Home-grown brand ROA takes its allergen-free cookies to the world

SINGAPORE – It started with one birthday cake for a child with multiple food allergies. Now, home-grown food brand ROA has secured the backing of a major Japanese supplier of baking ingredients to go big in Japan and elsewhere.

Founder Jane Tan, 43, will launch her vegan, allergen-free and halal bakes in about 100 of backer Tomizawa Shouten’s retail stores across Japan. She is also looking to sell her products in the United States, either through supermarkets or online via platforms such as Amazon.

Neither side will say how much the investment amounts to, but it is in the seven figures. With that, ROA, whose products are already sold in Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Australia, will be able to innovate, beef up its supply chain capabilities and develop new products.

Tomizawa Shouten, a family business now run by the fourth generation, has big plans for her.

One of its board directors, Shuichi Sato, 60, says the funding is meant to fuel the growth of ROA as “the leading allergen-free cookie company for the world”.

He tells The Straits Times that he met Tan in 2020, when he was working in Singapore and was a mentor for the Innovate 360 programme, which helps food start-ups find funding and mentorship, and to scale.

His wife is gluten- and dairy-intolerant and he says he had tried many allergen-free products, which “are always not tasty”.

“ROA’s cakes and cookies taste just great,” he says. “Ordinary people and those sensitive to allergens can enjoy these products. We thought we should introduce them to the world.”

The taste also won over Jun Tomizawa, 49, president and chief executive of the company, Sato says.

“Obviously, he has a lot of opportunities to try the best sweets from all over the world,” he adds.

Cake shamed

Tan, a mother of two girls aged 13 and 10, trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Sydney. The keen home baker quit her job in human resources in 2010 to pursue her baking dream. After the course, she worked a year with a company there that makes intricate wedding cakes.

Back in Singapore, she started a home-based business in 2013 selling elaborate fondant cakes, then moved on in 2015 to supply plain cakes that home bakers could buy and decorate themselves. She sold it in 2018.

Her best food business idea came courtesy of her goddaughter Emma, now 12, who cannot have eggs, peanuts, gluten or dairy. At pre-school, where kids would have birthday parties often, she would not be able to have cake.

Tan says: “That was not the worst thing. For her birthday, her mum asked a home baker to make a cake without all the allergens. It was a disaster. Her friends told her the cake was ‘not nice’.

“So, imagine at four years old, you’re being judged for your cake. And it’s not your fault. That stung my heart. I’m a pastry chef and her godmother. How could I not make something for her?”

She took nine months to develop her Midnight Cake, using a gluten-free flour blend, avocados and rice bran oil in place of butter, psyllium husk in place of eggs and, initially, soya milk in place of milk, before switching to brown rice milk.

“I wanted to create a cake that was tasty and rich, that kids would love,” she says. “If the kids love it, adults would usually be okay with it too and everybody can enjoy it together. So, the inclusion part was very strong for me.”

She tested the cake with customers from her previous cake business and found out that they preferred the Midnight Cake to her regular chocolate cake.

In 2019, she launched ROA with just that chocolate cake. A mini cupcake was priced at $2.50 and a whole cake at $65.

The name means “calm” in Icelandic.

She says: “I wanted a name that would go with what I stood for. I wanted people to eat with peace of mind.”

Growing pains

From the start, ROA’s cakes were made in a professional kitchen to ensure an allergen-free environment.

Word spread, first among people with allergies, then among the vegan community, and then to the wider community.

During Covid-19, she hit a snag.

The cakes were not coming out right and she had to shut down for two weeks to figure out why. It turned out the supplier of the gluten-free flour blend had changed the formula without telling her.

She says: “I was like a mad scientist, figuring out the ratios of the various flours and coming up with the right amount of baking powder and baking soda to use.”

Today, she uses a proprietary blend of corn, tapioca, rice and potato flours.

Once she fixed that, she was selling, she says, 400 to 500 cupcakes a month during the pandemic.

Luxury brands began contacting her to supply them with the cake for events and she soon branched out into corporate gifting too.

In 2021, she introduced cookies and they now make up about 85 per cent of production. Her Midnight Cake (from $7 for a regular cupcake and from $48 for a 11cm whole cake), cookies (from $2.50 for a 20g bag) and brownie brittle (from $3 for a 30g bag) are sold online (roa.com.sg). Customers can also find them at plant-based ice cream chain Kind Kones’ stores and Food Folks @ Lau Pa Sat.

They are also part of the meal trays on Scoot flights, at the breakfast buffet and in-room minibars at Crowne Plaza Hotel at Singapore Changi Airport, and sold at the Raffles Hotel gift shop.

After growing out of a series of central kitchen spaces here, she moved production to a factory in Kepong, near Kuala Lumpur, in late 2025. It carved out a space for ROA’s production line so that it can be allergen-free.

Blue ocean

When online sales dwindled post-pandemic, she decided to court the business-to-business market, taking part in food and trade shows.

Since 2024, she has been selling her cookies in Saudi Arabia. She says she was pitched the idea by a company looking to grow the market for Singapore products there. Her cookies are sold in LuLu supermarkets in Dammam, Riyadh and Jeddah.

She says: “The market has growing interest in healthier snack options and products with lower sugar levels.”

An Australian passenger on a Scoot flight contacted her after having her cookie on board and, in 2025, started selling them through his distribution company at supermarket chain IGA’s outlets in Perth.

She says consumers there had many choices if they were avoiding one allergen. The challenge was if they needed to steer clear of several ingredients.

“A product might be gluten-free but contain nuts, or dairy-free but contain soy,” she says. “That was one of the reasons our products resonated. They addressed multiple dietary needs without asking consumers to compromise on taste.”

She runs ROA with just five employees and is the one who develops new products.

There are new cookie flavours to concoct for the Japanese market. Customers have been telling her they cannot just have cakes and cookies every day, so she is working on a range of granola and crackers.

“My friends who have raised money for start-ups often tell me how stressful it can be once investors come in,” she says.

“But honestly, I felt a huge sense of relief. Not because someone was solving my problems for me, but because I knew I had a partner I trusted deeply to help me build what comes next.”