Talita has opened two cafes/bakeries in central Jakarta and is an Asia New Zealand Foundation YBLI and Leadership Network
Indonesian-born Talita Setyadi spent her formative years in New Zealand before moving to Paris to attend the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. She has now returned to her birthplace of Jakarta where she is blazing a trail in the food world.
It was when her mother returned to Indonesia while Talita was studying music at Auckland University that Talita's passion for food first emerged.
No longer having her mother to cook for her, and tired of eating out every night, she turned to cooking.
“I started to get into cooking out of boredom and necessity,” she recalls.
When she caught herself spending every spare minute “fantasising about pastries and cooking” she knew it had become her calling.
“I was well into my Honours year ... when I realised I was cooking more than I was practising my instrument. I’d always been an all or nothing kind of gal, so packing my bags and travelling to Paris seemed like the way I could really commit to this new field.”
During her nine months at Le Cordon Bleu, the days started at 8:30am and some days wouldn’t end till 9:30pm. Talita recalls that every time a student would complain about the pressure or long hours the chefs would say: “C’est pas des vacances!” (“This is not a vacation!”).
Talita not only completed her Grand Diploma but topped her class.
“I had set a goal to do the best I could and make the most of the opportunities and skills I’d learnt,” she says.
She was drawn to business after completing her internship as a pastry chef in a hotel in Paris. Her “restlessness and relatively short attention span” led to her growing weary of the repetitive nature being a chef day in day out, so in 2013 she took the plunge and moved to Indonesia where she saw a gap in the market for high-end baking.
Since moving back, Talita has opened two café/bakeries in central Jakarta (with a third opening in September this year) and her food has featured in some of the world’s most prestigious patisserie magazines.
She says by developing her own products and opening her bakery in a developing country such as Indonesia, it has allowed her to be "a pioneer in the artisan bakery field”.
In April Talita met with a visiting group of the Foundation’s ASEAN Young Business Leaders Initiative (YBLI) members, who were in Indonesia to learn about the country’s food and beverage scene.
“What struck me most about the young business leaders was their commitment to quality, transparency and creating products designed for export from the get go.”
It was through meeting the YBLIs in Indonesia and learning about the Foundation that Talita came to join the Leadership Network.
While other parts of the world are in recession Indonesia’s economy is on the rise, Talita says.
“It is an exciting time in Indonesia where the majority of the population are at a productive age. This provides significant opportunity for the country’s economic development.”
However, she says one of the challenges for business is the lack of industry-specific education. With few culinary schools affordable or accessible to the working-class population, Talita has had to train many of her staff “from zero”.
The spending power of the growing middle class in Indonesia means there is plenty of opportunity for business sustainability, Talita says. And the door isn’t shut on expanding her business to neighbouring countries.
“And who knows, maybe we’ll have a shop in New Zealand in the future. Like music, I believe that food is a universal language.”
By Matt Calman