Today we’d like to introduce you to Marcella Corrales.
Hi Marcella, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
We started baking pastries for coffee shops about 13 years ago. Back then, there wasn’t much of a bread culture in Tijuana other than the traditional pan dulce, which is mostly made with lard and leavened with commercial yeast. Trying to sell a better-quality bread to coffee shops and restaurant was hard, and the competition price of traditional pan dulce was a big problem for us, so we kept using simple nonexpensive ingredients to be able to offer wholesale prices.
When I had free time, I started making simple bread recipes like chocolate chip cookies, cinnamon rolls, and apple pies just for fun, and since we couldn’t just eat all the bread we made, we used to share most of it to friends and family. After a while, neighbors starting knocking at our door asking what the smell was, so they had a good share of free pastries too. I decided to make all my experiments on Thursday, and I would put up some pastries and bread displayed at the window of what used to be some kind of living room and through my personal Instagram account, invited all my friends and family to come pick up some freshly baked goodies to take home. At some point, I asked my husband, “How does this cookie taste to you” he answered, “It tastes like money, and you could be charging for it. People already know your taste and quality and the effort behind producing it so they will pay the actual price, don’t be scared” and so we did. My whole family started helping me out and my husband during his days off work too.
We started baking and displaying pastries at the window every Thursday to sell, and eventually, people we didn’t know started showing up on Thursdays to buy bread, asking if “this was the little window where they sell bread on Thursdays,” and that’s how customers named our place, “The little window of bread”
Nowadays, we offer this better-quality items to coffee shops too.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The biggest struggle was changing for our bread to customers who didn’t know us. They would ask, “how come a cuernito from the market costs $7 pesos, and you want $30 for yours” So instead of explaining the whole process and the price difference for better ingredients; we would give one piece for free, and say, “try it, and if you like it and makes sense to you come back and buy it*. Some people didn’t return, but most people did. Even though everyone is welcome, there are some clients who will never be our recurring customers and it takes time to process that though and accept it because either you become what the biggest market wants you to become or you stay true and make sure you take proper care of the clients who do come often and actually like what you do and how you do it.
Once this struggle got out of the way, the pandemic, of course, came around and gave us this huge feeling of uncertainty the first few weeks. We didn’t know if and how many people would be able to come each week and how much to prepare ourselves with, plus the whole “panicking over cash and coins being a main disease transmission issue.” Thankfully Emmanuel (my husband) came out with a web page one month after the pandemic started, where people would order and pay online on Tuesdays and pick up on Thursdays. It gave us a better way to handle payments and to prepare exactly for what we needed to bake that week.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are only open on Thursdays and Saturdays with the whole menu, which includes about 40 different kinds of bread and pastries. We close when we are sold out (most Thursdays around 6 pm and Saturdays around 2 pm). You can either stop by to see what’s on the menu, or you can order a few days previously online and just pick it up. The items we sell the most are our chocolate chip sea salt cookies, banana bread, and guaya or orange Danish. Our flourless chocolate cake is also very loved. Ok Thursday, we have grilled cheese sandwiches from 11 am to sold out, and Saturdays a breakfast bisquet and croissant sandwich 10 am till sold out.
Although we do have a steady menu each week, we will be offering daily specials, which you can check out at our social media that morning. On of the perks of not having a strictly specific “branding” is that we will definitely be cooking or baking whatever we feel like sharing with you, and it can go from fish sandwiches to a brothy bean stew with house croutons. We will also sometimes share with our clients our staff meal and put it on the menu. As weird as is may seem, this liberty of cooking so many different dishes, either sweets, pastries, or home comfort meals, is what I guess “brand wise” makes us so proud of. We get asked sometimes, “Who does our branding that makes it look so real.” It is real. We don’t have someone taking care of the “branding”… There’s just not much though into it. It just happened that way.
What makes you happy?
First of all, being able to live out of what I love doing and having my family close to me while I’m at it.
Seeing so many familiar faces each week and sharing a few pieces of freshly baked pastries to the first clients making like at opening time.
Also seeing pregnant moms come satisfy their cravings and after a while seeing their babies visit us and trying their first ventanita pastries, this specifically makes me feel very special.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.laventanitadelpan.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laventanitadelpan/?hl=es
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/100063034549154/
Image Credits
Anabel Alarcón
