Our Story
It all goes back to a recession, box of cake mix and a dentist office. It was 2010, 2 years after the last recession where we had lost absolutely everything, our car, business, house and who we thought were our friends. It was a very difficult time trying to explain to our family how we had failed so badly. My wife and I went back to work for Starbucks where we had met. A year later, we knew we had to make some changes.
It all started with Carina.
Carina started working full time at the dentist office and I went to work for a family friend that owned a market. One day I came home after a long day at work and I found Carina in the kitchen baking cupcakes for a party at work. The next day she came home after work excited because everyone had raved about her cupcakes and how delicious the frosting was. She decided to bake another batch to take to work again. A couple of months goes by and people in her office asked if she’d be willing to take orders for cupcakes for different parties they were having. She was ecstatic. She had no idea what a fair price to charge was and didn’t think that her product was even good enough to sell yet. Her secret ingredient was love. She loved to bake and make people. It was something that made her feel special. After another long day at work, we were sitting at the kitchen table and I had thrown around the idea of why not try to make a business out of selling her cupcakes? I was immediately shot down. After a lot of convincing, flowers and nice dinners I was able to convince her to start with a food truck.
In comes the food truck.
The search was on for a used truck that we could fix up and upgrade. After a couple of weeks of searching, we found a truck for sale in Ojai and it was ours. Over the next couple of months, we worked on cleaning up the truck, designing our logo and working on our own recipes. We ran into a major issue with not having a place to bake our cupcakes since, by law, we were not allowed to bake out of our home. Right as we were about to give up, we came across a riverside county article that talked about a new law that would allow a cottage food operation license. After some extensive research, we became the first business in Riverside County to hold that license. We booked our first event in Murrueta, an Irish color run. We were up all night baking 400 cupcakes and had just 4 flavors: lemon, vanilla, cookies & cream and strawberry. We loaded up the truck and headed to our first event. We had no idea what to expect. Fortunately, it was a huge success and sold out of all 400 cupcakes.
Our drinks.
Our community wanted more than just cupcakes. We needed more flavors and more items so that we could offer our customers more variety. We put our coffee experience to work and got the truck fitted with an espresso machine, blender and a fridge. We went everywhere we could with the truck we even got booked for the rose parade one year. We managed to save up enough money to build out our first brick and mortar location 2 years later. It was a struggle as it was our first time building a place from the ground up but we made it happen. For the first few months, our customers were happy with all the cupcake and drinks we offered but still wanted more. So, we grew our menu and started adding sandwiches (breakfast & lunch ), scones, pastries, bagels, soups, salads, cookies, muffins and croissants. Business took off up. At that point, we were only a team of 4 that consisted of myself, my wife, my brother and my sister-in-law. Now, we are proud to have 3 locations and employing 54 team members that we call maestranzas, Spanish for people who are around you helping. Thanks for stopping by and we look forward to serving you.
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