Miek Paulus is an engineer-turned-baker who is passionate about disrupting the food system – in the best way possible. Baking Business caught up with the Ket Baker owner to hear about what it takes to create an iconic business that’s built firmly in line with your personal ethos.

Miek Paulus first discovered a love for baking as a child when she’d head to the kitchen and experiment. She was intrigued by the ingredients, what they could do and the purpose they’d each serve within a recipe.

This fascination – firmly rooted in science – eventually led to Miek initially pursuing a career in engineering in her home country of Belgium, where she worked for a fractionated gas company.

“A lot of my customers were in food. We were mainly selling them nitrogen and Co2, which are inert gases. They didn’t do anything to the food. But the other things these businesses did to that food made me think ‘this is scary!’,” Miek said.

“It doesn’t have to be done this way. It’s just being decided because it makes more money. And that wasn’t ok with me.”

This realisation proved to be a full circle moment for Miek, and she decided something had to be done. Miek went on to complete a bread and pastry course in Belgium before relocating to France where she met her now husband, Stu, who hails from Geelong, Victoria.

After eight years together the duo decided to relocate Down Under, and Miek began questioning whether she’d continue her engineering career in Australia.

Miek at work in the Ket Baker kitchen

“Six months before we moved I was still contemplating it. I’m ambitious – I want a career and I want to make a difference in the world,” Miek said.

“I was deciding if I would continue as an engineer and work for a good enterprise, or if I was going to do my own thing. Then a friend of mine said, ‘no Miek. You will never be satisfied in your career unless you make your own career’.

“I decided, six months before we moved, that I wasn’t going to continue as an engineer in Australia. I’m going to start this bakery and make real food.”

Not one to do anything by halves, Miek got to work, planning out the entire concept for the bakery while pregnant with her second child.

She set up shop in her mother-in-law’s kitchen in Geelong, experimenting with creating luxurious cakes and pastries, however it was an offhand comment about sourdough that  cemented Ket Baker’s future trajectory.

“I was experimenting with cakes. I did my bread course in Belgium and I did a luxurious cake course and chocolatier course, so I had all this knowledge about fancy stuff but the bread and dough – the basics – is always what kept me intrigued,” Miek said.

“I was experimenting a lot with sourdough around that time – my 12-year-old chemist came back into living – and my mother-in-law said to me ‘you love pastries and all the luxury foods. If you like that why don’t you do sourdough pastries?’. That sounded amazing, because I could do this all chemical-free,” Miek said.

“Being the food disrupter I wanted to be, I started experimenting. I had some pretty good results, but I had no idea what I was doing.”

This is where Ian Lowe from Apiece Bakery in Launceston, Tasmania, comes in.

Miek describes Ian as a walking sourdough bible, and organised to travel south to train further under him. It was here she learned in depth about sourdough and fermentation and the science behind it – and saw firsthand Ian’s processes for making sourdough pastries.

“I didn’t learn everything, and Ian didn’t explain everything to me – I still had to figure it out myself,” she said.

“But I did get his formula, and I decided to throw away my own formula and work with his – because his formula is the way to get a consistent product.”

Some of the sourdough pastries at Ket Baker

That’s not to say it was an easy slog. Miek’s youngest son was just three months old when she officially opened Ket Baker, taking on every role in the business herself from the prepping of the dough to the cleaning, dishes, invoices, wholesale deliveries, and selling at the markets.

It’s a period Miek describes as insane, but one in which she was incredibly happy.

“I did not stop, and I was actually OK. I was very happy. I didn’t even know how much money I was earning,” she said.

“But I knew this wasn’t going to be sustainable. I had a family in Europe I couldn’t easily get to without closing the bakery for extended periods, and I was working so much. There was one day I fainted. I was alone in the bakery and I fell and I actually had to call people in the house to come help me because I was in so much pain.

“I realised it was not possible to continue my bakery in this way until I retire, so I was like, ‘nah this needs to grow and I need staff’. That’s when I had to go find another space where I could hire staff because my bakery [at the time] was 20sq m.”

That place was a shed bakery located at Bellarine – an idyllic spot surrounded by trees where Miek has dedicated herself to perfecting her craft.

To this day she still works with Ian’s formula, and even brought him onto the payroll in recent years as a consultant so she could, in her own words, reach for the stars.

“Sourdough pastry is extremely difficult, but I did it. You can take a formula and still make a terrible croissant. You need to learn your dough – not only the science behind it – it’s in your ingredients, and a baker understands that,” she said.

“It’s the engineer in me. From my personal experience my logic, my brain and my scientific thinking has definitely helped me create a structure to start trusting the process and trusting my own senses into developing the right dough.”

Miek with some of the Ket Baker team

And as for reaching for the stars? Well it’s a work in progress. Miek said after a decade in business Ket Baker is finally entering its adulthood – and we definitely haven’t seen everything it has to offer.

Vitally, Miek said it’s now possible to distance herself from everyday production and clearly see the role the bakery has to fulfil within the industry.

“I think Ket Baker has more in its ability, because the ideology behind Ket Baker is to provide good food and be disruptive in the food system – and I believe you can only do that if you’d loud enough,” she said.

“I have the capacity and skills to do what needs to be done – to create and make a difference in the world. I do feel that I’ve got an obligation to fulfill, and I will stay in that obligation until it’s time to hand over the torch to somebody else. There is more happening with Ket Baker, that’s for sure.”