We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rachel Catapia Edusada a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Rachel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

Honestly, it’s simple. Catapia’s Kitchen is named after my family’s name, most importantly, my late dad’s. It actually wasn’t hard for me to think of a name, I just knew I wanted to represent my dad in some way. He (and my mom) supported us in whatever we wanted to do. Here and there, he would throw in what he could see what we could be in the future and one thing he did say was “maybe you’ll own your own business one day” and I wish he was here to see me start that journey with our family by my side.

Rachel, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

During Covid, I was working full time at a manufacturing job. Because of the pandemic, we were switched to work remotely and because of this I found a lot of down time and found myself restless. So for fun, I would bake (even before COVID, I baked for my coworkers on special occasions). I would catch up with the latest food/dessert hype and end up trying to make them. I honestly just liked being in the kitchen. When I saw that “Ube” was trending, I was even more excited because I’m Filipino and seeing that a Filipino flavor was getting more attention, I wanted to experiment with the flavor as well. Prior to this, I was baking your typical desserts, brownies, cookies, and cakes so it was definitely something I had to R&D.

When I figured out how to work with Ube, I started off making Ube pandesal because… bread. Who doesn’t love bread. We had our family and relatives try them out and had the “go” to start selling them and since it wasn’t sold in many places around us, this helped start our business.

Since then, Catapias Kitchen has grown. We’ve expanded our menu exponentially and are doing many of your typical desserts but infused with the Ube flavor. Per our name, we wanted to be known as making things in the kitchen and not just a patisserie, so we didn’t only expand our desserts, but added Filipino food as well. Now, we are taking party orders, popping up at public and private events, and recently have added our desserts at a coffee shop!

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Currently, this side hustle is now my full time career. After the pandemic, we returned to working in person and at this time, I had to slow down with my business since I didn’t have as much time anymore. During this transition I realized how much I missed just being home and being in the kitchen all the time. I would look forward to the weekends where I would be baking our customers orders.

From the time I started my business to now, I’ve also become a mother. For a few years, I’ve had to overcome hurdles with my health and pregnancy, so during that time I had to close my business from any orders. Once I gave birth, I also realized how much being a mother meant to me and all I wanted to do was be home with my baby girl. After my maternity leave was up and not being able to coincide with my job about personal matters, I found this as an opportunity to leave an unfulfilling workplace to stay at home with baby and start my business back up.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I can’t take all the credit for Catapias Kitchen. My mom helped me tremendously at the start of our business and still to this day. I mean, who else has the most experience in the kitchen than your mom right?! For years my mom would help me from prepping to baking our Ube pandesals and once we expanded she has now become our main Filipino food chef while I focused on the baking.

Aside from my mom, I also have my husband (who I’ve taught how to bake our infamous Ube brownies and has now taken over the brownie baking tasks 😉) helping me out from coming out and setting up/taking down our events to being the runner boy when customers are picking up orders and even delivering them for me. Once in awhile, he will also put in his experiments in our menu like our well loved “Chick-sig”!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @catapias_kitchen
• Facebook: @officialcatapiaskitchen
• Other: [email protected]