Stanford Graduate Quit McKinsey to Chase Her Baking Dream, Now Her Microbakery Sells 400 Pastries a Week

Hali Mo built the kind of CV that usually points toward a corner office. She went from Stanford to a summer analyst job at McKinsey, stayed on as a consultant, moved into design consulting, and then became a senior product manager at the trucking startup CloudTrucks. She left all of it to bake.

Today she runs Hali Home Bakes, a French-Asian microbakery in San Francisco that she says now turns out around 400 pastries a week.

The pivot came at the start of 2024, when Mo quit her job in tech to study pastry in Paris. 'I wanted to wake up every day and do something I love,' she said. Baking had never been a casual pastime. By her own account it was more obsession than hobby, the thing she worked on before dawn and late at night while holding down a day job. She calls the bakery a love note to all things pastry.

Long before pastry school, Mo taught herself to bake in her own kitchen and documented it online under the name Halicopter Away. That following, now spread across Instagram and TikTok and totalling more than 120,000, gives the bakery a built-in marketing channel and a ready stream of would-be customers.

After deciding to go all in, she trained at Ferrandi, the Paris school with one of the best-known pastry programmes in the world, then set about turning the craft into a business.

The Money Behind the Microbakery

Hali Home Bakes did not begin in San Francisco. Mo launched it in New York, working out of her apartment, and the early going was slow. At first, she has said, she could barely sell a dozen boxes. Her first attempt at croissants, back in March 2020, came out closer to a biscuit, she told the ordering platform Hotplate, but she kept at it.

The business runs on preorders. Mo sells mainly through advance orders rather than baking on spec, an approach she has said keeps her organised, cuts food waste, and protects her margins. Selling in weekly drops and pop-ups rather than running a daily shopfront also keeps her overheads down while she builds demand.

The pastries are slow to make. Each is mixed, laminated, shaped, and baked over a minimum of three days, blending French method with the flavours of her Asian American upbringing. Recent seasonal runs have featured chilli crisp scallion rolls and Asian-French mooncakes, with a 2025 line-up stretching to black sesame passionfruit, matcha pistachio, red bean egg yolk, and hazelnut praline chocolate.

The bakery also takes catering and group orders through its website, and Mo runs pop-ups at cafes and markets around the city.

Rebuilding From Scratch in San Francisco

That New York chapter ended when Mo moved back to San Francisco and started again. She began in her apartment, she wrote on LinkedIn, carrying the pastries up to the top of Lafayette Park for customers to collect.

The operation has since scaled up. She moved into a commercial kitchen fitted with an electric sheeter, a double-door freezer, and two full-size ovens, and now sells every Saturday from Morella in the Marina. The jump from a home oven to a commercial space brought higher fixed costs along with the extra capacity, and she wrote that the new setup 'really is the dream.'

What Comes Next for Hali Home Bakes

The next step is volume. Mo says she is now producing around 400 pastries a week and wants to roughly double that to 1,000, and she has begun hiring a part-time baker to share the load.

It is a long way from McKinsey and product road maps. For now, the Stanford graduate is running her own kitchen, one three-day batch at a time.