People ask when I started this business, and the honest answer—I started baking in my own kitchen in 2012 and it took the shape of a business. My name is Pooja Baluja, and I am the founder of Glaze & Grain.
Two years later, in 2014, I opened a workshop in Mayapuri and launched my first outlet, Apple Pan. Word travelled fast. Institutions started calling: the Embassy of Brazil, the French School, Alliance Bakery, and several renowned schools, building a reputation for quality, consistency, and taste. It came from bread that was consistently good, in a city where that gets noticed.
The Part I Don’t Skip
Here’s the part most founder profiles skip. The path wasn’t a straight line. I hit a real setback — the kind that tests whether you actually want this, not just whether you’re capable of it. Food is a low-margin, competitive business, and it doesn’t ask permission before it tests you. I treated the disruption as a pause, not an ending. Some months, “pause” was a generous word for what felt like “stopped.”
What Came Back With Me
I returned in 2022. What told me the earlier years hadn’t been wasted wasn’t revenue — it was who came back. Hamdard and Jamia Millia Islamia signed on as new institutional partners, doors that opened because the reputation I’d built had outlasted the gap, even when I hadn’t.
That comeback has now scaled into Glaze & Grain, under Sugar and Spice Foods — a production unit that lets me serve long-standing clients and a widening circle of new ones, including Coco-Cart and Grasa. We make no-maida sourdough and whole grain breads, rusks, milk bread, burger buns, protein bread, and pizza bases. Our kitchens specialize deeply in Tiramisu and chocolate delicacies by Glaze & Grain.
Why It Matters: The Founder's Scoreboard
1. Key Insight: Reputation outlasts downtime. The institutions that came back did so because the relationships held, even when the business paused.
2. Key Insight: A setback is not a verdict. What matters is what you do in the year that follows it, not the year itself.
“I don’t think durability in this business is about avoiding the bad year. It’s about what you’re willing to do in the one that comes after it.”
— Pooja Baluja, Founder
Glaze & Grain by Sugar and Spice Foods
No-maida sourdough & whole grain breads, rusks, milk bread, burger buns, protein bread, pizza bases.
Contact: 9910859105
The Cosminnox • Reporting compiled from Glaze & Grain organizational profiles, Sugar and Spice Foods operational disclosures, and institutional vendor reviews across Delhi-NCR.
