Staff at the Celebrating Life Bakery make a habit of preparing birthday cakes for people who do not order them and will not pay for them. In fact, some of those receiving the cakes have forgotten when their birthday is. And for others, it has been a very long time since they celebrated it.
The routine is part of the company’s One4One Abu Dhabi campaign, which aims to give back to the less fortunate.
Every time a customer at the patisserie purchases one of its Dh60 0.5kg cakes or larger, the bakery makes a second, at no extra cost to them, for someone on a low income, who is then surprised with the gift on their birthday.
Manmeet Singh, the bakery’s founder and marketing director, was inspired by the shoe brand Toms, which gives a pair of shoes to someone in need every time a customer purchases a pair from the company. “The moment I came to know about this idea I said ‘we should do this’,” says Mr Singh.
The idea of paying it forward has taken off globally, with many big corporates adopting polices that encourage their customers to help others. The “suspended coffee” movement for example – where you buy yourself a coffee at a participating cafe and pay for a second one to be claimed by someone who cannot afford to buy their own – is popular in the West.
For Mr Singh, the need to help others came from working in Abu Dhabi as a sales and marketing manager and he launched his bakery in April 2016 with the CSR element in mind.
“I have been here for more than four years now and have seen a lot of workers are working away from home and it is very hard for them,” he says. “They get paid very little and they never celebrate their birthdays at all.”
The patisserie hands the cakes over in a gifting ceremony where the team sing Happy Birthday to the recipient and take photos to show customers the effect their donation has made.
“They are completely blown away. They say ‘who told you it’s my birthday?’ It’s really amazing,” says Mr Singh, who joins the team for weekend deliveries of the gift cakes. “One guy, a security guard, said in my four years in Abu Dhabi nobody has celebrated my birthday.”
The patisserie, on Electra Street in Abu Dhabi, is the first of what Mr Singh hopes will be a network of branches across the UAE, one in every emirate.
Mr Singh now wants to partner with more UAE companies to hand birthday cakes to their low-income employees. To date he has relied on customers giving the details of those they want to help.
“If a company decided that they wanted to do it on a monthly basis, then that’s fine. They can feed us the information so we can make sure we have something nicely written or we know who we are talking to,” says Asha Sherwood, the patisserie’s marketing and communications manager.
“A lot of this is the personal aspect to it. It’s having that conversation with the construction worker, cleaner or with the taxi driver, knowing their name and making them feel that somebody does care and it’s not just ‘here is a cake, and we will see you later’.”
Other UAE companies have similar initiatives. Nom Nom Asia, which has branches in Al Barsha and Al Karama in Dubai, recently displayed signs outside its restaurants offering those out of work a free meal. “Don’t think of it as charity. You can come back and pay us when you can – any time :),” the sign read.
And Blends and Brews, a coffee chain with branches around the UAE, is part of the suspended coffee movement with customers able to pay it forward by buying a coffee for others. Celebrating Life Bakery hopes to follow suit and start offering suspended coffees next month.
“There is certainly a current trend of companies moving away from traditional sales and marketing techniques, towards finding ways to connect on a personal level with their customers and the broader community,” says Robyn Brazzil, the programme manager at StartAD at New York University Abu Dhabi. “For example, by creating useful content through blogs, connecting with social causes or taking a position on current geopolitical issues. This translates to stronger brand loyalty from the consumer.
“Celebrating Life Bakery is a great example of how companies, especially start-ups and SMEs, are focusing on the customer experience.”
So far, the patisserie has handed out 50 cakes to labourers, taxi drivers, cleaners and children with special needs who attend Gulf Autism Centre in Abu Dhabi. The patisserie makes a regular trip there to celebrate the children’s birthdays each month.
“The bakery contacted us and told us that they wanted to celebrate with us every month with the kids,” says Amira Osman, centre supervisor at Gulf Autism Centre. “Our kids like the event a lot. When we do it they are so happy.”
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