Growing up in Chicago, Susan Sarich spent her childhood afternoons in her family’s kitchen, where her grandmothers Mildred and Madeline taught her how to bake bread, using recipes that they had written down over the years on 3×5 index cards. Sarich loved baking so much that she decided to turn it into a business. When she launched SusieCakes in 2006, the concept was simple: follow the recipes on the index cards to make high-quality bread with simple ingredients. She also wanted to create sustainable food and beverage opportunities for women.
“I wanted to build a business where women could develop their careers without having to work long hours or be away from their families during the holidays,” she says. Today, about 80% of Suzie Cakes’ employees are women, and all of the general managers at her local bakeries are women.
Before founding SusieCakes, Sarich worked in the hospitality industry for more than 20 years. She even founded a bistro in Portland, but she wanted to return to index cards. “While I was in California, I realized I was making too many desserts,” she says. “I felt like I was only eating half of them. I wanted to find a restaurant that served good, old-fashioned Midwest desserts.”
So Saric did it himself, with the help of his parents: They took out a second mortgage, and his father cashed out some of his retirement savings to start a bakery. “From day one, everybody understood what we were trying to do,” Saric says. “We took everybody back to their childhood.”
Suzie Cakes’ first bakery opened in Los Angeles and quickly developed a fan base that included celebrities like Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Garner. The brand expanded to Texas in 2016, and Saric, who now resides in Dallas, plans to relocate the company’s headquarters there in early 2022.
Today, SusieCakes has 26 bakeries across California, Texas and Tennessee, with plans to expand even further. All the while, Saric has stayed true to her original business plan, which included a promise to be a good neighbor. As a result of following through on that plan, SusieCakes has donated more than $4 million in bakery products. “One of our guiding principles is to never forget where we came from,” Saric says. “For me, it’s about humility. I know how hard it was to first open our doors, but sometimes people forget how they started.”
Sarich attributes Suzie Cakes’ success to the brand’s ability to appeal to customers’ memories of childhood and simpler times. That, combined with a massive increase in orders during the pandemic, has propelled the national bakery to new heights.
“People have really responded to it since day one because it’s a nostalgic product,” Saric says. “Because it’s a nostalgic product, it sticks in people’s memory and reminds them of their childhood. We have people who say, ‘Oh, I haven’t had a carrot cake like that since my mom made it for me on my fifth birthday.’ When COVID shut down, the word spread even more. People would email me and say, ‘I need a normal life, and Suzie Cakes is our family’s normal life.’ It became even more clear to me how deeply we are involved in people’s lives. When someone eats our wedding cake, there’s an emotional connection there. And they’re like, ‘Oh, Suzie made our wedding cake. Now we have our first child, let’s have a wedding shower with her.’ I think that’s what makes people so attached to the brand.”
The CEO says that Suzie Cakes’ underlying goal is to make high-quality baked goods using high-quality ingredients, and that remains the case. “We’re not trying to do anything revolutionary,” she says. “We just try to make really good baked goods, and people really appreciate that. I have no qualms about making things without sugar or with artificial ingredients. If there’s something in our baked goods that wasn’t in a 1950 kitchen, we don’t use that in our baked goods.”
