Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Susana. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Susana, appreciate you joining us today. Looking back, do you think you started your business at the right time? Do you wish you had started sooner or later

Honestly? I believe both of my businesses were born exactly when they were meant to be — not a moment too soon, not a moment too late. There is something quietly beautiful about that, even when the journey has been anything but quiet.
La Peruanita came to life in one of those pivotal seasons — the kind that reshapes you from the inside out. I had just become a single mom, and with that came a new kind of clarity. I needed a second income, yes, but what surprised me was how deeply I also needed purpose. La Peruanita became both. It was my way of bringing a true Peruvian street food experience to my community — built around Picarones, which I lovingly refuse to call donuts. They are so much more than that. A beignet comes closer to honoring what Picarones really are — rich in flavor, rich in history, rich in culture. Every item at my food stand carries that same intention: a story worth telling, a tradition worth tasting.
Warmisitay Health Services arrived during a different kind of reckoning. There was a moment when I feared I might lose my ability to practice nursing — the profession I had poured myself into. Instead of letting that fear close a door, it opened a window I hadn’t even known was there. Warmisitay gave me the space to reimagine what healing could look like — through ancestral methods, holistic care, and health and wellness coaching. It gave my career new breath.
Could I have started sooner? Perhaps. But I wasn’t yet the woman these businesses needed me to be. Starting later? I don’t think these seeds would have grown in soil that wasn’t ready. Both were born from necessity — and necessity, I’ve learned, has a way of making you rise.
It hasn’t been easy. Keeping both alive, both growing, through the weight of difficult seasons — that takes everything. But I look at what they represent, and I know without hesitation: the timing was right. The struggle has been worth it. And we are still here — still growing.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a nurse, a cook, a mother, a healer — and somewhere in the weaving together of all of those things, two businesses were born.
Food and caring for people have always been the two clearest callings in my life. They didn’t arrive separately — they arrived together, rooted in the same soil: love, culture, and the deep human need to nourish and be nourished.
My relationship with cooking began in the most tender of seasons — my pregnancy. No one had formally taught me to cook, not my mother, not my grandmother in the traditional sense, yet something stirred. My very first real meal was a Thanksgiving dinner I made at eight months pregnant, side by side with my abuelita, where we created a beautiful fusion of traditional American dishes and Peruvian flavors. It was magic. Around that same time, my grandparents and I would watch 30 Minute Meals with Rachél Ray, completely mesmerized that a woman could bring a full, soulful meal to the table through creativity and ingenuity. Those moments planted something in me. I began experimenting — with Peruvian and non-Peruvian flavors, traveling to stores near and far for that one special ingredient that could completely transform a dish, mixing fresh and pantry staples, recreating restaurant meals at home. I became a mom to a picky eater and the only granddaughter of a matriarch who believed food was how you gathered people, held them, and loved them.
Then came nursing school — not easy with a nine-month-old at home, but I graduated as president of my nursing student association and as a recipient of multiple scholarships honoring first-time Latinas in healthcare. Once I started working in the clinic, I discovered the potluck. At first I brought a veggie tray, unbothered. Then I met Mama Mo — my mentor, the nurse who shaped how I speak to patients and how to help them believe they can take charge of their own health. She cooked every potluck, from scratch, with love. I watched her and thought — I have to do this too. So I did. And people responded. You know that moment when people start telling you you should sell this? That moment came.
La Peruanita’s true birth happened in a friend’s kitchen the first time I made Picarones — Peruvian beignets. No one taught me the recipe. I watched videos, called my dad, and then I did something I still carry with me: Me encomendé — I entrusted the moment to my ancestors. Specifically to my paternal grandmother, a Black Peruvian woman who had fed her children by making these very beignets on the streets of Peru. Because that is the history — Picarones are traditionally made by Black women on the streets of Lima, women who are celebrated for cooking with sabor, with sazón, with soul. I am mixed Black and Indigenous Peruvian, and in that kitchen, I felt both of my grandmothers present — my maternal grandmother who made me a matriarch in our family, and my paternal grandmother who showed me what resilience for your family truly looks like.
La Peruanita became my way of healing the complicated relationship many of us in the Peruvian diaspora carry around cultural identity — the pride and the pain of being Black and Indigenous in Peru. I want my food stand to be a space of belonging for others who share that heritage, where every dish carries historical intention and every bite tells a story worth knowing. I refuse to call Picarones donuts — they deserve better than that. A beignet comes closer to honoring the depth of what they represent.
And as I sat with all of that — the healing power of food, of gathering, of storytelling through a meal — I began asking myself: what other ancestral practices have we lost that could still serve us today?
That question became Warmisitay Health Services.
Warmisitay began with Maternal Support Services — walking alongside women through pregnancy and postpartum, where nutrition and nourishment are inseparable from healing. From there, I completed a nurse coaching program and expanded into supporting people through chronic illness, mental health management, and holistic wellness. More recently, my work as a school nurse introduced me to neuroplasticity and neurodivergent care — and I have been finding the places where ancestral healing and modern neuroscience beautifully intersect.
What sets me apart? I believe healing is not one-size-fits-all. It is cultural. It is ancestral. It is personal. Whether I am feeding you at a food stand or coaching you through a health journey, I am drawing from the same well — the wisdom of the women who came before me, the science I have studied, and the deep knowing that people deserve care that sees their whole story.
What I am most proud of? That I built both of these from the ground up — through single motherhood, through career uncertainty, through every difficult season — and they are still standing, still growing, still becoming.
What I want you to know about me and my work is simple: everything I do is made with soul. Come hungry. Come as you are.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Honestly, my social media story begins not with a strategy or a content calendar — it begins with a challenge to step into myself.
I was part of an empowering program through a Facebook group called Mujeres del Futuro — Women of the Future. That space asked something of me that felt enormous at the time: to step outside of my comfort zone, to listen to the quiet voice of my inner confidence, and to gently but firmly silence my self-doubt. It was there that I took my first real steps into showing up online.
I started doing live videos. The first ones were uncomfortable — the way most honest beginnings are. But something interesting happened. Each time I went live, it got a little easier. Each time, I found my footing a little more. Each time, something I shared would spark a reaction, a curiosity, a connection. And slowly, I realized — this is working, not because I’m performing, but because I’m being real.
What I did that perhaps others weren’t doing was simple but rare: I recorded my process. I talked through it. I showed the behind-the-scenes, the learning, the figuring-it-out as it was actually happening — not the polished highlight reel after the fact. And I showed up as genuinely, authentically myself — no filter on my personality, no mask over my story.
That, I believe, is what people respond to. Not perfection. Presence.
For anyone just beginning to build their social media presence, here is what I would offer:
Start before you feel ready, because that moment of perfect readiness rarely comes. The confidence you are waiting for? It builds in the doing, not before it. Go live even when your hands are a little shaky. Post even when you are unsure. Let people see you in your becoming — because there is someone out there who needs to see exactly where you are right now to believe that they can take their own next step.
Do what is true to you, not what you see everyone else doing. Your process, your story, your voice — those are not small things. They are the whole thing.
And find your Mujeres del Futuro — your people, your circle, your space of encouragement. We do not rise alone. We rise because someone believed in us long enough for us to start believing in ourselves.

