From Maman To Dumpling Daughter: Million-Dollar Eats

I love dumplings so much. They're just such a gift. Dumplings are truly a form of art. The focus of Dumpling Daughter is to really share my homestyle Chinese cuisine of my childhood with as many people as possible. Kahawai T93 is a specialty coffee company. We source coffee from women farmers in Africa, and we give back to empower them. Kahawai means coffee in Swahili, which is the language that we speak in Kenya. And 1893 is the year that coffee was first commercially grown in Kenya. The name Maman encompasses the feeling of warmth and home, which is really the vibe that we have been going for. So we really wanted to kind of create a home away from home for our customers. Childhood classics are something that we always try to have on the menu, but we like to put a fun twist on them. We like to play with American flavor palettes with proper French pastry techniques. I love dumplings so much. They're just such a gift. Dumplings are truly a form of art. The focus of Dumpling Daughter is to really share my homestyle Chinese cuisine of my childhood with as many people as possible. I am the founder and CEO of Dumpling Daughter, and my dumpling company has brought in over four and a half million dollars in the last year. Now we offer dumplings in the frozen section of your local grocery store. We also sell dumplings nationwide to your door, shipping frozen dumplings, buns, and sauce. We also wrote a cookbook. We sell about 50,000 boxes of dumplings a month and anywhere between 1,500 to 4,000 dumplings a day through our restaurant. Our restaurants have been the two and a half to three million dollars, and our consumer is about a million dollars right now because we're still considered a startup. I grew up in the fanciest Chinese restaurant I've ever been, and I was spoiled with the most incredible Chinese food at my parents' five-star dining establishment. And so as you can imagine, growing up in this environment, it was super glamorous. I mean, Julia Child celebrated her 80th birthday at our restaurant. My parents started a family. They created this incredible business, and it was ingrained in me to work hard. My parents always urged me to go out and get a real job, which meant don't go into the investment world. I was an investment banker in New York City, and I realized very quickly that it bored me. I spent five years in finance as a day job, but at night, I was going out to eat, and I was cooking, and I was researching. And by the time I finished my finance job, I had $97 in my bank account. I ended up asking my mom, I said, can I move home with you? And she thought it was strange, and I said, well, under one condition, that you train me and you let me work with you and work under you in your restaurant. I was taking all these notes, and I said, one day, I'm going to do something, whether it's in restaurants or in food, somehow, someway. My husband actually said to me, you don't have to work. And I said, well, I appreciate that, but my father's lasting advice to me was you always have to be a self-sufficient woman. And so I really dug deep, and I wrote the business plan for Dumpling Daughter. I found the first location for Dumpling Daughter in my hometown where I grew up. People were excited to experience the next generation from what my parents built, and the press naturally came. We had lines out the door and around the building for weeks. There were moments that I would just stand in the walk-in freezer and cry for just 30 seconds, and then wipe away the tears and go back out because there was 40 people standing in line waiting for food that we were about to run out of. When we opened Dumpling Daughter, we had a combination of handmade and machine-made. I knew that if I wanted to sell a lot of dumplings, hand-making dumplings was just not sustainable. Pork and chive dumpling is the dumpling that I ate growing up when my mom and grandmother would all get around the table, we would make dumplings. It's truly grandma's recipe. When we make our dumplings at the factory, we freeze them raw, just the way that my grandmother did, to bring you that really authentic experience. Two of my employees at the time left and opened an exact copycat of Dumpling Daughter. We filed a federal lawsuit against Dumpling Girl, and very quickly they asked to settle. I was very happy with one restaurant, but it was the customers and the response that we got that forced me to grow the brand. When the pandemic hit, I immediately thought about how do we continue to serve people, and how can we make this company bigger and better in this time that we're supposed to be defeated. We started so many different things like bottling the sauce, we wrote a cookbook, we did virtual cooking classes, we sold meal kits where people could eat Dumpling Daughter at home, we opened a third restaurant. It went so well that I started looking into how do we ship these dumplings. We designed a D2C website where people could order our products and get it shipped to them overnight. It's a very scary business for me because I'm used to running a restaurant where you make money. In the consumer products business, you actually lose money because you're spending for the future and for the growth of the company. I think you need to have enough money in the bank and enough investors to continue to support the of your company until there is that tipping point. And hopefully when that tipping point comes, it will really pay off. I know that I can't ride my parents' coattails forever, that I have to create a brand or a feeling or a product that serves today's customer. Dumpling Daughter has changed my life because it