Munirah spent eleven years as a pastry chef. Pan Pacific, Four Seasons, Grand Hyatt. Seven in the morning until eleven at night, six days a week, making desserts for people she never met.
Then she fell pregnant with her first, and the question she had never had to ask arrived: where do you buy a lactation cookie you are allowed to eat?
“Saya tengok ramai ibu di sekeliling saya susah nak cari biskut laktasi yang halal.”
“I saw so many mothers around me struggling to find a halal lactation cookie. I kept asking why, for something this important, there was so little to choose from.”
Three years before a single pack was sold
She went back to the kitchen, this time her own. Her family were the first tasters, then new mothers she knew, then their friends. Batch after batch, until a cookie that helped was also a cookie somebody would want at three in the morning.
Gula SG launched in 2017. She still bakes every pack herself.
What goes in
Real French butter. Organic oats and flaxseed. Callebaut chocolate. No chalk, and none of the herbal aftertaste that puts mothers off the category on the first bite.
Five to six cookies a day is the whole routine. One 300g pack lasts eight to ten days.
One thing she wants said out loud
Breastfeeding is hard, and it does not work out the same way for everyone. Munirah is a mother of two and has never believed that a mother who formula feeds has failed at anything. These cookies are for mothers who want more milk. They are not a verdict on anyone who does not.
Her story was featured in Berita Harian.