We were lucky to catch up with Sarah Gartzman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sarah thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I have worked in the food service industry for the past 20 years – and graduated from culinary school with a diploma in Pastry Arts 15 years ago. Working with food is all I’ve ever known and the only job I’ve ever been passionate about. My husband and I started our careers and education in Boulder and Denver, Colorado and stumbled upon this tiny mountain town about 2.5 hours from our home in the city. We fell in love with Salida and it became our dream to live and work here and be apart of this community. After a few years of vacationing here we were walking past a bakery with a huge sign in the window stating it was for sale. My husband quickly quipped at me, ” you should buy this place!’ to the tune of my immediate, ” no way in hell” response. He has a business degree and has a background working in bike shops. He had never worked in a restaurant before we seriously started thinking about how to acquire that little bakery and deli we walked past a few weeks earlier. We decided this would be our dream. We’d purchase this underachieving restaurant and turn it into our dream. About a year later we did it. 10 years later our little bakery – which turned into Sweetie’s Sandwich Shop has grown about 3000% and has even found a new location around the corner which we built from the ground up and also houses our 3rd restaurant, The Biker & The Baker, which lives one floor up from Sweetie’s. Our 2nd restaurant, which we founded in 2016, Mo Burrito, we sold to our our longtime employee at the end of 2019.

Our menus across all of the restaurants have always been chef-driven, inclusive, as affordable as possible and really homey environments where everything is completely made from scratch in house and by hand. We take the approach that if we do it ourselves the quality will exceed anything else. Rob, my husband, and I love being in the kitchen together, crafting new ideas and recipes and working together. And our partnership is unique and complementary to each others skill sets. 10 years into Sweetie’s and it has a cult following and is by far one of the busiest restaurants in Salida.

Sarah , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Sarah Gartzman, pastry chef, restaurateur, sommelier, and serial entrepreneur is the founder of Sweetie’s Sandwich Shop, Mo Burrito, and The Biker & The Baker in Salida, Colorado with her husband and partner in everything, Rob. Most recently, she and her husband are in the beginning stages of disrupting the commercial baking boxed mix category of the consumer packaged goods segment in grocery stores with their new company, Hey, Sweetie! – a line of Sarah’s trademarked baked good recipes followers can make and bake at home.

Sarah hails from the windy city of Chicago, where she met her high school sweetheart and married 10 years later just before moving to the heart of the Rockies in Salida, Colorado and beginning their first business venture together, Sweetie’s Bakery & Deli located downtown Salida in 2012. Before their dreams of owning their first bakery together led them to Salida, Sarah graduated from Culinary School of The Rockies in Boulder, Colorado in 2005. She went on to work in prestigious Colorado bakeries and kitchens in the Boulder/ Denver area, helped open the Savory Spice Shop in Boulder, Colorado, taught both professional and home cook classes for CSR and later landed a full-time position with CSR assisting with their digital media marketing programs. That took her on to work for other Colorado based culinary schools as a social media strategist. She has continued to use her social media expertise as she’s helped grow her current brands cultures through the use of digital marketing – albeit not the main focus of her career. At her core, Sarah is a complete creative who is consumed by the technical and intuitive parts of baking and pastry. Her mind thinks in croissant, colors, loaves of bread, and dessert menus as she continues to change her pastry offerings daily and makes each element of her baked goods in house each early morning with her staff.

In 2016, Sarah and Rob opening their 2nd restaurant, Mo Burrito, and in 2016, their 3rd, The Biker & The Baker. The sold Mo Burrito to their longtime GM in 2019 and moved both of their existing restaurants into one, brand-new, custom built location to house both concepts at the end of 2020. Since purchasing an existing, under-achieving bakery in 2012 they have experienced 3000% growth among their current brands.

Sarah and Rob currently reside in downtown Salida with their family. They have an 8 year old daughter, Mabel, an almost 7 year old son, Ozzie, 2 dogs and a kitty. Their family is everything to them and their motivator in waking up every morning and working as hard and as many hours as they do. They’re family enjoy mountain biking the trails of Salida together on the occasional afternoon they all get the time to be together. They love to travel together and experience new places and cultures as a family and only hope that can continue as they become more mature in their businesses.

Sarah and Rob’s newest business venture is in the start-up stages currently and they hope to have an initial prototype finished and on the shelves of their restaurants and local boutiques by the end of the year.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Ah, I’m so lucky because I met my business partner/husband in high school. Rob sat behind me senior year in one of the classes we had together and would constantly poke me with a pencil to try and get my attention. It must have worked because he now currently has my attention everyday as we work together, have a family together, and navigate life and business together daily. We have been together 20 years at the end of this year.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Initially, when we first opened Sweetie’s we funded it by selling our tiny apartment located in Boulder, Colorado we lived in for about 7 years. That was the only capital we had and I remember thinking we were going to run out of money immediately and have to move back in with our parents when our business failed in the first 3 months. Luckily, that never happened. People loved us from the beginning and we were able to save and reinvest our earnings the longer we stayed open and continues to serve food to the community.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sweetiesinsalida.com www.thebikerandthebaker.com
• Instagram: @sweetiessandwichshop @bikerandbaker
• Facebook: @sweetiessandwichshop @thebikerandthebaker
• Linkedin: Sarah Gartzman
• Other: Personal @sarahgartzman on instagram

Image Credits
Catherine Eichel Dust & Grit Photography