After You Brand Guidelines: The Bangkok Dessert Café Behind Shibuya Honey Toast

A cookbook author opens a café.

After You is a Bangkok dessert café chain. It was opened in 2007 by Gulapat “May” Kanokwatanawan, according to a 2024 profile in Koktail magazine, which says that after university she published a series of dessert cookbooks called May Made and then opened a café that introduced Shibuya Honey Toast. The Star, the Malaysian newspaper, reported in December 2017 that she had opened the café about ten years earlier with Maetup T. Suwan, and that the honey toast drew queues from the start.

The partners expanded carefully at first. Maetup told The Star that they were unsure whether the response was hype or a passing trend, so they waited a year before opening a second outlet and another year before the third; once they were sure the success was real, they kept expanding. By August 2014 BK Magazine was describing a Thonglor branch on Soi 13 and noting that the café’s many locations were often crowded, with people queuing out front for what the magazine called a “super buttery” honey toast.

Gulapat is still with the business. Time Out Bangkok called her the brain behind After You in April 2016, and in April 2025 Brand Inside named her as deputy managing director of After You Public Company Limited. The Koktail profile lists other ventures she has started, including Mikka café and bakery, the shaved-ice shop Maygori, Song Wat Coffee & Roasters and the fruit café Luggaw.

Toast, kakigori and seasonal menus.

The menu grew well beyond toast. The Star counted about 70 items on the Bangkok menu in 2017 and singled out the Thai tea kakigori, a version of the Japanese shaved-ice dessert. The company’s website today lists Shibuya Honey Toast, Chocolate Lava Cake and the Panookie among its signature desserts.

Kakigori also got a shop of its own. In April 2016 Time Out Bangkok reported the opening of Maygori, a standalone kakigori store in Thonglor, with versions such as Mont Blanc, a chestnut cream kakigori with roasted chestnuts and kuromitsu syrup, and Ume, built on a Japanese plum jelly, alongside other Japanese-inspired ices such as hojicha and warabi mochi. In 2021 Brand Inside, citing After You’s 2020 annual report, listed new items such as a Thai melon and avocado kakigori and a mayongchid cheese pie, among 17 products the company developed to travel well as take-away and delivery orders. The same report said After You was also staging stalls at events and pop-up stores with freshly made menus that needed only a few steps to prepare.

The café also works through partnerships. In December 2017 After You desserts, including a smaller Shibuya Honey Toast and a chocolate brownie with vanilla ice cream, went on sale at the Starbucks Reserve Experience Bar at Mega Bangna, Brand Inside reported. In October 2021 it joined the grill chain Bar B Q Plaza on GON X After You, an okonomiyaki mix pairing Bar B Q Plaza’s dipping sauce with After You’s pancake batter. From 10 April to 10 May 2025 it sold a Mangonada Sriracha Kakigori with Sriraja Panich, the chilli sauce brand of Thaitheparos, using ripe and green mango and served with a bottle of the sauce, the same publication reported.

Design and documentation.

Thailand’s restaurant, bakery and café chains tend to present themselves through the places where people meet them: shopping centres, hypermarkets, community malls and their own stand-alone sites. Thai Wikipedia says most MK Suki branches sit in shopping centres and community malls, and in 2015 the Bangkok Post described MK Restaurant Group opening a food mall of its own in Bangkok, London Street, with five of its brands under one roof.

Menus are published by named dishes and drinks rather than by abstract promises. Chains sort their websites into sets, single dishes, desserts and drinks, run seasonal promotions around one dish or sauce, and tie repeat visits to member cards; MK and Yayoi, for example, share the MKONE card. Shopfronts, mascots and packaging are described brand by brand in each guide, as far as dated sources and the companies’ own pages show them.

Ownership is often layered. Several chains in this series sit inside larger groups, among them MK Restaurant Group, PTT OR, the CP group and Food Passion, and some international brands reach Thailand under licence: Yayoi, a Japanese set-meal chain, is run in Thailand by MK Restaurant Group under rights from the Japanese company Plenus, the Bangkok Post reported in 2017. Thai chains also go abroad through franchisees and joint ventures, as MK did in Japan, Vietnam and Singapore.

Corporate pages usually tell a founder story, a list of milestone branches and a record of franchise partners, and listed companies add filings with the Stock Exchange of Thailand. This guide separates what independent, dated sources record (founding dates, owners, listings, branch counts as of a stated date) from what rests only on a company’s own pages, and attributes the latter plainly.

A dessert café on the stock exchange.

The business is a listed company. In December 2016 After You became a public listed company in Thailand, The Star reported the following year. In December 2020 After You told the Stock Exchange of Thailand that two of its major shareholders had sold 66 million shares, together 8.1% of the company, to BTS Group Holdings, the operator of Bangkok’s BTS Skytrain, citing future business opportunities; the company said the sale would not change its management structure or business policy, Brand Inside reported.

Its 2020 annual report, as summarised by Brand Inside in July 2021, divided the business into four parts: the dessert cafés themselves; a non-café arm covering online sales and desserts made for other companies, including AirAsia and Starbucks; catering, pop-ups and small kiosks; and franchise fees. In early 2021 its After You Marketplace shelves, which sell take-away items at the shop front, were in 14 of its 42 branches, the publication said.

Branch counts vary with the date. Brand Inside gave 42 branches in 2021 and Koktail gave 40 in 2024; the company’s website, read in November 2026, describes more than 24 branches in Bangkok. Outside Thailand, The Star reported a pop-up at the Big Bad Wolf book fair at the Mines Exhibition Centre near Kuala Lumpur from 8 to 18 December 2017, with a short menu of three toasts, three kakigori and durian ice-cream sticks, everything made to order. The invitation came from the fair’s organiser, BookXcess, whose managing director told the paper he had tried the Thai tea kakigori on a trip to Bangkok and then met Maetup at the Big Bad Wolf sale there.

For a design guide, After You shows how a single signature dessert can anchor a café brand that then grows through seasonal menus and partnerships. Compare Starbucks, which served its honey toast in Bangkok, and Bar B Q Plaza, its partner on GON X After You. For this guide we use cocoa, a honey-toast gold and a whipped cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep After You’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.