Ex-Taj Chef From Mumbai Decided To Start Baking Desserts From Home - Now Runs A Zero-Wastage Confectionery Brand Earning Lakhs

You enter a restaurant feeling hungry. No wait, you’re not hungry. You are starving.

So you place your eager order:

A full bowl of pasta, some breadsticks, a hot chocolate, and a dessert to go with.

Except when you truly sit down to eat, you can’t finish it all. You don’t want to get it packed because that’s a hassle, right? And who wants to eat the same food again at home?

We have all been there. Wasting food that we order. Overestimating our hunger. Feeling a pang of guilt…but immediately moving on with life.

But the thing is, most Indian restaurants, bakeries, and food trucks do not have a system where they give away food to charities or underprivileged people in the locality.

India’s food service industry generates an alarming 22 million tonnes of food waste on an annual basis. 

“This is exactly why I started my home-run confectionery brand with a zero-wastage policy. I have worked in the food industry and I know exactly how mindlessly a lot of food gets wasted, with no proper systems to responsibly give it away. With what I am doing today, I sleep well at night, knowing that we are not enabling wastage in any form,” Sarah Patka, founder of Love & Flour, tells Startup Pedia in an exclusive interview.

Founded in 2015 by Sarah Patka, Love & Flour is a Mumbai-based home-run confectionery brand. It works on a zero-wastage, pre-order basis, and offers unique dessert items.

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THE BACKGROUND: A LOVE FOR DESSERTS

Currently 32 years old, Sarah Patka comes from a matriarchal household in Mumbai. Her mother ran a boutique store and always had a spark of entrepreneurship.

“I graduated in hotel management from Anjuman-I-Islam's Institute of Hotel Management & Catering Technology in 2014,” Sarah mentions. 

“It was honestly my mother and cousins who pushed me to pursue hotel management. She had seen me extremely interested in food, especially desserts, since I was a child,” she adds. 

Growing up with a sweet tooth, Sarah Patka was a complete fan of desserts. 

In college, she started a small project by the name of Sweet Passion. She launched it during a friend's birthday party and made a total of thirty cupcakes for the guests. 

Unfortunately, an extra dash of baking soda ruined the taste completely.

“That event made me lose my self-confidence in baking a bit. Nevertheless, things turned around after college,” Sarah Patka shares. 

After her graduation, she worked at hotels like The Taj, Trident, and The Oberoi. 

During her stint at The Taj Hotel, Sarah Patka experienced a moment that went on to shape her life in endless ways. 

There was a major event being held at the hotel, and fifteen chefs were appointed to the bakery. 

Sarah was handed over five trays which she was supposed to take inside a minus 17°C freezer.

“My task was to pipe the eclairs in the freezer. I was shivering constantly, but didn't seem to mind. The whole act of decorating the eclairs and filling them up with chocolate and cream made me lose myself to the process. It was then that I realized that I have always loved baking and should take it up more seriously,” small business founder Sarah Patka shares with Startup Pedia. 

After leaving her job as a chef at The Taj Hotel, she came home and wondered what to do next. 

A family friend pushed her to take up baking from her home. 

“Honestly, that idea was already at the back of my head. But executing it was so scary. That's the thing about thinking too much, right? You get too comfortable thinking. When it comes to doing, you freeze,” Sarah reflects. 

Finally, by September 2014, she planted the seed for her home-run confectionery brand called Love & Flour. 

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JOURNEY AND CHALLENGES AS A MUMBAI-BASED HOME BAKER 

From September 2014 to January 2015, Sarah Patka spent every single day and night preparing and building Love & Flour from scratch.

She bootstrapped the small business with an amount of Rs 30,000, which came from her savings.

“I could've taken a loan from my family and gotten a commercial space to start my bakery. But I didn't. I wanted to build it from scratch, all by myself, and from home,” the small business founder says. 

Initially, Sarah Patka undertook hands-on training classes, conducted recipe trials, and soft-launched Love & Flour among friends and family. 

The vision was simple but powerful: build a unique bakery brand that is home-run, made-to-order, and has zero wastage. 

Love & Flour was officially started on January 24, 2015.

Sarah started with a limited product range: cakes, cupcakes, cake pops, and brownies. 

For the first three months of business, the home-run confectionery brand clocked close to Rs 30,000 in revenue. 

“My growth was slow; I agree. That's because when I started out, I didn't have anyone to guide me through the step-by-step process of building a bakery brand,” entrepreneur Sarah tells Startup Pedia.

“For instance, when I tried creating an online presence and needed professional photographers for the same, the rates quoted were so high that I decided to invest in a DSLR and shoot content myself,” the small business founder adds. 

