On fikablore.com, it is a brand. Here, it is the real story of building a food business in India.
How It Started
Niklas Kuylenstierna and I are both Swedish expats in Bangalore. We both missed proper fika. Not just the pastries, though Bangalore had none worth eating, but the ritual itself: the deliberate pause, the coffee, the conversation that happens when you slow down in the middle of a day. We talked about it for months before we did anything about it, which is the Swedish way.
The turning point was Oktoberfest. Not in Munich. At IKEA Bangalore. We met Utpal and Neela, who own a farmhouse property in Bettahalsoor, north of the city, and somehow over beer and pretzels the conversation turned to baking, and solar panels, and horses, and whether it was possible to run a commercial kitchen entirely off the grid. Three months later, we had a lease on their farm kitchen.
The Team
Niklas handles production and quality. He comes from an H&M background, which sounds unrelated until you realize that supply chain discipline is supply chain discipline, whether you are moving fast fashion or slow-proofed dough.
Leanne is our head baker. She is part of the Hole in the Wall family in Bangalore, trained in Paris, and came to us through an unlikely chain of events involving a whiskey tasting and her mother. Her formulations are what make the product extraordinary. Anyone can follow a kanelbulle recipe. Very few people can make a cardamom bun that makes a Swedish grandmother nod approvingly. Leanne can.
I handle operations, systems, customer relationships, and the business side. Which, in a startup of this size, means I also handle deliveries, WhatsApp customer service, financial modeling, and building the AI tools that keep everything from falling apart.
The Place
The Farm, RocknRoss, Bettahalsoor. About 40 minutes north of central Bangalore, depending on traffic, which in Bangalore means anywhere from 40 minutes to an existential crisis. The kitchen is solar-powered, roughly 95% of our energy comes from panels on the roof. There are horses on the property, which has nothing to do with baking but everything to do with the feel of the place.
The location was a deliberate choice. We wanted a production facility, not a storefront. The pre-order model means we bake exactly what is ordered, nothing sits on a shelf, nothing goes to waste. The farm gives us space, clean air, and a story that turns out to matter more than we expected. When customers visit for a pickup, they see where their food comes from. That builds trust in a way that no packaging design can.
How It Works
We sell through WhatsApp communities, one per residential neighborhood or corporate cluster. Currently 10 communities across North Bangalore: Yelahanka, Sobha City, Prestige Shantiniketan, Embassy Springs, and others. About 300 customers total. Orders come in through the week, we compile them Thursday, bake Friday morning, and deliver Friday afternoon.
The product range is deliberately narrow. Five to six bun varieties, rotating seasonally. Kanelbulle (cinnamon), kardemummabulle (cardamom), chokladbulle (chocolate), solbulle (sun bun), and specials. Plus cookies and the occasional mazarin. Everything is priced transparently: ₹195 per bun, ₹250 for cookies. No aggregator platforms, no Swiggy, no Zomato. Direct relationships, every single one.
This model is unusual in India, where the default assumption is that you need to be on every delivery platform. We chose differently because the margins on aggregator platforms for a premium product are brutal, and because the WhatsApp community model creates something more valuable than distribution: it creates recurring customers who feel like members of something. The repeat rate proves it.
Where It Is Going
The next chapter is B2B. Corporate offices that want a weekly or bi-weekly fika delivery for their teams. Standing orders, predictable volume, better margins. We have started with IKEA Bangalore (the poetry of delivering Swedish buns to Swedish furniture, in India) and a handful of other offices. The model scales without scaling the kitchen, which is the whole point.
Longer term, I am building this business to be acquisition-ready. Not because I want to sell it tomorrow, but because the discipline of building something someone would want to buy is the same discipline as building something that runs well. Documented SOPs, clean financials, systems that do not depend on the founders being awake at 5am. We are not there yet. But every system I build, every process I document, every dashboard I create gets us closer.
Last updated: April 2026. Visit fikablore.com for the brand experience. This page is the builder’s view.