Daily Inspiration: Meet Preeti Waas

Today we’d like to introduce you to Preeti Waas.

Hi Preeti, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I’ve been baking in India since I was nine years old. As a first-time stay at home mother, baking and decorating cakes became my ‘me’ time. I became enamored with the idea of opening a cafe that was child-friendly but one that parents with good taste could enjoy. I wrote that business plan for five years and opened it in Tulsa, OK with a business partner. When the partnership tanked, so did the business, I missed the baking too much after moving to Raleigh, so had my home kitchen certified to bake cookies and pies. I added jams to my repertoire shortly after and outgrew my space. Two years ago, we moved so that I could have a detached building on our property certified as the production kitchen and began shipping cookies and jams nationally, as well as selling locally at farmer’s markets.

In October 2019, I was approached by the YMCA in downtown Raleigh to take over the cafe in their lobby. Not wanting to open just another coffee shop in a saturated market, I felt it was time to present more of my Indian roots to Raleigh and opened Cheeni chai + coffee + tiffin – a tiny shop mimicking India’s ubiquitous corner tea and snack shops. Business soared almost immediately, and I was thrilled. Four months after opening, however, the city went into lockdown because of the pandemic. Unfortunately, we were also impacted by the riots in May.

During lockdown, I had the idea of launching Spice Route Kitchens, an initiative to give home cooks and budding entrepreneurs a space to cook and be mentored by me at no charge. The idea was to give them a space and platform to see if the foodservice industry was in fact a good fit before they made expensive mistakes or large investments into their dreams.

Early this year, I was once again approached by the YMCA, this time to take over the larger cafe space inside the Alexander YMCA on NC State’s campus. We’ve been open since March 1st, and I’m hopeful for the future of my little business.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Far from smooth! Some of the struggles were as follows:

– I had talent yes, but no business sense, or experience.

– I trusted a business partner which was the biggest mistake of all.

– I made expensive hiring mistakes.

– In spite of writing a business plan and being advised by SCORE mentors, there were many unforeseen expenses that I didn’t know to plan for.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m making real, everyday Indian food mainstream, and that too inside of a gym! We’re also a bakery, but we don’t serve empty calories. Our baked goods contain einkorn, rye flour, organic raw cane sugar, and unprocessed locally milled flour. We don’t use any pre-made processed ingredients whatsoever.

We are known for our hospitality and love of food even above the quality and taste of our food. Our veg puffs are a perennial favorite, and we’ve been told (by a food writer who writes for national publications) that our chocolate chip cookies rival those from Levain bakery in New York City. People will drive clear across town for our chai and South Indian filter coffee, which has received the thumbs up from people native to South India.

I’m most proud of the way we treat people, and our staff’s well-being is most important to us. We pay as well as we can given our modest size, but we value them as people first and employees second.

I want people to come back not only because we fed them something delicious and memorable but because we made them feel good, even if for the few minutes that they interacted with us that day.

The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
One of them is that people will always seek comfort in food. Another is that it was eye-opening to see people display their true character through their actions, never mind the words they used.

And the kindness of human beings can be very humbling.

Contact Info:

• Website: cheeniraleigh.com
• Instagram: @cheeniraleigh
• Facebook: Cheeniraleigh

Image Credits
Preethi Venkatraman