An innovative Munich start-up employs pensioners to bake old-fashioned, traditional cakes. It offers them the opportunity to earn money, feel useful and meet people – and their customers, to enjoy cakes baked with love

Oma Rosemarie (Rottmann), with Opa Günter (Haun), at work at Kuchentratsch. Photograph: Christine Madden

The sweet, warm fragrance envelopes you as soon as you walk through the door. Hidden in a courtyard from the busy street, the Kuchentratsch cake shop entices you in. Just beyond the counter, the doorway to the expansive kitchen stands open, affording a view to the bakers hard at work. Despite the size and industrial fittings of the bakery, you could imagine you’ve called in at your granny’s. The bakers here are all over 65.

Brought into being as a start-up by Katharina Mayer – who, in her 20s, is far from pension age – Kuchentratsch (translation: cake chat/gossip) is not simply a bakery. It’s also a social enterprise and thriving experiment. As an answer to the question “What kind of society would I like to live in when I’m old?”, the company was established to give pensioners the opportunity for suitable employment that also puts much-needed extra funds in their coffers.

“I started by asking myself, ‘Where can you get a really good piece of cake?’ But I always got the best cake at my own granny’s,” says Mayer.

Read more here

Published by The Local Germany, 9 March 2018