Raveena Oberoi transforms her many talents into thriving business ventures, including Just Cakes Bakeshop.
There was a time when University of British Columbia (UBC) students would hike across campus, rain or shine, hoping to be first in line for an ooey gooey cinnamon bun — freshly baked daily and served hot in the Old Cafeteria. Unfortunately, this iconic memory for several generations of UBC students, like most things, is becoming a thing of the past as new memories are shaped by innovation and technology.
As the campus has grown and changed over the years, so, too have students’ experiences. The beloved Old Cafeteria is gone and cinnamon buns are still being served, but the recipe has been updated and they’re no longer straight out of the oven. There are also more options for meals and snacks, including a variety of independent and chain restaurants and cafés, several cafeterias, food courts and, most recently, a vending machine that sells cakes in jars.
Known as the “Jar Bar,” this high-tech treat dispenser is the brainchild of UBC grad Raveena Oberoi. Located in the Nest, part of the student union building, students can quickly grab a variety of popular cake flavours in jars for $8.50 each.
“Cakes in jars has been a fun idea since I was just doing cakes from my mom’s kitchen,” says Oberoi, who stumbled on the idea of layering cakes in 2014 while baking a lemon cake next to her mother, who was making blueberry jam. “Because we live on a blueberry farm, my mom makes jam every single summer and I had a whole bunch of extra cake scraps and stuff lying around. I had some Mason jars and just started to layer the cake, jam and buttercream in a jar, and I was like, wow, this is so cute. This is very Pinterest-y.”
Oberoi doesn’t take credit for the idea of cake jars, but had fun putting her own spin on the trendy dessert. She posted pictures of the jarred cakes on social media and began to sell them in what she called “weekly drops.” Alternating between different flavour profiles, she initially sold 12 jars at a time, but that quickly grew to more than 300 — all made in her mother’s kitchen.
“People went crazy, and I [thought], ‘Hey, this could be a thing,’” says Oberoi, who was still working on her bachelor of arts in psychology at the time.
Raveena Oberoi, founder of Just Cakes Bakeshop, turned her passion for baking into a thriving business — from experimenting in her mother’s kitchen to overseeing a Surrey bakery and innovative Jar Bar vending machines, all while earning national recognition as the winner of Food Network Canada’s Big Bake championship and as a judge on Wall of Bakers.
Just Cakes Bakeshop
Oberoi, who grew up in an entrepreneurial family, quickly recognized the business opportunity and turned her side-hustle into something more substantial. She graduated from university in 2015 and, while continuing to refine her business model, attended France’s École Bellouet Conseil and became a certified pastry chef. By 2017, she was ready to launch her Just Cakes Bakeshop in Surrey, as a bricks-and-mortar bakery.
The business flourished… until the pandemic.
“We were really struggling. I remember having to lay off the majority of my team,” she says. “I had a team of about 13 at that time and then it was basically me and just a few others, left to handle the little business that we did have at that point.”
Fortunately, around that same time, Fresh St. Market approached her to carry the cake jars, her first foray into wholesale. And, because of COVID, everyone was looking for products packaged as individual servings that could also be easily ordered online and delivered through various apps.
“So, we basically converted our entire pastry line into jar format,” says Oberoi, who mentions that in October of 2020, her sister gave her the idea of using vending machines to sell the jars.
“And so, we got our first machine, and I contacted Willowbrook Mall in Langley, and they said, well, let’s try this out. We did a 10-day pop-up with the vending machine and the response was insane.”
It was so profitable that she made enough money to buy a used vending machine and has since upgraded it, customizing the new machine to fit her specific needs, making Jar Bars available in malls and post-secondary institutions across the Fraser Valley and Metro Vancouver. After enjoying a successful run with university campus life at Langara and UBC, the Jar Bar can now be found at Highstreet Shopping Centre in Abbotsford.
Two years ago, once the bakeshop was back in full production, serving pastries, cakes in jars, regular cakes and wedding cakes, Oberoi acquired a separate commercial kitchen/warehouse to manage her increased production needs for the bakeshop, wholesale operations and catering services.
She and her talented team of bakers have also won numerous awards, including Food Network Canada’s Big Bake championship title, and she was a judge on Food Network’s, Wall of Bakers.
Rediscovering her happy place
With the success of her growing business, Oberoi had less time in the kitchen as she needed to focus on general operations, branding and marketing.
“I have an incredible team,” she says. “They’re so good at what they do and I’m so lucky to have them. They made my dream their own. It’s been cool to cultivate that, but I miss being in the kitchen.”
To reconnect with her love of baking while flexing her creativity, Oberoi began offering bi-weekly bake drops. She’s rearranged her schedule so she can spend more time baking and experimenting with new recipes and flavour combinations. With each new successful recipe, she creates small batches and invites people to try them and offer their feedback. Her most recent innovation was a twist on the Dubai chocolate craze — a cake tin with rich chocolate cake, kunafa filling, white chocolate pistachio mousse and a milk chocolate pistachio glaze. Only 50 were made, and they sold out quickly.
“When I’m in the kitchen, it truly is my happy place,” she says. “Many entrepreneurs probably can agree with this. When you make something that’s your hobby, your passion, your love… and then it becomes your paycheque, you lose a little bit of that magic just to make sure you can make ends meet, so you can put food on the table. I’ve definitely gone through ebbs and flows of that over the last 16 years, wondering if I still love this business. Do I still want to do this? But, you know, it’s those moments where I’m alone in the kitchen, and I’m just making something for the sake of making something. That’s when I’m like, okay, yeah, this is still my love, and it still makes me so happy, it brings me so much joy.”
Wedding cakes from Just Cakes Bakeshop.
Bake Buddy
As much as Oberoi enjoys being back in the kitchen baking and creating new recipes, she’s also become a resourceful businesswoman who, it turns out, is also quite savvy when it comes to technology. She learned to code as a teenager and recognizes the value of using technology to solve problems. A big one she faced in her business was how to effectively track costs to ensure profitability.
“I’ve probably made every single pricing mistake, I’ve even invested in very expensive software to help me with pricing. It was just too much for someone like me at that time.”
She’s spent the last two years simplifying the process for herself and her team. Starting with a basic spreadsheet and using her coding skills, she created a cloud-based software program called Bake Buddy to track her inventory and costs. It worked well for her team and Oberoi wondered if other bakers might also be interested in using the program.
“It helps bakers of any size, whether you’re in a professional bakery or at home, to keep track of all your ingredients, all your costs, where you get things from, and then also build out your recipes with the ingredients that you buy, so you know how much a recipe costs.”
Oberoi is currently developing a mobile app that can be purchased from the App Store, but in the meantime, the program is mobile-and desktop-friendly and available for $7.99 per month.
“I wanted to make this super affordable,” she says. She is planning to expand the software to include inventory management and a bulk pricing calculator.
Gummy Gainz
As her reputation grew, Oberoi was approached a couple of years ago to help formulate a recipe for Gummy Gainz, a company that produces high-protein candy.
“They loved what I was able to formulate, and then they asked if I wanted to join the team as an equal partner, so I said yes. About a year ago is when we really started to get some traction in stores, and now we’re in more than 600 stores across Canada.”
Moving forward
What’s next? Oberoi has decided to step back from day-to-day operations and focus more on the wholesale side of the cake business, and on helping other entrepreneurs with their businesses as a mentor and consultant. She intends to continue baking and innovating in her happy place and, of course, has a few more ideas for transforming shoppers’ experience with consumer-packaged goods in grocery stores.
Just Cakes Bakeshop
5-7548 120 St., Surrey
justcakesbc.com | @justcakesbakeshop | @thejarbar.ca
