Hualien bakery pushes back after Taiwan budget cuts threaten disadvantaged groups’ mooncake orders

A Hualien bakery is refusing to stop selling its signature egg yolk pastries, even as public anger grows over Taiwan’s budget cuts and the cancellation of mooncake orders from sheltered workshops.

YYY Desserts said it had faced calls to withdraw from the Mid-Autumn Festival market and leave the orders to sheltered factories. The bakery’s owner, known as Chef Yai, wrote on Facebook that the shop had sold egg yolk pastries for more than 10 years. The festival season is its biggest revenue period, affecting employee bonuses and year-end payments.

The shop had also paid deposits for packaging and scheduled ingredients as early as May or June. “Why, in the end, are we still being asked to make another sacrifice?” Chef Yai wrote, saying ordinary businesses had also taken on the consequences of the political dispute.

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Why, in the end, are we still being asked to make another sacrifice?

The controversy began after Kuomintang and Taiwan People’s Party lawmakers approved cuts and freezes to presidential office funds. The decision forced the cancellation of a planned purchase of 15,000 Mid-Autumn Festival mooncake boxes from sheltered workshops and disability welfare organizations. Fu Kun-chi, the Kuomintang caucus leader, bowed and apologized, acknowledging that the review had not properly excluded those purchases.

As calls grew for private businesses to give way, YYY Desserts said it fully supported buying, promoting and organizing group purchases of products made by sheltered workshops. But it opposed helping one group by requiring another to abandon its work. “Kindness should not have to be completed through the sacrifice of another group,” Chef Yai said.

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Kindness should not have to be completed through the sacrifice of another group.