Liza Curtis doesn’t need to use any words of motivation to engage her Bakers Delight staff in the three-week program that is the Breast Cancer Network Australia annual fundraising campaign.
In fact, the entire 20-member team is fully engaged in maintaining the status the business has within the Australia-wide network of bakeries — where it is regularly a top-five fundraising site for the BCNA Pink Bun Campaign.
“We ended up being fourth in the country at the end of the three weeks,” Liza said, adding the store was regularly supported by the community to the point where it was in the top handful of stores in regard to total fundraising.
She and husband Vince have operated the business for 20 years, expanding their own BCNA offerings every year to now include beanie and bucket hat options alongside the pink-coloured bakery delights that are offered in support of the charity.
The team’s serious approach to fundraising this year resulted in a $17,700 contribution to the BCNA network and had the Kyabram bakery again ranked well inside the top five stores of the 500-strong bakery network.
Liza and Vince Curtis’s community minded approach to their business has contributed to Kyabram on a variety of fronts, the BCNA program expanding on that generosity as Bakers Delight stores across Australia go into a 23rd year of supporting the program.
“In November it will be 21 years that we have had the store,” Liza said, explaining this year’s total was well up on the $12,000 the business raised last year.
She also indicated that rounding up to a $20,000 contribution may be on the radar for 2024.
“We’ve been involved with BCNA, as a store, for more than 10 years,” she said, explaining the Bakers Delight Australia connection had started way back in 2000.
“As a company Bakers Delight has supported BCNA on a number of fronts.”
Since 2006, when the Pink Bun campaign started, the company has raised $23 million for the cause.
This year, from May 11 to 31, the Kyabram store offered customers the chance to not only purchase BCNA products, but also accepted donations on behalf of the organisation.
Of her staff, Liza said they all got right behind what was often quite an emotional campaign as people regularly shared their stories across the counter.
“For us it is important to give back. We do that a lot in the Kyabram community already, this is just on another level,” she said.
The business sold out of pink beanies (250 of them) and bucket hats (60) and pink buns adorned the kitchen tables of Kyabram households throughout May.
Kyabram’s Bakers Delight was the only store in the area that got on board with the extra products, accepting the initial outlay to support the cause.
“The result comes down to the staff and the community. We wouldn’t have achieved the result without the support of our customers,’’ Liza said.
