Bakeland Saipan: Turning talent into profit

Bakeland Saipan is located along Barbara St. in Chalan Kanoa next to Trader’s Insurance. (CONTRIBUTED PHOTOS)

Just like making fantastic bread, Bakeland Saipan head baker Partha Talukder and his wife have all the right ingredients in putting together a business that is run at home. Established in November last year, they had a soft-opening to raise funds to help victims of Super Typhoon Rolly in the Philippines. Bakeland Saipan is now a household name and its humble beginnings can be traced back from selling one of the simplest bread of all—pandesal or salt bread.

“My wife and her family, especially her grandmother Lola Inay are from the Philippines and they are fond of pandesal, a local bread back home. While there are a few bakeries on island who make pandesal, access to it everday became hard because of the pandemic. Whenever we would go to a store, its either closed or sold out,” Talukder said.

“Because we had a lot of time during quarantine, we started to bake for our own consumption. There were days that we would share them with our friends, mostly Filipinos and they gave us an idea why not turn it into a business. Out of 57,000 residents on the island, 35% are Filipinos and during the pandemic, they are here to stay. So our focus market are local residents and not tourists,” Talukder added.

Bags of their signature product—ube pandesal.

Talukder said that currently, they do not have many products but whatever they have for sale, was given time to get prepared and the result is quality taste and texture. “Originally, we started with a single product, our signature product which is the ube cheese pandesal. Then, we added two or more products like mocha cream cheese bun, blueberry cream cheese bun, and ensaymada in cheese and ube flavors.”

“Our shop is based at home, so the freshness and quality of the products are obviously there, because we also bake in the comforts of our home. We treat Bakeland Saipan like a family business as every member of the family would add a personal touch—from our Lola Inay down to our cousin Patricia,” he added.

According to Talukder, they bake based on incoming orders, to make sure that there is balance with supply and demand. “This is so because we want our products to be fresh and everything sold out, so nothing gets old or go to waste. Every baked product is fresh out of the oven every day delivered to our customer’s doorstep or picked up from our home,” he said.

All Bakeland Saipan goodies are baked everyday to insure freshness and quality.

“We want our customers to buy and consume our products with the assurance of the quality in every bite when they take it home to their family or friends. We want them to feel that for every bread that they and their family eat, has that homemade feel because we live by the mantra ‘happiness is homemade,’” he added.

Bakeland Saipan is located along Barbara Avenue in Chalan Kanoa next to Trader’s Insurance. To order from Bakeland Saipan, call (670) 989-2989 or go to their Facebook page: Bakeland Saipan.