BC Business
The pink-and-brown truck can be spotted around the Lower Mainland on weekdays and at farmers' markets on weekends.
For Kelly Chau, being let go from a 9-to-5 job has never been sweeter.
Back in 2020, when most of us were posting about ripe bananas and sourdough starters, Chau had just gotten laid off from her marketing position at a Toronto-based HR and health & safety company five days after being relocated to Vancouver. Her boxes hadn’t even arrived from Toronto yet.
On the hunt for a new job, she noticed that her Instagram feed was turning into a budget-friendly baked goods highlight reel. She saw people testing out cookies, breads, cakes—but no brownies.
The Brownie Bakers
“My mom used to own a bakery here in Vancouver when I was a kid and I remember her brownies being really good,” Chau recalls. “So I said, Why not make a brownie Instagram for fun?”
That Instagram account from May 2020 scaled from a home-based business with a few customers (mostly friends and family) to a food trailer in 2021, and now a six-figure-worth mobile café. Chau and her two staff drive around Vancouver, pull up at festivals (most recently Khatsahlano) and cater film sets, office parties, birthdays and weddings with freshly baked brownies by her mom and co-founder, Lily Kwok. The 17-foot café-on-wheels carries vegan and gluten-free options, as well as brownie ice cream sandwiches. Schedules are posted on the company’s Instagram account every week.
The mother-daughter duo behind The Brownie Bakers may have ventured into entrepreneurship to be able to afford rent and groceries, but their business still maintains practices that became popular during the pandemic. “We do our best to locally source things where we can,” says Chau. “For example, our flour and eggs come from Abbotsford, we use butter from Burnaby and our coffee is also roasted here.”