Name: Milk Bar's founder had 'no business plan' before launching her multi-million dollar dessert empire
Uploaded: 2024-06-20
Duration: 7 min 50 s
Description: Christina Tosi, the chef and founder of “modern American” bakery Milk Bar, has never shied away from a challenge. In an interview with Fortune, Tosi revealed her secrets to success.

Christina Tosi, the chef and founder of “modern American” bakery Milk Bar, has never shied away from a challenge. In an interview with Fortune, Tosi revealed her secrets to success.

Milk Bar's founder had 'no business plan' before launching her multi-million dollar dessert empire

Features

I mean, my favorite thing to do for a living. The sky is the limit as far as I'm concerned when it comes to cereal and marshmallows and melted butter. I'm Christina Tosi. I'm 42 years young. I'm the chef and founder of Milk Bar. And this is the secret to my success. Milk Bar is a quirky American style bakery. That's all about making people happy with dessert. Baking was a really big part of my upbringing. We didn't bake to be fancy. We baked because it was just something we did. It was our conduit, our pipeline to community togetherness to sharing. My first restaurant job wasn't until I went to college. I became obsessed with the idea of working in a restaurant. And I went one day with a resume that had nothing on it except running my mom's shredding room at her accounting office and applied to be a hostess and from there in the world of food, I was hooked. I was 18, but I was like, I'm behind. So I had this idea. I'm gonna move to New York City. I'm gonna go to culinary school by day. I'm gonna work in restaurants. By night, I went to the French Culinary Institute on Broadway and Grand, which is now the International Culinary Center. And so Monday through Friday from seven or 8 a.m. until 330 or 4 p.m. Nonstop in the classroom, baking, getting the tactical work of classroom pastry art. And then right after school, bring my baked goods, hand them to someone on the street and go into a restaurant and work by nine, I got my first real pastry job at Boulet. I worked at Boulet for a year and a half. It's really important in your first like fine dining restaurant. You had to give at least a year commitment. But I knew I had so much more and so many more questions about food. So I started working at this like crazy boundary crossing restaurant called WD 50 in the Lower East Side. I worked there for about a year and a half. And then, then I met Dave Cheng at Momofuku. What drew me in at Momofuku was what Dave was doing with savory food, fine dining. It's very similar path to mine. Went to culinary school, like cut his teeth at a fine dining establishment and really sought to democratize savory food. And that for me is what was missing in my experience. I was this very passionate home cook and I was now this like increasingly more skilled pastry chef, pastry cook and there was no space in between the two and I really wanted to figure out how to bring the sensibility of a plate of brownies to the New York City food scene in a way that made sense that I thought there was a giant hole. I had like this dying love for dessert. I would go home after every day at Mama Fugu and bake and bring the baked goods in because that's what you do when you're obsessed with dessert and they love dessert. They just didn't think that there was a place for it on the menu. He equal parts dared me and pushed me to put a dessert on the menu at Momo Fuku Sound bar. I made a strawberry shortcake with market Tristar, strawberries, small sweet little gems. I hid it in the middle of the menu where we put all the other market fruits and vegetable dishes and it sold out the first night and I sold the second night. It sold the third night and I started adding a few more things, a few more things here and there adding desserts to the other mobile Fuku restaurants. And before I knew it, I was, I guess the pastry chef for all the Momofuku restaurant, we didn't have a real established pastry program. So I was doing it out of the basements of whatever restaurant had space. And as I was doing that, the space right next to one of the Momofuku restaurants got a new landlord and came up for lease Dave and the Momofuku group basically gave milk bar like its loan to start to open to, to sign the lease to open operations. And the bar shared a little kitchen door with Sambar. So it was kind of a thoroughfare in between the restaurant and the basement, which is where we had all of the restaurants walk in coolers and India. But we were essentially one big family just running two different operations. We opened milk bar, November 15th, 2008. At the beginning when I opened milk bar with an incredible team of four, working from doors open 7 a.m. closing time, 2 a.m. We were still making all the desserts for all the Momofuku restaurants and slowly but surely as our business grew as a milk bar bakery, we started slowly training other savory cooks at the different restaurants that were interested in dessert. So separating milk bar from Momofuku was always the idea and always part of the plan from a business standpoint when you were part of a restaurant group that is known and loved and trusted to use that to have the opportunity to use that. For me, it was really key to get the milk bar business up and running and then to take it and run from there. We don't serve vanilla ice cream because everyone serves vanilla ice cream. And life is so much richer than vanilla ice cream. But we do serve an ice cream that's called cereal milk and it tastes like what it sounds like. It tastes like what's left in your bowl after you eat all the cereal out of it. And that is our vanilla ice cream. We love cake but come on. Most cake is like chocolate cake, vanilla frosting. There's so much more and so we don't frost the sides of our cakes. And we think about everything from a flavor story of apple pie, reimagine into a layer cake, strawberry shortcake reimagine into a layer cake. And we let you in to all of this inventive thought, the layers, the textures, the flavor. When we build up a layered cake, we do weekly tastings at our R and D kitchen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Anyone that's a member of Milk Bar is invited to that tasting, which is to say that our financial analyst comes usually once a month when you taste it, you'll be like, what's up Tyler? Your input made this thing better. And I really believe in that as a way of working. And that is a big part of Milk Bar's backbone is that every single person that's a member of our team. Past, present and future has their fingerprints on the menu. But also how we do what we do, how we show up so much of milk bars. Story is about starting just starting, right, taking on the lease using Momofuku as a little springboard and then bootstrapping it along the way. Like bakery margins are razor thin. You gotta sell a lot of cookies to pay the rent but doing things thoughtfully, like doing things on our own. Like because I had already been the plumber, the electrician, the general contractor, the health department consultant. So much of building business can also be done by the people that are in the business to start. Especially if you don't have the financial resources, which we didn't every year at milk bar. I think about doubling and tripling down. I don ourselves, we've raised money to help grow the business over the course of 16 years. But I do think that milk bar is what it is and so much of its fundamentals and the spirit of it. It's so human and you can sense that it's so human because it was built by the people that are a part of it. And I think that's a really important piece of both our fundraising strategy. I wanna be really clear, there was no like um business plan or fundraising strategy to start milk bar. But for me, it was fundamental, there were things that I learned from my mom in how you make a great business and how you make do when you don't have the financial resources that I applied to milk bar and still apply to this day. So in all great business stories, when you don't really have any money to do what you think needs to be done, to build a great business. Remember that you have everything that you need. People couldn't find the door to milk bar because we had this like, I don't know, C plus D location halfway in the block of a dark street on 13th Street. And I thought if I can hang a neon sign, something inside that's bright enough, people will see a little bit of light and maybe come down the block and find us, had no idea that it was going to be the thing that it has become for Taylor Swift and everyone else, you don't need a lot of money to start a great business. But you have to start somewhere and you start small and you build and you grow from there.