Meet the people behind Farah Qureshi Foods
Farah QureshiFounder and head baker
Imtiaz QureshiHer husband, deliveries and accounts
Leela ThomasBaker, joined in the second year
Farah bakes in a converted ground-floor flat in Nilpur, two streets from the house she grew up in. Her first orders came through a residents’ WhatsApp group: a chocolate cake for a seventh birthday, then another, then a wedding.
Three years on, the kitchen runs three things at once. Gulmohar Cake Studio makes celebration cakes to order. Sunday Crumb is a bread club: members get a sourdough and a tin loaf every weekend. Tin & Twine sends festive hampers across the city at Eid and Diwali.
Imtiaz does the van runs before his day job. Leela arrives at six. Farah still decorates every cake herself, because that is the part people come back for.
What was going wrong
Every order still arrived as a message. A cake enquiry on Instagram, a bread cancellation by voice note, a hamper order from a cousin’s office on email. Farah kept a paper diary by the oven and a spreadsheet for hampers, and on busy weeks neither matched the other.
She lost track of who had paid a deposit. Bread members paid in cash some weeks and by UPI in others, and nobody was sure who was paid up. The hamper season nearly broke them: couriers booked one by one from a phone, addresses copied from chats.
“I didn’t want to become a software person. I wanted to stop apologising to people for things I’d forgotten.”
The workarounds that got them this far
- A paper diary by the oven
Reliable until it got flour on it, and only Farah could read it.
- A shared spreadsheet
Good for hampers, but nobody updated it from their phone, and it knew nothing about payments.
- A marketplace listing
Brought orders, but took a large share of each one and owned the customer relationship.
Farah Qureshi Foods on Intersink
Farah creates her free User ID, adds Farah Qureshi Foods as the business, and opens a channel for each brand so each one keeps its own shop, customers and look. She starts with just the cake studio and adds the others as they need it. Imtiaz gets a role on the back-office channel; Leela gets one on the cake studio and the bread club.
The apps in this story
Sell products online with catalog, orders, payments and hyperlocal delivery.
Online appointments with staff calendars, deposits and reminders.
Collect Google and on-site reviews, reply fast and show the best ones on your website.
Plan, schedule and measure posts on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X and YouTube.
Paid memberships and subscriptions with plans, trials, gated content and dunning.
Book couriers, print labels and track parcels and returns across major UK and US carriers.
Invoice your clients, track what they owe, record expenses and see profit.
People, attendance, leave, payroll and payslips for the company that owns this channel.
A day in their life, some months in
Farah opens the cake studio’s orders on her phone. Today: two birthday cakes, one anniversary, one tasting at eleven. Deposits are marked against each.
Leela checks the Sunday Crumb member list before shaping the dough. Members pay by autopay, so the list she bakes to is the list that has paid.
A couple arrive for a tasting they booked from the website. The reminder went out the evening before.
Hamper orders for next week are packed. Labels print from the shipping app, and customers get a tracking page instead of asking on WhatsApp.
Imtiaz raises an invoice for an office hamper order and logs the day’s flour bill as an expense.
A customer leaves a review of yesterday’s cake. Farah replies before bed.
What is different now
In plain words, because this is an illustrative story and there are no real measurements behind it.
Payments stop being a guess
Deposits and subscriptions are tied to the order or the member, not to a memory of a UPI screenshot.
Each brand keeps its own voice
Separate channels mean separate shops and looks, while the business behind them stays one.
Subscriptions look after themselves
Bread club members pay by UPI autopay or card, and failed payments are retried, so the bake matches the paid list.
The festive rush is planned, not survived
Hampers are booked, labelled and tracked in one flow instead of one courier call at a time.
What it would cost each month

| Channel and apps | Per month |
|---|---|
| Gulmohar Cake StudioOnline Store Free + Bookings Free + Reviews Free + Social Free | £0 |
| Sunday CrumbOnline Store Free + Memberships Free | £0 |
| Tin & Twine HampersOnline Store Free + Shipping Free | £0 |
| Kitchen officeAccounting Free + Workforce Free | £0 |
| Subtotal, before VAT | £0 |
| UK VAT at 20% | £0 |
| Total per month | £0 |
What others could take from this
- Start with the brand that hurts most
Farah began with the cake studio alone. The others came when the first one felt settled.
- A channel per brand is worth it
It keeps customers and catalogues apart, and lets you switch one off in a quiet season.
- Keep the human bits human
The software took the diary. It did not take the icing.
Running more than one brand from one kitchen?
Add a business, open a channel for each brand and install only the apps each one needs.
Illustrative story: a composite of how an organisation like this can run on Intersink. Names and places are fictional.

















