From Mary Grace’s Home to Yours: Crafting Beloved Filipino Favorites that Always Take You Home
In an exclusive interview with The Business Manual, Mary Grace Dimacali shares the secret recipe behind her entrepreneurial success with Cafe Mary Grace.
T.S. Eliot once said, “Home is where one starts from.” In many special ways, this is uniquely true of Mary Grace Dimacali, the singular entrepreneur behind Cafe Mary Grace. Long before she became the founder and CEO of Mary Grace Foods Inc., she began the company, which was born from a love of baking, from her kitchen at home. As a mother to five children, she would often bake then sell what she made from her own oven. First she sold her products in the neighborhood, then in bazaars, then in shopping mall kiosks, then in cafe restaurants, until one cafe became 70, spreading from Manila to Pampanga. And yet, despite achieving such remarkable scale, walking into a Cafe Mary Grace is always like stepping through the familiar threshold of home.
The Business Manual spoke to Mary Grace Dimacali about her extraordinary journey from home baker to entrepreneur, naturally, over cheese rolls, ensaymada, and cups of hot chocolate. She shared with us her recipe for the celebrated brand of Mary Grace, with the conversation leading to business school, gradual growth over 30 years, and her plans for bringing her authentic brand of beloved favorites to more Filipinos in the future.
A Passion for Baking
Today, Mary Grace Foods Inc. oversees a network of 70 cafe restaurants and 68 store kiosks in various locations across the country. A completely family-owned business, it has over 3,000 employees; however, 30 years ago, all of this existed only in the mind of Mary Grace Dimacali.
Even earlier than that, the origins of Cafe Mary Grace can be traced back to a childhood passion for baking. When Mary Grace Dimacali became a mother, she would take that passion and create personally decorated cakes for her children.
“I have five children,” Mary Grace explains. “And while they were in school, I said, what can I do at home? So I found myself gravitating to baking. I love poring over recipes. My heart was there, and I tried these recipes on my own.”
As she honed her craft, Mary Grace engaged in constant learning. Aside from taking classes from the neighborhood teacher, she also studied with Sylvia Reynoso and the Maya school. But more than anything, it was about hard work, experimentation, and grit.
“It was really about doing my own research and putting my hand to the whipping spoon in the bowl and experimenting from home.” Mary Grace says. And it was those creations that led to the start of a business.
“I’d take the products of my experiment and sell them,” she says. “I started that entrepreneurial venture in a little kitchen selling to neighbors in the village.”
That was the beginning of Mary Grace the entrepreneur: Door to door, she sold chocolate cupcakes, brownies, lemon squares and fruit tarts in her village.
Recipe for Success
Given the tremendous success of Mary Grace ensaymadas and cheese rolls, it would be understandable to assume that her business began with these iconic products. But in fact, her first commercial product was a fruitcake which she sold in the bazaars that were popular in those times. These fruitcakes sold well, but Mary Grace was looking for something more…
“I wanted [a product] that Filipinos would love to embrace and make a beeline for. And I came home from a course in the US and I had this much of recipes from [my trip],” she says gesturing with her hands wide apart. “There was sour dough and rye bread and challah bread, and you name it, it was in that little book. But I said, ‘What is close to the Filipino that he loves and [cherishes], part of his culture?’ The ensaymada.”
Mary Grace set out to make her signature ensaymada.
“It’s made with real eggs and real butter,” she says with pride. “And we have the Christmas cheese that our generation… we have it on our Christmas tables, edam cheese, or what we call queso de bola.”
Soon after, the recipe for her cheese rolls was born.
“Children don’t take very easily to the salty cheese, which is the edam. So I said, let me go to cheddar,” Mary Grace says. The cheese rolls she created found a market with other moms. She explains, “It’s quite handy. [The children] like to take it to school for their baon. Mommies would love to buy the cheese roll… These two products [the cheese rolls and the ensaymada], hand in hand, they flew together.”
‘Bring It Up Higher’
In 2001, seven years after starting in bazaars, Mary Grace Dimacali took her business to the next level. She enrolled in the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) and took a Masters in Entrepreneurship.
In AIM, she learned to look at her business from a different perspective. She recalls, “We [Professor Andy Ferreira and I] sat for a chat and he said, ‘Grace, what’s your business?’ ‘Prof, I make ensaymada.’ He repeated the question, ‘Grace, what’s your business?’ I think three or four times. What he was trying to make me understand [was] that this ensaymada was a gift. I’d make it for a gift to the person, for the person who had everything. So everything would come around the gift, right? The packaging, the wrapping, the story, the presentation would come around the meaning of ‘gift.’”
