Page 16 - Food & Drink Magazine July 2018

✷ RISING STAR
Silly Yaks bakery levels the field
A former IT high-flyer has created a bakery business where fun is paramount and people mean as much as the product, writes Samantha Schelling.
BRYN Pears was once a high flyer in the IT world. Things began to change in 2002 when he joined a fledging café serving coffee and gluten-free cake in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote.
Within 12 months the business had become a full- service restaurant, doing breakfast and lunch six days
a week, dinner three nights a week, and retailing 35 different products that were baked in the café kitchen overnight.
Wholesale enquiries were beginning to arrive from health- food shops and specialty stores wanting to resell the product.
In 2003, a separate facility was created for the bakery, and in October 2008 Pears sold the café to a third-party, and Silly Yaks was born.
“After the café sale there was a period of extraordinarily hard work where we tried to build a national business, which we have done. Now we are in the process of building an international one.”
Winding back to the 1990s, Pears took his Bachelor of Science degree, with Honours in Computer Science, and began work in IT research. He hated it.
“So after three months I was offered a job with a start-up IT firm. When I joined, there were four of us. When I left almost 14 years later, there were 690 staff, the company was listed on the ASX, and was turning over $62 million a year.
“SowhywasitthatIlefta high-paid job in business- technology consulting with a firm that I had joined in a
start-up and went into an industry about which I knew nothing? Simply because the gulf between how I saw myself and what I did with my time was getting wider and wider. Actually, it was spectacularly misaligned with my moral framework and how I saw myself.”
While he wanted to prove to himself that he could build a business, he also wanted to “build a business that delivered more equally for everybody”. That meant leaving the field he’d spent his life in. But Pears soon discovered that his skill set was highly transferable.
GLUTEN-FREE 101
“I didn’t even know what gluten was! I’ve never baked a loaf of bread in my life, but when I looked at that industry, I could
OPPOSITE: Packaging for Silly Yaks’ Chocolate Chip Cookie reflects the company’s sense of fun.
16 | Food&Drink business | July 2018 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au