The Story of Baked Vegan Sweets

Where It All Began
I started the business in 2016 when I was 19 years old. I was still in culinary school at the time and many of my chefs told me that opening a vegan bakery was a dumb idea and the “trend” would die out quickly, My “bakery” started out as a small home based cake business. I would take custom cake orders on the weekends while still working a full time baking job. Eventually I started selling at farmers markets (mom and dad had to represent while I was at my real job). In 2017 I moved into a commercial kitchen so I could begin wholesaling to many vegan restaurants in Orange County, all while still working my full time job as a baker at Disney. I started vending at festivals and vegan events which helped grow my business by word of mouth and I started getting an overwhelming amount of orders. Eventually in 2018 I had to quit my job at Disney to be able to bake for myself full time. One week after leaving Disney I was signing the lease to my storefront! However opening the store was not as quick and easy as I was led to believe it would be. Over 50 trips to city hall with what seemed like a never ending list of corrections, thousands of dollars and two years later the buildout was done and the bakery was ready to open-except it was April 2020 and we were in the middle of the pandemic. The city was not doing any inspections, nobody was in the office. When things started to lighten up a bit toward the end of June we were finally able to schedule inspections. All the inspections were scheduled for the same day on July 2nd and we passed. The bakery officially opened it’s doors on July 11th 2020.