Turning to baking during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic was a common source of solace for housebound Chicagoans, but Carla Medina Jacobson took it to new heights.
She made treats like tres leches and croissants, and one stood out as her “crowning glory,” a three-tier chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting, she said.
But there were pitfalls aplenty as she made the towering birthday cake for her husband (and trashed an entire first attempt in the process).
Medina Jacobson realized how hard it was, not only to find foolproof recipes, but to source the right amount of ingredients. Even for a casual baker who knows her way around the baking aisle, she still has an entire tub of cocoa powder left over from that three-tier cake, taking up precious real estate in her small apartment pantry.
“What we were discovering on our own baking journeys is there are so many barriers to baking at home,” Medina Jacobson said.
Her mind started churning. She just knew there was a market among amateur bakers who could use an assist.
Enter BaKIT Box.
Medina Jacobson, who works at a Chicago travel tech startup, partnered with her entrepreneurial-minded friend and fellow University of Chicago Booth School of Business graduate, Shelley Gupta, to start a meal kit-like box, officially launching in February for Chicago-area bakers.
And their idea couldn’t have come at a better time.
Over the first year of the pandemic, flour sales skyrocketed, with King Arthur Baking Company seeing a 58% increase in sales as customers cleared grocery store shelves for weeks at a time, according to a Yahoo! Finance report. Baking ingredients and mixes shot up 25%. Stuck at home, many tapped into their inner baker after plowing through food-related TV programs and competition series.
Shows like “The Great British Baking Show” and “Sugar Rush” fueled interest in baking in recent years, but with people spending more time at home, that enthusiasm only intensified.
BaKIT Box (pronounced “bake-kit box”), similar to Home Chef or Blue Apron, provides pre-portioned ingredients and step-by-step directions for a monthly rotating selection of baked goods like salted chocolate chip cookies, zucchini sweet potato bread, vanilla cupcakes. On their website, customers can also filter by level of difficulty — burger buns, for example, are listed as intermediate, while chocolate cupcakes and tres leches are considered easy.
“Baking calls for small quantities of many items. And that’s impossible to buy at the grocery store,” Gupta said. “We thought, what if we create a baking kit where the recipes were completely vetted with user-friendly directions, and we provide all the pre-measured ingredients?”
The brand is geared toward hopeful home bakers looking for a place to start; they might not have measuring cups or the willingness to stock up on flour or baking powder, but they’ve got a whisk and some mixing bowls.
“You might be searching online for a recipe, and you come across hundreds of different variations of the same recipe with cups and grams,” Gupta said. “The novice baker won’t know what those ratios mean. That was the first step to realizing there is a market for making this easier for people.”
Both Medina Jacobson and Gupta consider themselves foodies and like to draw inspiration from their upbringing. Medina Jacobson is Puerto Rican and Gupta, who hails from Toronto, is Indian. In their selection of featured bakes, they try to incorporate recipes that showcase their own cultures.
Sweet empanadas, inspired by Medina Jacobson’s childhood favorite of guava and queso empanadas, are a rotating BaKIT offering that include a strawberry jam filling, instead of harder-to-source guava.
And upcoming in the September lineup is Nanaimo bars, a Canadian no-bake dessert with three layers of wafer and coconut, custard icing and a layer of chocolate ganache on top.
“They are super popular and became even more popular when it was mentioned on ‘Schitt’s Creek’ at one point,” Medina Jacobson said with a laugh. “We really wanted to showcase our cultures. And when you think about cultures, it’s more than just your family’s background; it’s where you grew up too.”
Gupta and Medina Jacobson, much like their target demo, are not baking professionals. They partnered with pastry chefs and recipe developers from The Hatchery, a food incubator and production facility in Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood. The Hatchery provides local food entrepreneurs space to grow their businesses, to extensively test recipes and work on ways to safely and efficiently package each box. Gupta and Medina Jacobson also self-test in their own kitchens and jot down new recipes along the way.
The content of each BaKIT Box indicates how soon ingredients should be used, but Medina Jacobson recommends sticking the whole bag (which comes inside the box) in the fridge if it won’t be used right away. But if the butter, for example, needs to come to room temperature before making frosting for cupcakes, the recipe cards will specify.
“It has been quite the learning curve,” Medina Jacobson said. “The biggest hurdle we’re finding as female, minority business owners is finding people who are open-minded and willing to take an investment chance on us.”
In July, the pair received a grant from Tech Rise, a diversity initiative led by civic-minded development firm P33 that supports Chicago’s Black and Latinx tech founders and has backing from Penny Pritzker, Verizon and 1871.
Aside from the grant, BaKIT Box has so far raised nearly $100,000 of a planned $500,000 pre-seed funding round.
While their current business model is a la carte, Gupta and Medina Jacobson are working on rolling out a holiday subscription, where customers can opt to automatically receive boxes every few months. “This is for the person that says, ‘I bake, but I only bake for holiday gatherings,'” Medina Jacobson said. “That could be Thanksgiving, Christmas or the Super Bowl.”
In addition to new subscription offerings, they’re planning out the next round of recipes, like autumn-inspired pumpkin spice cupcakes, savory cheddar-jalapeno cornbread, apple hand pies and some dairy-free and gluten-free options.
Because the business is so new and so niche, both Gupta and Medina Jacobson understand questions like “Why not just use a baking mix from the store?” Yes, new and experienced bakers can turn to baking mixes to bake a little faster, but with store-bought mixes, “you don’t get to see all the elements that go into it,” Gupta said.
“At the end of the day, we’re providing convenience and education in the area of baking,” she added. “We’re aiming to make it easier for young professionals, parents, anyone who enjoys experimenting in the kitchen. Where they can still create something delicious and beautiful from scratch, with a little bit of help.”
BaKIT Boxes range from $25 to $30. Visit bakitbox.com for more.
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