India's “Macaron (小圆饼) Queen”
Pooja was a young Indian woman. She opened her own macaron store a few years ago. She should have been a lawyer. But while studying law at university in Mumbai, she decided to quit. She wanted to do something more creative. She had helped her mother in the kitchen during her childhood, so she decided to work with food instead of legal cases.
Pooja persuaded her parents to let her go to Switzerland to study cooking and management. Returning to Mumbai upon graduation, she set to work in her parents' kitchen. She wanted to develop her own macaron recipe (配方). It took her around six months of research and 60 failed recipes to finally get something right.
When she had a recipe she was proud of, her businessman father agreed to put money into her business. Yet being both young and female, she faced challenges. “The biggest problem was to get people to take you seriously," she said.“For example, if I had to sign a lease (租约) for a place, or buy machinery, I would have to ask my father to make the phone calls for me.”
She named the business after "Le 15 Patisserie” in Paris, where she once lived. In Mumbai, very few people knew what a macaron was. People never tried one. Pooja decided to give away free samples. The cakes were immediately popular, and sales soon started to go up thanks to positive word of mouth.
Pooja also started running classes on how to make macarons and other cakes. This made the business better known. She even published a book on cooking. It became a best-seller in India. One newspaper article called her“the macaron queen of India.”
1. Pooja became a lawyer after graduation.
2. Pooja thought cooking was more creative than law.
3. Pooja studied cooking in Switzerland for six months.
4. Pooja got the right macaron recipe from her parents.
5. Pooja's father refused to give her the money for the business.
6. Pooja's father sometimes helped her make business calls.
7. Pooja lived in Paris for five years.
8. At the beginning, Pooja let people try macarons for free.
9. Pooja offered courses on how to make macarons.
10. The book Pooja published was not popular.
