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In September, my husband and I took over a store, the former Kiosk Sardelle in Wedding. Located in Sprengelkiez, I was convinced by the brightness of the main room and the possibilities the store offered.
So, now a café. Something I never wanted. Too much responsibility, too much uncertainty. But stronger diversification. That's always good for a business. My customers could finally try my cakes without having to order an entire cake, and my baking courses would have a nice place. A café also offered a more sustainable approach to my work. Most cakes dome when baking, and by leveling them for the cake layers of tall cakes, there was always offcut that unfortunately had to be thrown away. As the online shop did increasingly well, there was, unfortunately, a lot of wasted food at times. For a company that values sustainability, I didn't want that any longer. And then I had the idea - Cake Cups, or Trifle (unattractively called Schichtdessert in German) in reusable jars. To offer these, I needed a café.
And now there's exactly that. In Kiautschoustraße 1, Mansfield Park has opened a vegan café in Wedding, a sustainable concept store where you can bake, eat, and shop. Because the ingredients I use for my cakes are available for purchase here. My more-than-fair-trade chocolates are offered in reusable jars, aromatic organic Ceylon cinnamon, bright green pistachios, the best vanilla paste. Alongside, you can also find my favorite sustainable kitchen utensils. Like reusable silicone bags with which you can freeze freshly made fruit puree or chocolate chip cookies. Hopefully there will be more soon.
The whole concept store revolves around sustainability, which has become the central theme of Mansfield Park for me.
I try to completely avoid single-use for the gastronomy business and am a partner of Vytal. Because single-use is crap and has been legally restricted for gastronomy since January 2023. This is poorly implemented, and to compensate for this, we decided to move forward radically in the concept store. According to the Federal Ministry for the Environment and Consumer Protection, around 320,000 single-use cups for hot drinks are consumed every hour in Germany, of which up to 140,000 are "to-go" cups.* That's almost three billion single-use cups per year in Germany alone! That's why at Mansfield Park, there are only reusable containers for coffee and cake. I find it nonsensical to put a piece of cake on a cardboard plate and then pack it all in a paper bag on top of that. All just to throw it away in your own apartment, maybe a hundred meters away. For coffee, there are options with Vytal, so rent instead of deposit (which you only accumulate at home and don't want to return), in-café consumption of course, but also the purchase of the cups used in the concept store is possible. For this, I chose the stylish Huskee from Australia after long research.** They are B-certified, i.e., particularly sustainable, and really well-thought-out reusable coffee cups.
The beans for this come from quijotekaffee in Hamburg.*** The raw coffees are purchased directly by the collective from small-scale, organic-certified producer communities in South America. The price paid by Quijote for Robusta is twice as high as for "fair trade". The Hamburg roastery finances all coffees before the start of the harvest with at least 60% of the agreed amount by interest-free advance payment, so that the harvest can be brought in without financial stress. This is an exception in the coffee business. Quijote pays the highest percentage of the retail price of roasted coffee to the producers within the specialty coffee industry worldwide. And they do this for the two reasons that I have also set for my café: on the one hand, the company has no intention of making a profit beyond its own wages, and on the other hand, no social selection of customers over the price is desired. This results in fair prices, for everyone.
So, come by! Mansfield Park Café & Concept Store
Kiautschoustr. 1, 13353
Business hours: Monday, Thursday - Saturday 12:00 bis 17:30
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