We recently connected with Joseph Zecchin and have shared our conversation below.

Joseph, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

The name of our company started out when my wife and I were living back with my parents around 2018. We wanted to generate another source of income and start a side hustle. So, we came up with the idea of selling cookies in jars, packaged nicely, around the holiday season. We would always make fun of each others’ smile and teeth which is where “Toof” comes from in the name Sugar Toof. We though it would be funny to package the jars with that name and so we did just that. We didn’t expect anything to come out of it other than just a playful name and some small sales of cookie gifts.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I decided to go to culinary school around 2014. I had always loved to cook at home with my father when I was young but I didn’t really think of it as a career. I would watch the old Julia Child, Jacques Pepin or other old cooking shows on PBS and they were very entertaining to me. I went to high school and didn’t really know what I wanted to do after that, so for my college major I decided to study criminal justice. I figured I would use my criminal justice major to work for juvenile probations or maybe later go to law school. After I graduated in 2009 with my major in criminal justice, I got a job working at a law firm. During this time, I was still trying to get into the juvenile probations department. Years passed by and I decided I didn’t want to take that route. So, in 2014 I decided I needed to really pursue my dream of cooking and I quit my job to focus on culinary school full time.

During and after culinary school, I was working in kitchens and eventually worked my way up to Sous Chef at a Michael Tusk owned restaurant called Verjus in San Francisco. All was going great until 2020 when the restaurant was forced to close because of Covid. During that time, my wife, who was always laid off from her restaurant job, and I began to really focus on Sugar Toof. We put out daily menus of food each week and basically did the “pandemic pop-up” operating out of our apartment. This snowballed into us having an opportunity to pivot into a baking career and take over a long-standing family bakery in the city that we live in.

How’d you meet your business partner?

My cofounder and business partner happens to be my wife. We met in culinary school back in 2014/2015. We would partner up in class and create menu ideas or study together and it just blossomed from there.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I think that being genuine and knowing your product helps tremendously in this industry. This is not the industry that you want to burn bridges in because people are way more connected than it seems. My wife and I are hands-on and mostly always in the bakery making sure service is met and quality standards are practiced. This goes a long way with building the reputation and the trust of the community you are serving. Being an owner is one thing but being an owner that is actually around and present is a totally different idea. We are always open with everything we do.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sugartoof.com
• Instagram: SugarToof
• Facebook: SugarToof
• Yelp: Sugar Toof