Award-winning café owner positive about hiring immigrants

The coffee-shop owner Sari Kutvonen has offered opportunities to immigrants.

For many tourists, the Pullaposki café in the centre of Punkaharju is a pilgrimage site. It was founded by Sari Kutvonen and recently selected as the business of the year in the village.

“Positive feedback doesn’t pay the bills, but it does give me the strength and drive to go on. It feels nice when customers congratulate me and say the award went to the right place,” Kutvonen says.

At the time of writing, she was preparing for one of the busiest seasons of the year. As every year, customers have placed lots of orders for Christmas foods. Kutvonen says that the fact that the homemade quality of the food is her café’s most important selling point. All the products are made by hand.

“The weekend before Christmas, we bake Christmas oven bakes and rice pastries day and night. We make the oven bakes ourselves from scratch. We peel, boil and mash the carrots for the carrot oven bake. We use about 20–30 kg of them,” Kutvonen says.

The selection also includes beetroot, blue cheese, swede, liver and potato oven bakes, the last of which is sweetened.

“There are so many orders at the moment that I might have to say on social media that I can’t take any more. I don’t have enough resources or space in the oven,” she says.

In addition to oven bakes, rice pastries are popular at Christmas in eastern Finland. The café bakes hundreds of them for Christmas.

“I can’t always pay myself”

Kutvonen opened her first café in Enonkoski in 2004. Her current café in the former municipal building of Punkaharju has been open for 14 years. Last year, her business turned 20. Kutvonen has succeeded in turning her café into a steady income source, even though the business has not been as profitable since the pandemic.

“Before Covid, there was as much work as I wanted to do. Back then, a little more was left over for me. Since the pandemic, the autumn months and the start of the year have been difficult. Thankfully, I also run a catering service, which allows me to spread out my business a bit.”

Kutvonen is doing her dream job, which she sometimes wants to do without any salary.

“I can’t always pay myself. Still, I always have to believe in the future. I can’t always be wanting the sun, moon and stars. Sometimes I have to settle for less.”

Kutvonen is an accountant by training. However, she decided early on that she did not want to work in that profession.

“I’m not a computer person at all, which is why I don’t like accounting. My accounting skills are useful when running my own business, though.”

Expectations for the spring

Kutvonen is eagerly looking forward to the spring and summer, when holidaymakers arrive in Punkaharju.

Last summer, the demand for cinnamon rolls reached such a level that Kutvonen briefly wondered whether she should focus on baking a single product.

“Somehow, tourists got the idea that we bake the world’s best cinnamon rolls. We didn’t even advertise anywhere,” the business owner says.

In a day, the café kitchen turns out up to two hundred cinnamon rolls.

Kutvonen employs two permanent staff members. Over her 20 years as a business owner, she has offered trainee places to several immigrants.

“I’ve always said I wanted to give people the chance to see what this job is like. I’ve taken people on to work alongside me and taught them how to make pizzas and Karelian pastries and how to knead buns.”

She admits that insufficient language skills can sometimes be a challenge. At the moment, one of Kutvonen’s permanent employees is a Russian who has lived in Finland for 30 years. Nevertheless, there are language problems from time to time.

“Employees dictate terms”

Kutvonen says that immigrants are a welcome alternative, because native Finns do not seem interested in working in a café.

“If you want to employ a native Finnish employee who is at least half-decent, they are few and far between. The trend today is for employees to dictate terms, not the employer.”

Kutvonen provides a real-life example.

“One applicant wanted €20 an hour. I said I can’t even pay myself that much. They would only have been able to work 2–3 days a week and a few hours a day, and didn’t have any experience. I had to tell them that on those terms, unfortunately, they wouldn’t get a job in this industry.”

Are you a Suomen Yrittäjät member yet? Read about member benefits and advantages