Shanghai’s culinary entrepreneurs are starting to bring their work home with them

If you’re like me, moving to Shanghai means missing certain foods like crazy and stockpiling them maniacally during visits home. For the entrepreneurially-minded among us, however, these culinary yearnings can turn into business opportunity.

“It was the summertime and we were all out drinking beers on a friend’s balcony when someone was like ‘Man, I really want a decent pie right now’,” recalls Nick Major, co-owner of the Shanghai Pie Company. “The next day my sister Caroline went out, got together the ingredients and baked our first pies.”

That was three years ago. The Shanghai Pie Company now boasts a fervent following and a factory that bakes thousands of pies a week, but Major remembers their humble beginnings well. “We started out simple. We had one product that was promoted mostly through word of mouth. Deliveries were made by taxis and we sourced the ingredients ourselves from the wet markets.”

These grassroots to riches success stories have encouraged others in Shanghai to throw their chef hats into the ring. Amelia Heaton-Renshaw is one such example. “Back towards the end of this summer, I decided to leave my engineering job. My mother always made jams and chutneys at home, so I decided to give it a try in Shanghai because no one was really doing it here.” She’s since opened Amelia’s Jams, where she’s bolstered her mother’s recipes by adding local seasonal ingredients.

But while the barriers to entry are low, the road to riches is not easy. Usually, these entrepreneurs find themselves juggling multiple roles. “I’m the chief baker, supplier, sales and marketing team and delivery person all in one,” laughs Jenna Suharto of cupcake-making Oh My Goodness Bakery.

But since Jenna’s cooking philosophy hinges on the sourcing of top organic ingredients, her visits home are now grocery runs as well, a time for her to stock up on everything from organic sugar to beet juice. Food’s always better when you know where it came from, and with this new trend catching on, it might be coming from just down the street.