From clicking pictures, shooting videos, posting content on Instagram, strategizing content, and baking unique desserts – Sarah did everything on her own, with little to no external help. 

By 2017, Love & Flour started selling its freshly-made desserts online as well as offline. 

“I had partnered up with an online delivery partner called Scootsy,” Sarah says. 

The year 2020 is what the home-run confectionery brand owner describes as a “good year for business.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants, cafes, and bakeries had shut down. People came to Love & Flour for all their birthday and anniversary needs. 

“In 2021, when everything opened up again, my home-run bakery business was affected. But we survived. Eventually, I realized that ramping up marketing and building our own website, which would act as our digital shop, was important,” Sarah Patka reflects. 

In 2023, Love & Flour launched its own website and started catering to website orders, offline orders, and direct orders received via Instagram DMs. 

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THE “JUST ANOTHER HOME BAKER” TAG

During her interview with Startup Pedia, Sarah Patka stressed on the fact that people mistake home bakers to be people who bake purely out of “hobby.”

“I am sorry but nothing boils my blood more. Home bakers do not wake up to bake a small brownie for aesthetics. There is a whole lot of operational back-and-forth that goes behind the scenes. Most of these people aspire to run full-blown bakeries in the future. They are entrepreneurs in their own right and should be treated as such,” Sarah Patka affirms. 

When she started Love & Flour, a lot of people thought that it was a “phase” where she wanted to experiment, and that she would be done with it in another two or three years. 

“Eleven years later, I am still here,” she laughs. 

LOVE & FLOUR: MADE-TO-ORDER, FRESH, AND DELICIOUS

Today, Love & Flour operates as a Mumbai-based home-run confectionery brand that works on a zero-wastage, pre-order basis, and offers unique dessert items.

From sourcing to baking and final assembly, the home bakery maintains that high-quality ingredients are integral to every step of the process. 

Love & Flour’s bestseller products include:

• Cookie Pizza (a dessert pizza that Sarah innovated, it went viral on the Internet)

• Signature Belgian Chocolate Cake

• San Sebastian Cheesecakes

• Cheesecake Bars (inspired by New York)

• Cake Pops (made from cake scraps, promoting the zero-wastage policy)

Additionally, the home-run confectionery brand also offers freshly-made brownies, cupcakes, chocolates, tarts, and mini macarons.

The prices start from Rs 500 and go up to Rs 5,000 (depending on the customization). 

“Our USP is that we give the customer a variety of desserts to choose from. We are constantly innovating,” Sarah shares. 

Love & Flour is a one-woman operation, with Sarah Patka handling all the baking, accounting, order dispatching, management, and marketing herself. 

“It is exhausting, but I like it. It's my ikigai. Additionally, I have a domestic help who cleans the kitchen. That's all. For social media, there are temporary interns who strategize content for Instagram,” she says. 

Since 2017, Sarah Patka has been regularly posting baking recipes and behind-the-scenes footage of building Love & Flour from scratch. 

Today, the order split for the home-run confectionery brand is:

• 50% orders from Instagram DMs

• 40% orders from offline customers 

• 10% orders from the website 

THE UNIT ECONOMICS

Sarah Patka revealed the unit economics breakdown of one of her bestseller products, the Cookie Pizza, which sells for Rs 1,500:

• Rs 300 goes into the raw material cost

• Rs 50 goes into packaging 

• Rs 300 is spent on labour (although the baking is done by Sarah, she accounts for it as her charge)

• Overheads like utilities and rent come at Rs 50

• Rs 10 is the marketing and distribution spend

• Rs 790 is the net profit margin per unit 

“Since the beginning, I have been reinvesting the profits into the business,” Sarah notes.

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GROWTH AND MOMENTUM

The home-run confectionery brand owner did not disclose the specific revenue figure for the initial years of the business.

“Honestly, it's all so haywire. I was just trying to make things work and keeping an account wasn't at the top of my priority list. But yes, Love & Flour turned profitable within one year of its launch,” she says. 

In 2023, Love & Flour clocked an annual revenue of less than Rs 6 lakh. In 2024, the figure surged to Rs 8.5 lakh, and in 2025, the confectionery brand clocked Rs 11 lakh. 

In 2025, the customer base surged to 2,000+ from 1,750 in 2024, and 1,250 in 2023. 

Serving Mumbai, Pune, Lonavala, Navi Mumbai, and Thane, Love & Flour is projecting a total customer number of more than 3,000 in 2026, with an annual revenue of approximately Rs 13.5 lakh.

“The ultimate vision is to build this into a luxury boutique confectionery brand where there is endless variety when it comes to pampering your sweet tooth. Love & Flour will become exactly that,” Sarah Patka signs off.