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

Reputation, I have come to understand, is not something you build all at once. It is something that grows quietly, steadily, in the spaces between every interaction — in the care you put into the small things that people remember long after the moment has passed.
For me, it has come down to three things: referrals, reviews, and word of mouth — and the processes that make those things possible in the first place.
There is no marketing more powerful than someone who experienced your work turning to a friend and saying you have to try this or you need to talk to her. That kind of trust cannot be bought. It is earned, one genuine interaction at a time. Every Picarone I hand across the counter, every coaching session where someone feels truly seen and supported — those become the seeds of something that travels further than any advertisement ever could.
But what I have also learned is that reputation is quietly held up by the structures you build behind the scenes. At La Peruanita, that looks like writing out recipes and instructions that guide people through the experience — not just feeding them, but connecting them to the story and the process behind what they are tasting. It creates a interaction that lingers.
At Warmisitay, it looks like developing progress note templates that give our coaching sessions intention and direction — so that every person who sits with me moves through a process that is thoughtful, trackable, and deeply personal to their journey. When people feel that care has been designed for them, not just improvised, it builds confidence. And confidence in your care becomes the foundation of your reputation.
So my answer is this: show up consistently, deliver with soul, and build the systems that allow you to do that even on the hard days. The referrals, the reviews, the word of mouth — they follow naturally when people trust not just what you do, but how you do it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.laperuanita.org www.warmisitayhealth.org
• Instagram: laperuanita_seattle, warmisitay_health
• Facebook: La Peruanita, Nurse Susana Ipanaque