• KEYNOTE •
SPRINKLES FOUNDER CANDACE NELSON TRACES HER CAREER PATH FROM CORPORATE AMERICA TO ‘QUEEN OF CUPCAKES’
The entrepreneur found success by following her joy
C andace Nelson is a serial entre- preneur, TV personality, author, and investor who shared her path to “Sweet Success” with attend- ees of CREATE: The Event for Emerging Restaurateurs. The founder of Sprinkles, and thus arguably the catalyst for the ongoing cupcake trend, and owner of an ar- tisanal pizza concept called Pizzana, Nelson has been her own brand am- bassador as well as entrepreneur. She was dubbed the Queen of Cupcakes on the Food Network show Cupcake Wars, where she was a judge, has appeared as a guest “shark” on the reality TV show Shark Tank, and is in the Netflix series “Sugar Rush.” “Sweet Success: A Simple Recipe to Turn your Passion into Profit” is her best-selling book, which she gave to conference attendees while discussing her journey with Nation’s Restaurant News editor-in-chief Sam Oches. She said she got the baking bug as a kid, but the entrepreneurial bug came later because, apart from Mrs. Fields, she didn’t have any role models growing up. Her father was a corporate attorney, so he was all about risk mit- igation, which is essentially the oppo- site of entrepreneurship, and Nelson herself started her professional life do- ing financial analysis for an investment bank in San Francisco, thinking, “Oh my god, there’s got to be more to life than this.” She went on to work in tech during the dot-com boom of the 1990s, which BY BRET THORN
as we all know eventually went bust. Without a job or prospects for a new one, she said it felt like she’d been “sold a bill of goods,” having followed the rules for success in corporate America that ultimately didn’t get her anywhere. So she went to pastry school and rekindled her love for baking, not nec- essarily knowing what she was going to do with a pastry degree. “I was just following my joy,” she said, and quickly realized that was a whole lot better than crunching num- bers. Nelson developed a reputation for making great cakes for her friends, and started making custom-decorated spe- cial occasion cakes out of her home, which she said was very artful, “ and a
huge pain in the butt.” But “that business brain of mine hadn’t shut off,” Nelson said, and she had an epiphany in the bakery section of a grocery store staring at cupcakes in plastic clamshells. “I just thought, these cupcakes look kind of sad,” she said, and the inspira- tion for Sprinkles was born. It took a couple of years to “reinvent the cupcake,” which at that point were mostly mass-produced and uninspir- ing. “They were kind of the ‘fast fashion’ of the baking world, and I wanted to make mine ‘haute-couture.’” She used premium ingredients for her cupcakes, and also reimagined the look, starting with the frosting. Rath-
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PHOTO CREDIT: EDIN STUDIOS
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