a very busy time for my business. It all started with a cookie,” she says.
It helped that she was able to work remotely from where she was, which gave her time to focus on her baking.
The 35-year-old is a graduate in Hospitality Management and an accredited skills development facilitator.
“But during my years of studying, I majored in accommodation and management. I did not go through the culinary route. I wasn’t a fan of being in the kitchen,” shares Gwai.
She says her choice of going the accommodation route was inspired by her friends who had chosen the accommodation and management major. However, she notes that they received basic baking skills.
“The first and second year, we did practicals, we did bake, we cooked. From those skills, I carried them over and baked cookies for my family just to treat them,” she says.
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Developing the youth
The bakery has evolved into a beacon of empowerment and innovation in the John Taolo Gaetsewe District Municipality, Northern Cape.
Gwai offers training and skills development in her community, teaching interested youth how to bake.
However, things were made tough by the height of load shedding in the country around 2022, which impacted her business.
She received assistance from local businesses, which supplied her with solar equipment, significantly reducing her reliance on electricity for storing her cakes.
“We’ve moved out of the house, we are still in the yard, but we’ve now got a kitchen studio where we do our baking and host our training. It’s still limiting because we are only able to host about 10 students a time,” Gwai says.
“The aim is to grow and expand our skill development training programmes so we’ll be able to host a big number of people.”
The entrepreneur says she’s trained a total of 90 to a 100 young people, sharing pastry skills.
Alongside her dream of opening a coffee shop that sells her baked goods, Gwai says she’d like to obtain accreditation from the Quality Council for Trades and Occupations (QCTO).
“Because I believe that if we want to give something tangible, it has to have weight, unlike the basic attendance…we want to give them something of value.”
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