Auckland cakery hit by storm, baking supplies ruined

Wednesday, 1 February 2023

A flood has hit Auckland for the second time in days, with houses and streets underwater. (Video February 2023)

Auckland cake-in-a jar business Sweet Talk is counting the cost of the floods of the past week.

Owner Mariska Macdonald said she has lost at least $3000 in ruined stock and damaged equipment, with about a dozen 25kg bags of flour and sugar, as well as other baking ingredients, now unusable.

Her cake packaging had also been ruined, a freezer and fridge broken and the carpet in the office would have to be replaced.

On Wednesday morning, she and her staff faced a clean-up job to rid her Eden Terrace cake shop of leftover storm water.

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The business was hit by minor flooding on Saturday after the storm began on Friday, but on Tuesday night the flooding had affected the opposite side of the bakery, where the electrics were located.

She said she was yet to sit down and tally up the total cost of damage but said this would easily be in the “thousands”.

Mariska Macdonald and Lyric Donaldson cleaning up the flood water.

“We’re going to have to bin a lot of our ingredients which is a waste, and such a shame,” said Macdonald.

Macdonald said the business had also been hit by indirect impacts of the wild weather, facing cake cancellations, requests for refunds and cakes that were unable to be collected.

“We’re not having as many orders now as events aren’t going ahead; it is very Covid vibes,” she said. “I’ve got some real PTSD coming through from Covid.

“The indirect cost is the loss in sales. We’ve made cakes and then unfortunately people were stuck and couldn’t collect them, and postponed, so that was still an expense. It is also that sort of loss [we’re facing].”

Sweet Talk started out as Collab Cakery in 2019 shortly before the first nationwide Covid-19 lockdown.

It found its feet and grew a significant following online on Instagram in 2020 when it created a cake-in-a-jar product as a way to diversify and mitigate the risk of loss of revenue in the event of another lockdown.

Macdonald said the flooding was unfortunate as it had affected all avenues of the business, including its wholesale division, events and retail product shipped nationwide, arms she had established in a bid to be able to continue to trade.

“Now the roads are closed and New Zealand Post can’t deliver to certain areas, each division is now a little bit impacted at the moment.”

Sweet Talk staff were delivering cakes and doing whatever they could to carry on.

Macdonald said no planning could prepare a business for this kind of disruption.

Flooding inside Sweet Talk’s Eden Terrace shop and bakery.

“Despite all of this, I feel really lucky that this is all manageable. There will be a lot of people who are hurting, a lot of damage out there and a lot of people displaced.”

She said a broken freezer had meant that Sweet Talk had thawed egg white to use up. Egg white was used to make its signature butter cream.

“There’s only so much we can do with it, and then we’ll probably have to eat egg white omelettes.”

Just days ago, Macdonald said she was feeling so good about the year ahead and that she had finally found her feet after a couple of tumultuous years.

“I was finding some predictability, and I was saying that maybe a week before that happened.”