Where the unexpectedly viral bite of the summer is concerned, Pineapple Bakery’s founder Adele Wong knows a thing or two about pineapple buns.
Adele Wong created the recipe for Pineapple Bakery’s fervently-beloved and viral pineapple bun two years ago, but it took until June 2025 to emerge in the public – and to sell out 900 buns every single week.
As a private chef of two years, her pineapple bun was first sampled by her clients-turned-private investors in the Sheung Wan bakery. The group of real estate and finance professionals loved her dessert so much they implored her to serve her treat to others.
“Originally, we had planned to open up a Hong Kong-style bakery and sandwich shop where we make our own bread and serve sandwiches,” Adele mused. “This place was always going to be a shop that served traditional Hong Kong foods that would include pineapple buns.”
Planning for Pineapple Bakery began in spring of 2025, firstly to find a suitable location for the bakery and to craft the limited menu, at present a pineapple bun, cocktail bun, and a cinnamon raisin bread.
Sheung Wan remained a manifest choice for Adele with the neighbourhood’s heavy workweek foot traffic. The focus on pineapple buns was clear: it was Adele’s childhood favourite, an icon of Hong Kong bakeries, and the perfect palate for experimentation.
Adele keeps traditions at heart with the pineapple bun recipe with using high-quality ingredients whilst ensuring its taste and look finds a familiar footing.
The buns shun lard for New Zealand butter using milk from grass-fed cows and French AOP butter for their pineapple buns with butter. “The reason why we chose to not use [pork] lard,” typically a staple in the traditional recipe, “is because I think butter gives a better taste for the buns.”
With Hong Kong’s large Muslim community and growing number of Halal-dieting foreign visitors, trading lard for rich butter makes sense for accommodating all types of bun-hungry customers.
Your typical pineapple buns in Hong Kong are made with “an egg and butter” milk bread or prepared in mainland Chinese factories and baked locally, the latter most commonly found in cha chaan teng chains. Adele’s pineapple buns use a brioche bun base with the conventional pineapple-y sugar crust.
“I think we are mainly doing the basics, but of course, as a pastry chef, I am always influenced by people who are way better than me. I think Pineapple Bakery is quintessentially Hong Kong.”
“We do not have that much influence from Japanese style bread or Western style bread, I think our biggest foreign influence would be the brioche touch. Yet, I wouldn’t call us a Western influence bakery.”
Speaking to Foodie inside the bakery’s closet-sized kitchen, with only space for two people to operate in, Adele ruminates over the debate for whether Pineapple Bakery is elevating or enhancing the pineapple bun and its sister products.
“Elevating means that one thing is higher than the other. For example, you wouldn’t say with a very traditional tiramisu versus a deconstructed version that one is necessarily superior over the other, they are just different ways of doing things.”
Adele opened Pineapple Bakery on its first and only Sunday on June 8th where the work crowd was non-existent but welcome for friends and family to order.
“The thing I remembered most about that day was a customer who came in to buy one pineapple bun and enjoyed it so much that they came back again and asked for six more. This was a little twist of fate. They just happened to walk into a shop with no menu posted outside nor banners, bought something, liked it, and came back again for more. I think that was like a really big deal for me.”
“ If it were not for that one incident, I think the trajectory of this place might actually have been different.”
It took just over a month for the hype to spill over online and word-of-mouth to propagate in the white collar working area. “It was early July when people began queuing up outside before we opened. It started with only four or five people who came 15 minutes early. It didn’t seem like a lot at the time, but I thought it was totally insane.”
Today, it is not uncommon to see customers lining up for more than an hour prior to doors opening at 11AM, 2PM, and 4PM, the bakery’s schedule for the 60 pineapple buns coming out each time.
“We started really implementing [the bakery schedule] when people would start lining up outside. It is not necessarily getting pineapple ones out or managing a queue. It is that everything has to be perfect on time because you know that it is an event for some people and that they came here specifically to buy it.”
