THE BAKER
Sabrina Bibby
Bree Cookies
Meeting Sabrina Bibby is a tonic. She's young, bright, enthusiastic and oozes vitality and energy. Tucking into her triple chocolate cookie — one of her best sellers — when we meet for coffee, I’m blown away by the dark, moist, chewy and chocolatey taste and by the story of how she became a cookie aficionado at the tender age of 23. She started her baking company Bree Cookies, a one-woman business, just four months ago.
“I've tried a lot of things since matriculating in 2018,” she says. “But this year, I finally knew where I was going.” Sabrina started studying psychology at Tukkies, realised it wasn’t for her and changed her course, graduating with a degree in nutrition.
Unsure of her next move, she became a personal trainer and then started her own healthy-eating line of products, but her enthusiasm waned before it could get off the ground. “There have been lots of conversations around what I should do with my life. My biggest scare is not having a purpose, but creating a business has inspired me,” she adds.
Her dream was to own a little bakery — she’s a coffee and cookie junkie who loves sweet things — and recently she opened a “dark kitchen” in a converted garage on her parents' property, with a new floor she painted with her dad, a double oven, kitchen sink and a large freezer she speaks of proudly.
“I pour everything I make back into the business,” she says of her purchase of an industrial mixer and other baking necessities. “My friends think I’m crazy when I invite them round to see my freezer,” she laughs, adding, “most people my age are out on Friday nights. Mine are spent planning, and buying ingredients online.”
Sabrina launched her business on Instagram, posting videos to encourage potential customers to try her cookies. Her her big break came soon after: “I was in the bath when I got the message. I leapt out, my hair covered in shampoo, and ran to share the news with my mother,” she says. The Naked Coffee team wanted to meet her. Today, they're one of her biggest clients - she provides their three Joburg stores with a couple of hundred handmade cookies weekly — triple chocolate, red velvet and salted caramel cookies, and her more recent creation, a crookie — a combo of a mini-croissant with a cookie dough filling, a generous piping of Nutella and a dusting of icing sugar.
It helps to have a foodie mum extraordinaire, the famous Dianne Bibby. Sabrina sings her praises. She's close to her mother, who's taught her so much.
She's starting to bake small cakes while she works on new packaging and her logo (aiming to get a delivery bike carrying her logo). But it's sleep this workaholic misses most; she does most of her baking late into the night to fulfil her orders which she delivers herself in the mornings. “I like working on my own, making my own decisions,” she says. “I follow my vision — I know what I want for my business.”
Follow: #baked_by_bree.co
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