Each month, Cupertino High School juniors Shreya Kiran and Anya Gupta distribute orders of themed baked goods as part of Hearts of Baking, their nonprofit baking business.
Kiran and Gupta founded their business in 2022, inspired by a shared passion for baking, which began in their middle school cooking class.
“We met and became really close around that time, and we’ve been baking together ever since,” Gupta said. “I’ve been baking for as long as I can remember, with my mom as well.”
“We just wanted to expand beyond baking in school, because the class only spanned a semester. We started Hearts of Baking to both continue our love for baking but also make an impact on our community,” Kiran said.
The two described how the beginning of their blossoming friendship was built upon the hours poured into business processes, from planning menus to distributing orders.
“We had been planning it out for a while in eighth grade. Our first menu was Valentine’s-themed, with lots of pink and hearts because it was in February,” Kiran said. “The positive reactions and support during the first month made us really feel like all of our hard work and planning paid off.”
As their business saw sizable growth, so did their relationships with customers, many of whom communicated their preferences for future themes and items.
Said Kiran, “Most of our customers really enjoy our treats — they typically suggest we make their favorite treats from our various menus over the months.”
Listening to their customers has played a key role in shaping their selections for menus.
“I definitely heard, ‘When are you guys doing tiramisu? When are you guys doing cake pops?’ So we take that into consideration when we’re planning our menus, because we want to appeal to as many people as we can,” Gupta said.
Hearts of Baking takes orders on a monthly basis, with each month introducing a new theme. Themes have ranged from brightly-colored rainbow goods in June for Pride Month, to pink and red heart-shaped specialties for Valentine’s Day in February. “It’s really fun to be creative with the packaging of products each month and [see] our visions come to life,” Gupta said.
All profits generated by Hearts of Baking are donated to various charities, including Active Minds, UNICEF, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. By the end of 2024, Kiran and Gupta donated a total of $1,200 to their selected charities.
“We also dive deeper in terms of charities. For example, September is Suicide Awareness Month, February is Black History Month and March is Women’s History Month. And so we base our donations off those kinds of honorary time periods, to show support for each charity based on each month,” Kiran said.
The two entrepreneurs have mastered the art of time management, now being juniors in high school. They recently celebrated their three year anniversary as a business, while simultaneously maintaining a loyal customer base in their community.
Said Kiran, “We’ve definitely grown immensely in terms of organization. We started off using the Notes app, but we’ve transitioned into a Google Sheet where we compile all of our customers’ orders, all of our pricing, all of our total revenue.”
With growth, however, brings new challenges — specifically in terms of balancing their business and academic commitments.
“Because we can’t make products ahead of time and don’t know exactly how many orders we are going to receive, we have to wait until the end of the week, meaning we usually spend one or two entire days baking. Sometimes we have to literally be doing our schoolwork while baking orders, or staying up later, but we just find a way to manage it, but I definitely have to prioritize the business sometimes,” Gupta said.
Having now run the business for over three years, Gupta reflected on their growth in terms of online marketing strategies over time.
“Especially within social media, because we run our business through Instagram, we needed to figure out when to post, the best time to post, how to write captions and how to most effectively repost our menus on our personal accounts,” Gupta said. “That is definitely an area that has improved significantly over the past three years.”
Throughout the rest of 2025, Kiran and Gupta hope to expand their reach by collaborating closely with charities and participating in meaningful events beyond donations, such as hosting bake sales at various locations throughout the Bay Area.
Said Kiran, “We’re also going to be part of an event in April where we’re planning to teach children affected by autism [how] to decorate cupcakes. So in those sorts of ways, we want to expand in that area [and use] different strategies to help impact our community, besides just donating.”