Taking her learnings from AIM, Mary Grace decided to open a kiosk in Glorietta in 2002.
She admits to being nervous about the endeavor at the time. “To make that jump from being that well-loved secret to being out there… That made me a little bit anxious and nervous because I was also happy to be where I was. But then there was also something that was telling me ‘Bring the business up higher, bring it up higher.’ And so I made that leap into the first kiosk in Glorietta.”
The kiosk was only four square meters in size, but it had something that others did not: location, location, location. Being under an escalator, it was in the flow of traffic. Soon, the kiosk proved to be a valuable channel, and other Mary Grace kiosks followed. However, this wasn’t the pinnacle yet; Mary Grace would go higher still.
Cafe Mary Grace
Today, Mary Grace Foods Inc. is a family-owned and family-run company. Each of Mary Grace’s five children play an important role in the company, with each of them joining “in their own time.” Chiara handles the Marketing, Adrian is in charge of HR and legal side of the business, Gabriel handles business development and new store openings (together with Adrian), Raphael is in charge of Finance, and Mian leads the bakery, commissary and other key day-to-day operations.
Critically, the beginning of Cafe Mary Grace happened because of her son Gabriel. A graduate of BS Biology, he had originally planned on a medical career. But on his own, he approached the management of Serendra and asked for a place where they could open their first cafe.
In 2006, for the first time, four years after their first kiosk, Mary Grace had a cafe, a home of their own, and what would become a second home for countless Filipinos.
Step into any Cafe Mary Grace, and you will find a myriad of things: thank you notes under the glass of the tables, decorative tchotchkes that remind you of home, devotionals, tiny nooks or play areas for children, inspirational quotes on the wall. Every Cafe Mary Grace mirrors the Filipino home, and also tis founder.
“This place is my heart,” Mary Grace says. “This place is me. This is who I am… [Thanks to] Divine Providence, I became my authentic self. So everything you see here, Our Lady of Guadalupe on the wall, this is my devotion… The sense of home when you step into a Mary Grace must be felt. This sense of feeling, this sense of knowing that the person who put up this cafe has her hand into it. I don’t think you could ever create such an atmosphere if the creator herself was not coming from home.”
Staying Authentic and True
With 70 branches and 68 kiosks today from Manila to Lucena to La Union, the growth of Cafe Mary Grace is nothing short of remarkable. Yet Mary Grace insists that it occurred steadily over the succeeding years, and that there is no hard target for the number of stores or number of cities to hit. Instead, Mary Grace remains focused on keeping every branch true to her vision of providing “The Goodness of Home.”
How does she ensure that this authenticity remains in every aspect of the cafe? Mary Grace recounts, “In the learning years, in the early years, I walked side by side with every baker, with every chef, with every server. They know my attention to detail, and what is behind consistency is a hundred and one details which you must embrace and you must love… So, everything is written down to the detail and must be followed to the detail. While we give some liberty to our chefs to explore, they stick to Bible truths.”
Even then, Mary Grace does still have dreams that she hopes will come true. “I’d like to see it cross the seas into Cebu, Davao,” she says. “That’s something to look forward to and I’m sure we will be able to do that in time. In God’s appointed time.”
Advice for Entrepreneurs
When asked to give advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, and in particular mompreneurs like herself, Mary Grace replies with an answer that is farthest from the fast-living, bottom-line-driven, competitive advice your hear from many entrepreneurs or gurus today.
“Wait,” she says.
“I mean, Mary Grace was not built in a few years,” she continues. “It’s a long journey. And I’d like [entrepreneurs] to be able to go on that long journey. There’s a song, it’s beautiful. It’s entitled “The Journey.” It’s about taking on that journey and the end is not in sight, but the stars are shining tonight, right? And I’ll go [on] this beautiful journey, step by step, one door that opens to the next, patience, staying within the field of grace with God. Put Him above you, beside you, right in your heart.”
Text VINCENT SALES
Photography KIM ANGELA SANTOS of KLIQ, INC.
Videography KIM ANGELA SANTOS and JR RAMIREZ of KLIQ, INC.
Art Direction MARC YELLOW assisted by ANDREA SANGCO
Sittings Editor RJ LEDESMA
Shoot Coordination TONI MENDOZA
Shot on Location CAFE MARY GRACE, POWER PLANT MALL
