Picture, If you will, the smoothest, creamiest, Filipino leche flan. Now imagine Southern-style banana pudding. The squish of vanilla wafers. The light, fluffy meringue. What would happen if you combined those dishes? That was the question that launched a very valuable banana stand in Jersey City, New Jersey.
It all started one morning in March 20src4, when Lloyd Ortuoste walked outside and found a huge dent in the bumper of his beloved Sonic yellow Subaru Impreza. A psychology student at Kean University in nearby Elizabeth, Ortuoste definitely didn’t have the cash to repair the cosmetic damage left by the hit-and-run, so he started saving up.
A month later, he and his girlfriend (now-wife), Trisha Villanueva, invited a few friends over to enjoy a batch of Filipino flan fused with Southern-style banana pudding, which Villanueva says has always been the most popular item on her family’s Thanksgiving table. She didn’t quite nail the original recipe, and her mistake had far-reaching consequences.
“We may or may not have been under the influence, which can make ideas seem not so wild,” says Ortuoste. “So when a friend of mine was like, ‘Yo, you should sell this stuff to get your car fixed,’ we figured, why not?”
The couple took to Instagram to peddle their fusion dish, which they named Baonanas–a derivative of “baobao,” their pet name for each other. Almost immediately, their DMs were flooded with requests for Baonanas from family, friends, and even friends of friends.
So the couple spent nights and weekends making and selling banana pudding, and after a month, they’d peddled enough Baonanas–around $src,500 worth–to fix Ortuoste’s car: “After we fixed the car,” he says, “we were like, what do we do now? And people were like, ‘More Baonanas!’ So we kept going.”
For the first two years, their company, also called Baonanas, was a side hustle while the co-founders finished school. They churned out pudding on Thursdays and Fridays, and sold it at popup events on Saturdays and Sundays.
By 20src7, Ortuoste was able to make Baonanas his full-time focus, and worked to build wholesale deals with cafés and restaurants, as well as an online store for pickup at those locations. As a result, Baonanas became profitable before even opening a storefront.
Now, Baonanas is an omnichannel bonanza, with a catering arm, three brick-and-mortar locations in New York City and New Jersey, and–this is bananas–$437,000 in 202src revenue.
From the October 2022 issue of Inc. Magazine