Five cafes across Kolkata and Hyderabad. Over 350 daily orders. More than 6.5 lakh customers. And an advertisement featuring Bollywood star Ranveer Singh. The journey to these feats started in a 200-square-foot room for Baguiati baker Megha Sarayan when she was still a second-year student of economics at city-based Scottish Church College.
Her first stroke of brilliance — and her calling — came with a bakery workshop on a whim. Then, a simple chocolate truffle cake, which turned out surprisingly tasty, changed the course of her life.
“I made the cake at home and everyone loved it,” Sarayan recalled.
“Friends and relatives kept telling me I should try doing this professionally, at least part-time. Zomato had just started picking up in Kolkata then, so I decided to list myself on the app,” she said.
Even the name of her brand highlights her journey. “I was studying at Scottish Church College, and Scotland is often called the Land of Cakes. That’s how the name came to me,” she said.
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After returning from college each day, Sarayan would switch on the Zomato app for three-to-four hours. “Whenever I logged in, I would receive one or two orders. That’s when I realised there was potential.”
Within a month, Sarayan rented a 200-square-foot space in the same Baguiati building where she lived and took her first leap of faith into entrepreneurship.
A Facebook post helped her hire her first assistant, and soon she was delivering five orders a day. Within weeks, her team grew to nine members, with daily orders touching 20. All this while, Sarayan was still preparing for her MBA entrance examinations.
But when she could not make it to IIM Calcutta, she made a defining decision. Steering away from her original dream of an MBA, she dived headlong into full-time entrepreneurship.
Then came the 2020 pandemic.
As Covid-19 brought small businesses to a standstill, Sarayan’s team went back to zero. But she refused to let Land of Cakes fade away. From being the face of the brand, she became its backbone, baking, packing, managing orders and deliveries on her own, day after day, at a time when bakeries across the city were shutting down.
“I knew if the business shut down then, there would be no coming back,” she said. “Every day, I made 20 to 30 cakes, and every single one would sell out on Zomato,” Sarayan added.
By 2021, Land of Cakes had expanded to five outlets across Kolkata. Sarayan emerged as one of the platform’s best-selling bakers, catching the attention of Zomato itself.
Ahead of the 2023 Cricket World Cup, her efforts were backed by the star power of Ranveer Singh. Zomato approached her for an advertisement — one featuring Singh and Chris Gayle, with the former declaring in the video that he is craving brownies from Land of Cakes.
Today, the 26-year-old baker processes over 10,000 orders every month with a team of 35 staff members. Her brand has served more than 6.5 lakh customers and enjoys a loyal fan base among Kolkatans, including influencers and prominent personalities such as Saheli Chatterjee and Anupam Mittal.
Additionally, her brand now has an outlet in Hyderabad.
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Sarayan may have failed to crack IIM Calcutta. But within years, she made it to the B-school campus — not as a student but as an entrepreneur students could learn from.
