Hello! It's Paloma and Nick here, the founders of Zi Sweet.
What many of you may not know is that Zi Sweet is a happy accident. Both of us met working at a supermarket during the pandemic and connected over our love for bringing people damn good looking (and more importantly good tasting) food, which meant we spent a lot of time baking together.
Both of us have never had any formal training. We are what you call “self-taught”, although we don't really like that word as we give all our credit to a lot of baking shows, books and blogs (the internet basically…). Fast Forward to January 2022 we posted a photo on Instagram of our first official heart cake we made. This was something we wanted to test and trial just for fun, not thinking too much of it and we never looked back.
It's kind of crazy to say we started very humbly and very unaware of what was to come in Nick's parents' kitchen. A few months after our initial Instagram madness and we took a very big leap in getting our first commercial kitchen out in West Auckland. This completely catapulted us into the baking world, and it was non-stop caking. We didn't feel 100% satisfied with what we had achieved & switched things up a bit to bring you the best of what we love to bake. Seeing the introduction of our new sweets range and taking a bit of a deep dive into our backgrounds and culture, where the love for food and baking truly started. Nick's family is Italian & Paloma’s is Japanese. Growing up we both felt as though we didn't truly understand our cultural identity, especially through food. We thought what better way to explore this further than through Zi Sweet.
This journey started when we were 21 and 24 and blissfully unaware how drastically the projection of our lives would change. It's been a wild ride and we are eternally grateful for coming along with us. Here's to what Zi sweet will bring us in the future.
