SINGAPORE – When cake business
Flor Patisserie closed down
in July 2025 due to a rental spike, its founder Heidi Tan, 36, was hardly at a loose end.
Since 2023, she has been curating and leading food and cultural tours to Japan for small groups, usually comprising eight persons.
Initially, her clientele were customers of Flor Patisserie, known for its Japanese-inspired cakes. The idea for the tours was sparked by her collaborations with pastry chefs from Japan, which started around six years ago.
Ms Tan took fellow Singaporean travellers to places like the city of Kobe, famed for its yogashi, or Western-style confectionery. A typical example is baumkuchen, a cake of German origin with a distinctive shape formed by concentric circles.
Her travel company, Kitabi Travel, was officially launched in August 2025, and her upcoming October tour is fully booked. Highlights of the five-day trip, which costs $4,200 a person, include feasting on highly prized matsutake mushrooms and Tamba beef, and learning about the centuries-old pottery tradition in the Tamba region.
What started as a hobby has become her second career, even as her 15-year-old confectionery dream crumbled with creeping rents in recent years.
She started Flor Patisserie in 2010 in partnership with a Japanese pastry chef. At its peak, she had five outlets and a monthly revenue of $180,000. Its signature confections included a strawberry shortcake and a tart made with orange, grapefruit and pomelo.
Of her side hustle, Ms Tan says: “I didn’t start the tours with the intention of letting go of my business. It has been a smooth process because I’ve been doing this for the past two years. It feels like a natural transition. I’m very lucky to have the option to walk away and not be tied up by loans. I know I’m privileged to have this.”
Ms Tan, who is single, is a foodie like her parents, who enjoyed whipping up dishes like steamed fish, curry chicken and thunder tea rice during her childhood. With the adults monopolising the stove, she turned to baking.
Her father, 74, is a retired seafood wholesaler, and her mother, 65, started out as a tailor before running her own apparel brand. They divorced when Ms Tan was a teenager. She has a younger brother, aged 34, who works in public service.
At 16, she recalls watching the 2005 South Korean hit drama, My Lovely Sam Soon, which featured a pastry chef; and working through the recipes in Foolproof Cakes, a book written by Mary Berry, a British baker, chef and TV personality.
She told her mother, Ms Rina Chong, that she wanted to become a pastry chef. After her A levels at Serangoon Junior College, she set out at 19 to pursue her dream at the campus of French culinary school Le Cordon Bleu in Sydney, Australia.
She did not meet with parental disapproval about not going on to university. She says: “My mother is a businesswoman who doesn’t feel the need for formal qualifications.”
During her diploma studies, she took a year’s sabbatical from Sydney at the age of 20 to work as an apprentice in Singapore under a Japanese pastry chef.
She says: “I wanted to work with my hands first. It was a shock to me because school doesn’t prepare you for it.”
Describing her role in the kitchen hierarchy then as “the lowest of the low”, she did tasks like slicing strawberries, weighing vegetable portions and sweeping the floor, working 10- to 12-hour days. Her colleagues teased her about being a “princess” when she took too long to wash the dishes.
She says: “It was terrible while I was in it. But now that I run my own business, I realised that was the happiest time in my career. Your work ends when you leave the shop, and there’s satisfaction in working hard and getting the job done.
“I think everyone should go through a stint in the service industry. The best time to do it is when you are a kid, as a part-time job during your school holidays. It builds character and resilience.”
Around this time, she sensed a business opportunity and partnered the Japanese pastry chef to start Flor Patisserie in 2010. Her mother invested in the business to the tune of $250,000 and came on board as a director.
Ms Tan did not hesitate to start a business at the age of 21 with no prior experience.
She says: “When I make up my mind, I make up my mind. I don’t think so much about such decisions. It’s not about confidence, but about having no fear. Just do it. All your fears are learnt. I never thought, what if I don’t succeed?”
Within a year, they broke even and business boomed following the rise in demand for Japanese desserts. Over the years, the company expanded from its flagship store in the Duxton neighbourhood to stores in Siglap Drive, Takashimaya Shopping Centre and Funan mall, as well as a pop-up in Westgate mall.
But trouble loomed. Around 2014, Ms Tan parted ways with her business partner following a legal dispute.
Rental costs rose over the years. The writing on the wall came well before 2025’s 57 per cent rent increase at her last remaining shop in Siglap. It went up from $5,400 to $8,500 a month.
Her social media post in April, in which she highlighted the “exorbitant” increase, drew public attention, and was picked up by various media outlets as an example of rising rents affecting businesses.
She says: “I think a lot of business owners find it embarrassing to admit that their business is not enough to support the rent. But I’ve never felt that way.”
It was not only a rental issue.
She says: “We couldn’t find enough staff to run the operations. That got me thinking about whether bricks and mortar were really sustainable. It was a question I had been thinking about for years.
“In 2024, I gave up my Duxton outfit, the flagship. When I could give that up, I told myself I could give up anything. I didn’t want to work for landlords any more.”
The rental for her 1,200 sq ft space in Duxton had risen from $4,500 in 2010 to more than $9,000 in 2024, she says.
She carries the Flor Patisserie DNA into her second business.
In 2013, she spent three months in Fukuoka prefecture immersing herself in the Japanese language “for the future of Flor”, as it was already working with Japanese suppliers and regional authorities.
At Flor Patisserie, she had insisted on premium ingredients, resisting the use of stabilisers and chemical additives. She also visited farms, artisanal spaces and businesses in Japan that she worked with.
Ms Heidi Tan (in blue, foreground) in an underground brewery for shochu, a Japanese distilled spirit, in a disused gold mine in Kagoshima, Japan, in August. A visit here is part of Kitabi Travel’s tours in 2026.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF HEIDI TAN
Similarly, high-quality produce and cultural experiences are part of her planned Japan tours. These include visiting a wagyu farm and dining on top-tier beef and kaiseki feasts, making washi paper and taking a turn at an underground shochu brewery located in a disused gold mine.
She is relishing the comparative freedom of her second wind.
Ms Tan says: “I spent a large part of my youth being tied down to a business. I want to compensate for my younger years. The things I didn’t do, I want to do them all.”
Her peers could take leave when they wanted, but she used to yearn to travel in winter, when she would be in Singapore, fulfilling Christmas log cake orders.
She reflects: “I had a dream when I was 16. I told my mum, ‘I want to be a French-trained pastry chef.’ I have achieved my dream. To me, it’s okay to move forward.”
Tastemakers is a personality profile series on food and beverage vendors who are creating a stir.
AloJapan.com