“They are getting [pineapple buns] for someone that they really love or for their friends who are visiting from out of town. It is always a pleasure to serve my customers.”
Pineapple Bakery is open on Saturdays to accommodate Hong Kongers who are not able to sneak out of work to travel far to Sheung Wan.
Adele recommends customers to arrive 20 minutes early to queue. Once the pineapple buns come out of the oven, she leaves the kitchen to mark down how many buns each customer requests, a maximum of three per person. “They sell out immediately, so you need to come out on time or I have to cut the queue.”
The pineapple buns are priced at HKD18, slightly higher than a typical bun found at hundreds of the city’s traditional pastry stores, but enough to warrant the choice of quality ingredients, Adele says.
Four months into Pineapple Bakery’s viral mania, the hype has not died down. Their social media page posts infrequently, rather, earning the trust of influencers and foodies to spread the sweet gospel, or word-of-mouth to preach pineapple goodness.
The bakery’s popularity has allowed Adele to leverage collaborations with other budding establishments in town, including a Pineapple Bakery burger with Barkada, Snack Baby Gelato’s nitro milk tea gelato with chunks of pineapple bun, and Sugar King’s Cuban sandwiches made with their brioche buns, sans sugary topping. She has also teased a collaboration with a Hong Kong coffee brand in the coming months.
Beyond the venerable pineapple bun, other Cantonese treats appear alongside. The coconut cocktail bun and raisin bun, two staples in any Hong Kong bakery, find themselves equally as popular on the menu, available to wash down with Pineapple Bakery’s nitro milk tea.
“We wanted to create a traditional cocktail bun but with a rich buttery coconut filling inside to get a super caramelized flavour. The buns come with an optional pandan filling, inspired by Southeast Asian [flavours].” As is everything here, enhancing is the game.
“Raisin buns were created because at every single Hong Kong bakery they are probably the top one or two best sellers.”
Crafting both cocktail buns and raisin buns everyday, whilst introducing new special items like banana walnut cakes and paper wrapped cake, allows Adele to breathe and remain creative in her craft. “I think if I just did pineapple buns, I would die of boredom!”
“[Baking pineapple buns] is a very repetitive task. I think it does come with the trade and I don’t mind repetition, but I think there has to be some kind of outlet for creativity still.”
As Adele’s days consist of constant sell-outs and growing fanfare, she remains appreciative of the summer of love she has received, with big wishes for the future. “I really appreciate the amount of enthusiasm for our pineapple buns, and of course, I would like for it to continue.”
“What I want to change is that I hope we can make more pineapple buns and open in a more consistent manner because sometimes we do have these last minute schedule changes due to our orders. I want to be able to satisfy more customers and make more people happy.”
She has discussed plans to increase the schedules and output at the Sheung Wan bakery and open a second location across the harbour to please customers located further north of the city in the future.
After all, Pineapple Bakery is allowing Adele to finally employ her skills into practice, skills earned over years working in her family’s restaurant business.
At 13 years old, her first foray as a chef came at a relative’s roast meat shop in Mong Kok, preparing meats for cooking. Following that, she joined other businesses operated by her family, specialising in Chinese cuisine first and later experimenting as a private chef.
“ I love restaurants. I think that is my lifeblood. Also, I prefer to be in the kitchen. I like going into a flow state. Of course, one day, I would love to go back into restaurant cooking again.”
“Private cooking does also provide a lot more space to explore my creativity and it is a lot less high stakes as well.”
As she mentioned in her two hour break between baking schedules, her favourite childhood bakery in Jordan, where she was born and raised, a muse for her current work, no longer exists. It closed during the pandemic.
They served egg tarts, paper wrapped cakes, raisin twist swirls, puff pastries, and, of course, pineapple buns. Pineapple Bakery is a space for Adele to reinvent what she first learned to enjoy years ago.
Pay a visit to Pineapple Bakery today for one of Hong Kong’s most viral and tasty pineapple buns.
