San Ramon's Janneh Merritt created his own English muffin business after embarking on a quest to find the best breakfast sandwiches. (Courtesy Janneh Merritt)
A little over a year after making his first English muffin sale, entrepreneur Janneh Merritt, founder of Muffin Lab, is shipping his handmade small-batch English muffins as far away as Hawaii and Lisbon, Portugal — while fulfilling catering orders for corporate America, too.
The project began at home in his San Rafael kitchen, brainstorming with his teenagers and mother-in-law to figure out how to make the best breakfast sandwich.
“We were tired of having the same old, dried piece of bread,” he says.
So they decided to make their own English muffins, incorporating different flavor combinations into the dough — dates and orange juice, for example, bourbon and maple, blueberries and honey and, of course, chocolate and plain.
It wasn’t long before they realized they’d hit on a winning formula. Merritt started taking his muffins to pop-ups and farmers markets. He quickly became a popular vendor at the San Ramon Farmers Market, where he sells breakfast sandwiches, filling his muffins with 10-hour smoked tri-tip, say, or chicken katsu alongside egg, sauce and housemade pickles.
Merritt had worked for more than 20 years in the tech industry, including at big-name companies like Genentech, Salesforce and Meta, weathering the ups and downs and the hiring sprees and layoff cycles that come with the territory. This time, he says, he was ready to be his own boss.
So he created Muffin Lab. “Everyone has a lab, whether it’s in a home, office or kitchen,” he says, “someplace where you can make a mistake, grow and create something amazing.”
These days, he keeps bakers’ hours, working away to fulfill orders in the kitchen, chase pop-up opportunities and surprise customers with home deliveries. He supplies English muffins to cafes such as Beacon in San Francisco and Rosetta Roasting in Livermore. And he’s in the process of expanding to the Belmont and Walnut Creek farmers markets.
His business is still in the early stages. There might be a brick-and-mortar in his future but, he says, it’s a niche business: “I don’t know how many people will eat English muffins every day.”
Meanwhile, he’s all about introducing people to his products — offering the occasional freebie to woo them in.
“The first one’s on me,” he says. “It’s like a drug.”
Details: Find Muffin Lab on Saturday mornings at the San Ramon Farmers Market, 6000 Bollinger Canyon Road in San Ramon; muffinlab23.com.
Originally published at Kate Bradshaw