The BentoBox 25
Sarah O’Brien Is Creating The Community She’s Proud to Live in
May 14, 2024
The pillars of Little Tart Bakeshop & Big Softie? Delicious pastries and community activism.
“I’m waiting for someone to declare Cookie Grab Day an official holiday,” baker and restaurateur Sarah O’Brien jokes. The now-annual Cookie Grab is something of a holiday in Atlanta. Started by the Little Tart and Big Softie owner, the initiative has now raised more than $225,000 for Planned Parenthood and boxes sell out faster each year. People set alarms; they plan tasting parties if they get a box — this year, the eighth fundraiser raised $50,000 in about ten minutes.
Flyer from the 2024 Cookie Grab Day. Via Instagram
So when she co-founded Southern Restaurants for Racial Justice, it felt like a natural extension of her work. “After George Floyd was murdered, we were all asking, what are we doing? We have to do something — we want to be part of the solution.” She called her friends, baker Cheryl Day in Savannah and pastry chef Lisa Donovan in Nashville, and they called restaurants all over the South and asked them to give 10% of sales to Color of Change.
Quickly, they realized there was space for them to do more to help specifically within the restaurant industry. O’Brien says she was literally googling “how to start a nonprofit,” when Atlanta restaurateur Anne Quatrano called up Ed Lee of The LEE Initiative. “I will never forget when I got a call from managing director Lindsay Ofcacek and she asked if we would take our program national. I said of course — we started in the South, but yes, let’s give money to more people — and she said great, because Heinz wants to give us a million dollars to give out to Black-owned restaurants. I basically fell out of my chair.” Now they’ve done three rounds, and given out $3,000,000 to restaurants determined by a board of advisers. “Making those phone calls to people when they won, especially that first year, was truly one of the high points of my life.”
Beth McKibben, senior editor at Rough Draft magazine, has been covering food locally and nationally for over 13 years. She’s been a supporter of Little Tart since it opened in 2011, and notes that the baker has been focused on her community the whole time. “She opened in a shared space with the coffee shop Octane, and there was a built-in community aspect between these two very local, Atlanta-centric businesses working together.”
And while social media can be a double-edged sword, McKibben appreciates the way it can help small businesses like O’Brien’s get the word out there about what they are doing, whether it be seasonal specials or fundraising events. “In this industry, the margins are so terribly thin, and PR is expensive. The chef community has really leveraged social media in a very powerful, productive way.” O’Brien agrees that platforms like Instagram and BentoBox are necessary to easily communicate with customers about what’s happening. “Atlanta is a very creative, entrepreneurial city,” McKibben says. “Restaurant owners and food producers are using social media to get eyeballs on what they’re doing, and obviously we, the diners, see things that resonate and go to check them out.”
Some of the delicious holiday cookies served up at Little Tart Bakeshop. Via Instagram
Little Tart regular Andre Blanchard remembers when he walked into the flagship location early on. “It just felt like I was a piece of a quilt. There was a sense that I belonged here, and that takes real work — one of the things about being a person of color is sometimes you’re invisible when you don’t want to be and visible when you don’t want to be, and Sarah just makes everyone feel comfortable.” It’s not enough for the food to be good, he says, and he respects that O’Brien has always been transparent about where she stands and her business practices. “She’s really preaching the gospel with regards to taking care of her employees and community, and I appreciate that she has always been upfront about her policies. I know that my dollars are going to people and places whose beliefs align with mine, and I wish more people realized they have that power. At the end of the day, we all have to contribute if we want to make this city a better place to live. It’s on us to show up.”
McKibben adds that more and more consumers want to know what businesses like restaurants are doing for their community beyond feeding people who come in for dinner every night. “I gravitate to places that center the community and their employees’ well-being. This industry is really tough, and when you see a restaurant making something like benefits a priority, that’s huge.”
Little Tart Bakeshop employees at their staff disco party. Via Instagram
O’Brien says she “didn’t want to run a company where people couldn’t have a sustainable career.” So she asked herself: What does it mean to create a place where people can work for a long time?
“It means you have to have healthcare, which is, as you know, extremely expensive in this country, and also hard to navigate.” PTO was also a non-negotiable for O’Brien, and as the pandemic was starting, her business separated out paid time off and sick leave to make sure folks were using both. “It’s also sustainable scheduling—scheduling that happens at least a couple weeks in advance, so people can have a life and make plans for going to the doctor or having lunch with friends.” Between Little Tart and Big Softie, O’Brien employs more than 70 people across four brick-and-mortar locations and three farmers market outposts, and her business also offers maternity leave, FSAs, and a retirement savings account with employer matching. After four years of employment, people can take a sabbatical—a month of their PTO off all at once, if they want. “I want my team to use their PTO, and I want them to come back refreshed.”
She says that every year she thinks, “What do people need, and what’s a benefit that we can add?” One that’s really meaningful to her is that they’ve started offering home buyer down payment assistance for folks who have worked for the company for two or more years. “There are people who started working for me when they were 24 and now they are 34 and they want to buy a house. The big hurdle is the downpayment. Being able to say, ‘here’s some research on how to do this, and here’s a lender and a realtor, and this money is here’—it’s bumpy out there and this helps smooth it out a bit, it’s a softer landing. I’m very proud of that.” They’re also looking into helping to cover childcare costs through the FSA in the future. “I was 29 when I started the business, and as we all grow up, we need different things. I had one mom in the bakery and now I have four, so what do the parents in the bakery need?”
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Though she makes it sound easy, of course it’s not: “About this time every year, I start getting really worried about our health insurance because it renews annually and generally increases every year.” So they started charging a 4% fee for employee health insurance about two years ago. “It’s basically an employee benefits charge. I know it’s a very common thing in places like California, but we were the first people to do it here, and at least four or five places have followed suit in Atlanta.”
O’Brien says her customers are, for the most part, very happy to pay it. “I wanted to make it visible, and not just roll it into another price increase. The challenge to providing these benefits is making sure they are affordable without constantly imposing price increases onto my customers because I don’t want to do that either.”
Blanchard remembers when the bakery started offering a surcharge. “That was radical,” he says. “She recognizes that she has talented employees and that her goal should be to nurture and retain top talent. She’s trying to make the decisions that are best for her business, and if you’re not okay with it, you’re not Little Tart people.” He admires how she’s trying to combat turnover by “putting roots in the community and hoping people who stay with her do the same,” which takes real work. “Sarah and I are both ‘investors’ in our community. Perhaps from different slides of the counter, so to speak, but with the same goal: to create the city we want to live in.”
Follow Little Tart on Instagram @littletartbakeshop.
Check out the full list of The BentoBox 25.
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