Marisa Dillon Took the Long Way Back to Castara

Ask Marisa Dillon how long she has been in business and she will give you two answers. The honest one is four years. The other is twenty, because that is how long she spent learning the trade for somebody else before she dared to do it for herself.

Dillon owns Castara Bay Baking, the small bakery at the top of the hill in Castara that supplies bread to three guesthouses, a dive shop and, on Saturdays, a queue of locals that forms before the shutters go up.

She did not start there. In 2005, fresh out of school, she took a kitchen job at a hotel in Crown Point because it was the only one on offer. Within two years she was running the bakery station, and within five she was being flown to Port of Spain to train staff at the group’s other properties.

The decision nobody understood

The money was steady. The hours were not. By 2019 she was managing a kitchen of thirty and seeing her own children mostly on Sundays. When the hotel closed its doors in 2020, she describes the feeling not as panic but as permission.

"Everybody told me to wait for the hotels to reopen and go back," she says. "I had waited twenty years already."

She started with an oven in her mother’s kitchen and a Facebook page. The first customers were neighbours. The first real order came from a guesthouse owner who had tasted her bread at a wedding and wanted forty loaves a week.

Learning the business side the hard way

Baking she knew. Pricing she did not. For the first year she charged what the shop down the road charged, and only realised she was losing money on every wholesale loaf when a Chamber workshop made her cost a single loaf, ingredient by ingredient, in front of the room.

That afternoon changed her prices and, she says, her confidence. Wholesale customers were told the new rate. None of them left.

“Everybody told me to wait for the hotels to reopen and go back. I had waited twenty years already.”

Today the bakery employs four people, two of them full time, and runs two ovens out of a converted shipping container that Dillon bought with her first year’s profit rather than a loan.

What comes next

The next step is a second site in Scarborough, which she is in no hurry to open. "The hotel taught me what growing too fast looks like," she says. "I would rather be the best bakery in one village than an average one in two."

For a business built on the long way round, that patience looks less like caution and more like the plan all along.