Kitchen Fund

Firstly I’d like to start by saying this is not something that we’ve personally wanted to do but we’ve found ourselves in a very difficult position and a tight time scale….

We run a small family business that has survived COVID and grown to be a very popular cake shop all while having a young family.

However in October 2024 we made the decision to make use of the government grants to get a town centre shop to help grow the business as our current shops location was limited on footfall and on the outskirts of town.

However this plan of utilising the grants is where the problem started…

To cut a very long story short, we found a shop negotiated rent, informed the grants team that we didn’t have long to decide as there was a competing offer….. we were informed that to keep all invoices and submit all the application as soon as possible.

we followed these instructions to the tee but were greeted by a “All that you’ve done to this point is in retrospect”

This left us with savings spent, work started and in a 6 year lease….. so we pushed on called in every possible favour and managed to get the shop open in time for Xmas.

moving Forward to this year we made the difficult decision to close our original shop, due to not enough foot fall and rising costs made the shop unviable financially, however we still have to use the original shop for it’s kitchen to produce all the cakes from.

This means we currently have to run the town shop during the day then go to the original shop to cook for the next day as we haven’t got a kitchen installed as yet.

What we need to do is build a kitchen in our town centre shop so we can be under one roof and not working 16-18hr days that we can’t physically maintain as well as having a young family.

we have the go ahead for the work to be done but to start from scratch installing gas and commercial kitchen canopy the costs are astronomical…. We’ve tried just about everything to save up and fund this ourselves we just keep hitting problem after problem that drains anything we’ve saved.

Again this is not something we wanted to do but we’re running out of options.