has proved to me, myself, that I can be the self-sufficient woman my father said that I should be. I would say I am the Dumpling Daughter. When I was on Wall Street, it was very fast-paced. As a woman and especially as a Black woman, I was one of very few people in the industry, so I really had this motivation that I wanted to rise up. I survived on coffee. My name is Margaret Nyamombo. I'm 36 years old and I live in New York City. My coffee company, Kahawai T93, brought in over $3 million last year. Must I smell it? I am like at three cups now a day, so I feel like that's the limit before I start getting jittery. Kahawai T93 is a specialty coffee company. We source coffee from women farmers in Africa and we give back to empower them. Kahawa means coffee in Swahili, which is the language that we speak in Kenya, and 1893 is the year that coffee was first commercially grown in Kenya. So this is the Kenyan flag and Kenya is the main place that we source our coffee from. I grew up on a coffee farm in Kenya and what I observed is a majority of the labor came from women and so I wanted to build a brand that would give back to the women who are doing majority of the work. And so our coffee bags have a QR code on the back that you can scan and tip farmers. Our business is split into three major channels. So we have a website, online, Amazon, but the majority of our business is actually in grocery. Part of the business is also in food service, cafes, and offices as well. My parents were not happy when they heard that I had left a well-paying job on Wall Street to start a coffee company because coffee was not as prestigious of a career at the time. To them it was almost embarrassing that I was choosing to do coffee. I was working more than when I was in banking but it didn't feel the same because I was essentially doing many different things and I loved what I was doing. I grew up in western Kenya in a small town called Kisii. My parents growing up were farmers and traders. Coffee was seen as, you know, a crop that didn't really pay farmers that well. So it was not something that was desirable to be into. In Kenya we drink tea, we drink chai, we export all our coffee. I remember my first cup was on my flight here. I was going to America, I felt like I had to fit in. So I ordered a cup of coffee and it was bitter. And then in college, just to stay awake and study, I really got into coffee and again at work. It was an acquired taste that I started to love. I was covering consumer packaged goods and it's during that process that I really got interested in studying a brand because I learned how different brands had been started and I realized that brands, even fortune 500 companies that are household names, at one point had very small humble beginnings. And so coffee to me was a natural match because I had this experience growing up on the farm. It's been a family business. It started off as a side hustle but it was really hard to balance out because my job was very demanding. I really couldn't do anything on the side except weekends. Even weekends was kind of pushing it. So I thought I'd take a sabbatical or a leave of about a year to really explore this idea and if it didn't work to go back to my job. So once we roast it, we taste it. It's called a cupping method. It's scoop the coffee and then you then you spit it. Funny enough, it didn't feel scary. I felt that I had, you know, an amazing resume. I had an MBA. I had good work experience and so I felt that if I needed to come back into the job market, that I'd be able to do that. I didn't want to regret not ever having tried it. We are a small company still, so I'm involved from choosing which coffees we're going to roast this week, cupping the coffees, sampling them, all the way to thinking about marketing strategies for that week, talking to investors, customers, checking in with our customer service team, and overall just setting the strategy for the team. So for the packaging, we give it this color which reflects the vibrant African colors. The bags also have animals which is a safari theme which reckons back to this dynamic landscape of the Maasai Mara at the safari back in Kenya. So when we first started the brand, I was basically working around the clock. I wake up, I'm thinking about it, I was dropping off packages at the post office, I was roasting, I was doing tastings, at night I'm sending emails, posting on social. The first year was fully self-funded for my savings and reinvesting any profits that we got, so didn't raise any money or debt for that first year. Then the pandemic hit and that business went away overnight. I was really in a very like weird state. I didn't know what was going to happen next. I used up all my savings and I had about $50,000 in credit card debt. I was about to get a like a part-time job to start to supplement the business as it grew. Then we got a lucky break. We got contacted by Trader Joe's and they were interested in bringing their coffee brand into their stores as our own brand. So that was the first time I felt like, oh my god, we have something here and really began to invest in making sure that we could get the product in the store. And so that was the first time that we needed outside investment. So it was very stressful. It was also a very short period of time and during the pandemic, which is when the supply chain issues just took off, so it was a very unique time to be able to be doing something that big. We were going to be the first black and woman on coffee brand to be in Trader Joe's and somehow it took off. We started getting calls from other retailers, so like Target, Sprouts. It's like we were dealing with Trader