Grace Aaron resides at 232 Section ‘A’, Block X, Diamond, from where she operates Grace’s Business Enterprise. Food is her business. She offers food, cakes, seasonings and beverages. Grace is ‘up for Christmas’ with the customary seasonal offerings… pepper pot, fried rice, Black Cake… ‘the works,’ as we say in Guyana. Her constants – pastries, drinks, achar, guava cheese, fruits for cake, and green seasoning, among others, are also available.
Grace used to be a full-time employee at The Demerara Harbour Bridge. That was when she began her part-time culinary excursion. It became a permanent pursuit after she retired in 2018.
The manufacture and marketing of green seasoning was her first entrepreneurial venture. It went well. She had had her grounding in this pursuit as a girl growing up at Suddie… witnessing production in her own home. It was that grounding too that took her down the agro-processing road, offering pepper sauce, achar, and guava cheese to customers. Later she ‘graduated’ to cooking and baking an assortment of popular local dishes and pastries, cakes.
She boasts what she says is an encouraging clientele… friends, relatives, supermarkets, and more modest shops. She has begun to engage the Guyana Marketing Corporation with a view to further expanding her market. Enter COVID-19.
The affordability of high-quality packaging and labelling is the bane of her existence. Still, she soldiers on. She didn’t need to tell us that the prevailing pandemic has upended sales. That has been the case for the past eight months. Last year, during the fortnight before Christmas, she was going ‘great guns’ where orders were concerned. This year the orders are trickling in. She comforts herself, however, in the faithfulness of her long-standing customers who, ‘rain or shine,’ would want to have their cake… and eat it.
Some of her reputation as a baker derives from her carting off of the First Prize in the 2010 CARICOM Black Cake Competition. “Word spreads,” she says. Over time she has added a greater measure of expertise to her natural talent through courses at the Guyana School of Home Economics.
Grace is very much open for business this Christmas.
Grace Aaron can be contacted on telephone number 602-3606
