Joe Moruzzi with his Pleesecakes
(Picture: Pleesecakes)To say “one night a cheesecake changed my life” sounds even less likely than a DJ doing the same.
But that’s what happened to Joe Moruzzi, a painter-and-decorator turned baker whose Instagram-fuelled cake business hit a £1 million turnover last year thanks to the unlikely combination of the Queen, Joe Wicks and a jar of Nutella. Moruzzi left school at 16 and worked as a squash coach, a landscape gardener and then as a decorator before coming home from work on a building site one day in 2015 to find a white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake, baked by his dad.
“It was all right,” Moruzzi reports. “My dad’s side of the family is Italian, we’re into our food. But I thought I could do better.”
A few days later, the entrepreneur made his first cheesecake — Nutella and peanut butter: “I couldn’t get the tin base off the cake. It was so flat.”
But he kept on making them.
“I decided to have a bit of fun with flavours and overload them with the sweet stuff people love — salted caramel base, topped with loads of fudge, and every chocolate I could find in the supermarket.”
Pleesecakes
Founded: 2017
Staff: 16
Turnover: £1 million for 2021
Headquarters: Redhill
By 2017, Moruzzi had turned his baking hobby into a side hustle. He started an Instagram account to market his cheesecakes, and took them onto the building sites and homes he was painting — including footballer John Terry’s house.
“I’d give them out to the boys as tasters. Subconsciously I was doing market research, but at the time, I just thought I wanted to brighten their day.”
Then “body coach” Wicks posted about Pleesecakes.
“We’re pals from way back, and one day out of the blue he gave me a shout out on his Instagram page… It was crazy — 15,000 followers in 24 hours. I decided I was never painting again,” laughs Moruzzi.
“But it was also a bit nuts — I had no business plan, no website or email, no health and safety — just my mum and dad’s kitchen, and three tins.”
Customers were sending 50 Pleesecake orders a week via Instagram messages.
“We were in the kitchen for 20 hours a day most days, it was very testing psychologically.”
Moruzzi, 34, found alternative kitchens — including one in a Territorial Army base — but has since raised £300,000 to move Pleesecakes into commercial premises.
As well as taste, looks were a focus “to make the product very Instagrammable”.
An early favourite, the £65 Fully Loaded Pleesecake, remains a bestseller, with a double chocolate digestive base, salted caramel cheesecake topped with milk chocolate ganache and “all the chocolate bars you can imagine”.
Moruzzi’s social media fame saw him approached by brands for publicity stunts — Weetabix ordered a cheesecake with baked beans and bacon roses on top. But he’s most proud of an order from McVitie’s for a “VIP customer”.
“They wanted everything made from McVitie’s biscuits — so it was a chocolate digestive base, with HobNobs, iced gems, everything piled on top. Then they casually mentioned ‘it’s for the Queen’. I had to get security clearance for my little van, and drove it into Clarence House… hopefully she liked it!”
Instagram helped Moruzzi grow his business, but he’s unsure if it would do the same today.
“Instagram’s changed a lot since I started Pleesecakes, and the focus of [its owner Meta, née Facebook] is to push users to spend on their ad system,” he says.
“If you don’t, you get pushed down the algorithm. TikTok is currently our biggest revenue-stream through brand collaborations and pay-per-view. LinkedIn is also great.”
Stockists now include Amazon, Selfridges and Deliveroo. Moruzzi and his team sell as many as 30,000 products each month; they’ve branched out into Mini Cheesecakes, Freezecakes (frozen, scoopable cheesecake) and Chuffles (cheesecake filled truffles).
“I want to grow a global brand, so we’ve become a product development kitchen and third parties make our product.”
Moruzzi, though, has had to cut back on his testing. “I don’t eat as many as I used to… I was putting on some timber! It probably works out at about one a week as I’m involved in the signing off of new products — it’s a hard life.”