Joe's but also now suddenly we had to source for other retailers. Three years later, I've been able to have a salary and I'm out of credit card debt. I actually have zero. Oh, that's a good coffee. Yeah, I'm a tea girl but that's a good cup of coffee. I'm very, very, very particular about my coffee. It's been an amazing relationship. It's been life-changing for the business. I think the amount of exposure that we were able to get from the show actually went viral in Kenya, so that was kind of a surreal moment. On our website, we charge from $16 to about $20 for a 12-ounce bag of coffee. In deciding what we charge for a bag of coffee, we kind of think about three things. So first is the price of the unroasted coffee, which we call green coffee. Most of the cost is actually getting the coffee from unroasted to its final destination. And then the cost of roasting the coffee, packaging it, transit. We're making a little bit of profit. We also look at what are other coffee brands charging. Our goal is to keep growing our distribution, so being able to bring coffee to more households. So we are working towards increasing distribution and also the more coffee that we're able to distribute, the more farmers that we can bring into our system and the more impact that we can have on the ground. It is a dream job. I would not have predicted it, but it's something that I love doing. I don't know what else I would be doing if I wasn't doing this. In the crowded market of coffee shops and bakeries, how does a business set itself apart? Is it having Instagrammable pastries, unique drinks, or is it something else? How can we be better than the competition? How can we be more than just food and coffee? You need that little something more. It's really important to really offer our customers a multi-sensory experience. This is Elisa Marshall and Benjamin Sorbante, founders of Mamon, a chain of 34 coffee shops, bakeries, and event spaces. Spread across the east coast of the United States and Canada, their stores are inspired by their travels, mothers, and childhoods. The name Mamon encompasses the feeling of warmth and home, which is really the vibe that we have been going for. I think that within New York City, not a lot of people had the luxury of having these dining rooms in their home, so we really wanted to kind of create a home away from home for our customers. After spending $250,000 to open their first location in New York's Soho neighborhood, Mamon, influenced by French countryside charm and filled with antiques, quickly found an opening in the $49.5 billion U.S. coffee shop market. It was very important to have a place to gather with our friends, and it became like a home away from home for us, truly. This is the story of how a couple pivoted careers and started a company that brought in nearly $50 million in sales in 2023. When they met in Montreal in 2011, Benjamin and Elisa were in very different careers from restaurant hospitality. Benjamin, originally from France, was pursuing a law degree, and Elisa, who grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, was dabbling in a few different spaces. Everything from event planning to interior design, a nine-to-five in PR and marketing, and event planning on the weekends with a little bit of catering on the side. Around 2012, Benjamin and Elisa were looking for a change in their careers. A unique opportunity came from some friends of Benjamin who worked with a restaurant group. The couple then found themselves running a restaurant in Ibiza, Spain. It was really like restaurant school 101 for us, where you get thrown into an island, where you don't speak the language, and start a restaurant from nothing to, you know, what we made it. Being exposed to all the different aspects of the restaurant business really helped us for the future. We had so many failures along the way. Then, wanting to take a step away from the nightlife during the off-season, Benjamin and Elisa moved to New York City just five months later to open a wine bar with the same restaurant group. It was a really great experience for us to kind of, you know, get our hands dirty in the hospitality industry in New York and really learn what it was like in comparison to the island over in Spain. Elisa had always dreamed of opening a cafe, and she noticed something that many of the ones in New York at the time had in common. The trend at the time was very industrial chic. All of the cafes, especially in Soho, were very cold, and nothing really had that warm and welcoming atmosphere. And for us, it was really important that our space was reminiscent of a home, and primarily of our parents' home. The couple came across an old poster shop and signed a lease to start their very own passion project. In October of 2014, Mamon was born. When we started the business plan, obviously we didn't know how much it would cost. So overall, we spent around $250,000 into the business, and that money came from friends and family, also from the savings we were together working in Bissau. What was important to us is really to be super active in the construction of Mamon, so our parents were there, we painted the wall all together as a family, we built some tables, we built some chairs, so it was a lot of sweat and tears and love that made it happen. Benjamin and Elisa drew inspiration from their upbringing for the design of their cafe. Growing up with our family, we both live on the countryside. Elisa from the countryside of Toronto, and I live in the countryside of the south of France. We love antiques, we love repurposing items, we're very involved in the design of our store still to today. It's a very important part of the