Cupcakes and ‘authentic desserts’ see Hummingbird’s sales soar

Opening an American-style bakery in the UK in 2004 came with enormous challenges but cupcake fan, Tarek Malouf, is shortly to open a seventh UK store.

It was at school that Tarek Malouf, founder of The Hummingbird Bakery, was first inspired to set up his own cakes and desserts company.

But unlike those entrepreneurs who claim to experience their Eureka moment at a whiteboard full of sums, it was between classes that a light bulb went off for the London-born business owner. “I used to hang out with my friends and eat American-style brownies and cupcakes,” remembers Malouf, who studied at the capital’s American School. “That’s how it all started.”

This was the early Noughties, when cakes from across the pond weren’t exactly a favourite with UK consumers. “American baking was looked down on back then,” he explains. “The desserts were seen as fake, of inferior quality and a bit trashy.”

This was also a time when London’s street food scene was completely different. “There weren’t many places where the food craze that we have now was present – where on street corners you might now see food trucks selling ambitious fusion cuisine,” says Malouf.

For cakes and sweet treats, it didn’t exist at all. “If you wanted a birthday cake, you had to go to the supermarket or a french patisserie,” adds the founder, who in 2002, took his first steps on the path to launching The Hummingbird Bakery. 

The brand would be about bringing home-baked, American-style cakes to the capital, shaking off its tawdry image. The products would be freshly made on site, using real ingredients and authentic recipes.

In fact, it was the “authentic recipes” aspect that presented the first obstacle; the American cookbooks that Malouf would turn to for inspiration and guidance were written in another language – in culinary terms, at least. Everything was measured in cups or worse, sticks. Recipes would also ask for ingredients that seemingly didn’t exist in this country.

“Now, of course, you can find everything,” says the bakery owner. “But back then, you couldn’t – and I wanted to understand what ‘heavy cream’ and ‘granulated sugar’ really were here (double cream and caster sugar) and how to properly use them.”

Baking – the precise, chemical process that it is – meant that Malouf couldn’t guess, cut corners or substitute when it came to ingredients and recipe steps, especially if his desserts were going to be truly American. So he stayed with his sister in New York for six weeks and attended a few baking classes.

When he returned to London, more commanding of his craft, he hit the laboratory – his kitchen – spending about a year tweaking, perfecting and testing his creations on friends.

The first Hummingbird bakery launched in Notting Hill in 2004. Back then it was a four-person operation, but it has grown, slowly but surely, to become what it is today: a 129 person-strong company that registered turnover of £6.6m last year.

There are six stores in the capital and, as part of a franchising deal, three stores in Dubai and one in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The brand’s steady, organic growth has been very deliberate; its founder doesn’t want to grow too fast and risk losing its personal, family feel. “Part of owning a business is knowing what you don’t want for it,” explains Malouf, who brought a more senior team member on board in 2010. Over the next two years, that staffer pushed to raise some venture capital money and roll out the brand even further and wider.

“It started to feel like I was losing the essence of the business,” he explains. “I became cut off from employees who I had known for many years.”

As things became increasingly impersonal and corporate, Malouf and the colleague parted ways. “It wasn’t what I wanted; I dreaded going into the office every day,” he says. “I took back control, bringing back that personal touch and making it so that employees felt like they were being looked after again.”

Now, lots of careful consideration and planning goes into launching a new bakery. “Only expand when you’re ready,” advises Malouf.

“In 2011, we opened our Spitalfields shop and about six months later, our Islington store. Both floundered in the beginning,” he admits. “Designing, building and opening a new shop is the easiest thing in the world; the difficult bit is what happens after day one.

You have to keep customers engaged in those crucial first few months, so that people don’t come once and never again.”

The marketing wasn’t in place for those two new shops, says Malouf, who also suffered staffing issues. “We weren’t able to train people with enough consistency, so that every person at every shop was on the same page.”

The team started to notice that different shops would have different approaches to opening, setting up and serving shoppers. “They would use me as an example,” jokes Malouf. “One shop might say: ‘Tarek likes the boxes to be packed this way’ – while another would say: ‘Tarek likes them to be done this way’.”

The solution? “You need to have a solid foundation on which to open new sites and train new staff,” says Malouf, who advises growing businesses to put together an operations manual. It doesn’t have to be long or expensive, he explains. “At the very least, put a Word document together that tells people how to turn on the lights in the morning, how to greet customers, how to stock the shelves and so on.”

The Hummingbird Bakery uses cloud storage service, Dropbox, to host all of its key operational documents, recipes, marketing collateral and so on. With a computer in each store, staff can quickly and easily access what they need. “We started using it in 2012 – the manual is there, as is our opening and closing checklists,” says Malouf.

In August, the business will open its first UK store outside of the capital, in Guildford. Interestingly, the bakery’s four recipe books, which to date have sold more than one million copies combined, have helped on the marketing side. “They’ve been great for brand recognition,” says Malouf. “When we announced that we were opening the new shop, people in Guildford were already excited about us coming.”

Shop number eight is on the bakery founder’s mind, but he definitely won’t rush into anything. “I have no idea where that will be yet,” says Malouf, who recently received an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List.

“We want to get Guilford right first. We will tweak things there to suit the people of the town, because we don’t want be a London brand coming in and assuming that it’s just like the capital – and that customers there are the same as London customers.”