business for us. I grew up with my father being an antique dealer, and my house being filled with antiques. I love hearing people come in and eating a meal saying that these are the plates that my grandmother had, and this reminds me of home. So having that little bit of nostalgia in the space just helps to really embody what Mamon is and what our ethos is. When creating the menu, Benjamin and Elisa continued to look to their childhoods. Initially when we started creating the menu, a lot of the inspiration was drawn from our mothers and the recipes that we had growing up. We realized that when we asked ourselves, we both say Mamon, in a sense that we both grew up in a kitchen with our mom. Childhood classics are something that we always try to have on the menu, but we like to put a fun twist on them. We like to play with American flavor palettes with proper French pastry techniques. In addition to serving food and beverages, some Mamon locations also act as event spaces. Depending on location and time of day, events at their cafes in New York and New Jersey range from $1,500 to over $10,000. It was a really big part of our business plan and has become a large portion of our business as well today. Benjamin and Elisa threw themselves into running and operating the business. Truly the first couple months and maybe the year was really a 6 a.m. to maybe 8 p.m. I remember waking up, you know, crack of dawn and coming in, getting the coffee machine ready. That was kind of my thing overseeing the baked goods and the coffee and working the barista. And Ben was really front of house working the cash and overseeing the savory. A breakout moment for the company happened just within a month of opening. I read an article on Grub Street saying, watch your back Levin, Mamon has the best chocolate chip cookie in town. That was a very defining moment for us because then, you know, Eater picks it up, the other publications pick it up, and the new hottest cookie in town is at Mamon. I remember being in that moment looking at each other like, we are going to be here all night making these cookies. Mamon brought in around two million dollars in sales in its first year. We didn't have any day off. We couldn't pay ourselves for a while. We were very fortunate that our family helped us a little bit on the side so we could afford to live in New York. We put back all of our earnings into the company knowing that it was something that we did want to grow and want to expand upon. So we, we lived very tight for our first few years. I think one of my most difficult points was where I was close to burnout. I think we were both working an excessive amount of hours every week and wanting to do everything ourselves. In 2015, Benjamin's brother invested one and a half million dollars as a purchase in equity. Eventually, Benjamin and Alisa started to bring in staff. It was really a matter of figuring out, you know, what am I not very good at? Where could someone else add more value? And what doesn't bring me joy on a daily basis? And kind of like carving that out and creating a job description for that role. 2017 brought another breakout moment when Mamon's Nutty Chocolate Chip Cookie, then priced at four dollars, was named one of Oprah's favorite things. Today, a box of eight of those Nutty Chocolate Chip Cookies ships anywhere in the U.S. for $45. Prices for other in-store items on the menu vary. A regular croissant runs four dollars, a small latte five dollars and 25 cents, a tuna sandwich $17, and a breakfast bowl $16. Additionally, a six-cookie gift box costs $30, and a 12-cookie gift box is $60. Mamon would grow and open two new locations in 2015, one in Toronto and another in New York City's Tribeca neighborhood. They opened their seventh location in August of 2019 in Montreal. Near the end of 2019, Mamon looked into investors. We went on a road show and it was more by curiosity to try to understand if someone would be interested to partner with us. We didn't have any debt. Then in March 2020, the world collapsed. In December 2020, however, private equity firm TriSpan struck a deal with them, raising between $10 and $20 million. Benjamin and Elisa would own 50% of Mamon, a majority stake according to the company, and all of their stores would remain company-owned. Expansion soon followed, and additional 27 locations have opened since then. During COVID, we ended up signing about 14 leases, a lot of them being second-generation restaurants where Ben was able to really negotiate some fabulous deals. In addition to expanding into other markets, Benjamin and Elisa want to transform their company into a lifestyle brand, complete with dinner plates, candles, vases, a cookbook, and a collaboration with baby and toddler brand Lalo. My vision for Mamon is much more than just, you know, brick and mortar and four-wall restaurant. I really see us turning into a multifaceted lifestyle brand. For 2023, Mamon brought in nearly $50 million in sales and maintained its profitability, according to the company. Today, Mamon's revenue is roughly 75% from the restaurants, 20% from events and catering, and 5% from retail. While Benjamin manages Mamon's business dealings, Elisa handles the company's creative direction and event planning. We really understood very quickly that if you want to be successful, you've got to be flexible and creative in your approach to the business. What we learned along the years is to be a little bit more focused on what we know how to do and also sometimes to focus on the offering instead of wanting to please everyone. We really, really learned how to be focused on what's profitable, what's beneficial for us, but also for the customers.