Cooks, bakers and even hobbyists in the kitchen know that making food is about more than just feeding people, especially in the South. It can be a way to take care of them, show your appreciation, introduce them to a cherished tradition or start a new one. Whitney Joseph’s cinnamon rolls have encompassed all of the above and more.
It all started with a dislike of birthday cake. “Our son, Chase, does not like cake,” says Whitney. “It was always a waste of money to get a cake or cupcakes for him. He started asking for cinnamon rolls instead.” Whitney would go to Cinnabon to pick up mini rolls and create a birthday cake-like structure at home.
“One birthday, the only present he asked for was quality time with the family. So, the next year, I thought, ‘I’m not going to buy cinnamon rolls this year. I’m going to make some myself.’ It was a way to share my love.” After a few bites of her homemade cinnamon rolls, her family agreed: Cinnabon’s rolls didn’t hold a candle to Whitney’s.
She made them more often and shared them with friends and volunteers from their church. Everyone wanted more and urged Whitney to try selling them. So, she did. “Our friend’s mom was our first customer. She wanted to treat her employees. Afterward, our friend’s review was, ‘I didn’t even get a chance to eat any because everybody came back for seconds,’” she says.
The opportunity to grow something that started organically was a new frontier for Whitney, but one that blended seamlessly with her personality and that of her family. “Our whole family’s very creative, and we’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit,” she says. “It’s my love language for me to cook something for other people.”
Whitney started with pop-ups at her church. She chose the name Cinné for her business and paired it with high-end, luxury aesthetics. “The direction was artisan, elegant and with flavor profiles that you are not familiar with,” she says. While holding occasional pop-ups, she took about six months last year to do market research.
More importantly, she perfected her cinnamon blend, a task that required a lot of tweaking the recipe at home and taste testing from her husband, Marcel, and her kids, Ezari and Chase. “Surprisingly enough, because I smell cinnamon so much, it’s hard for me to taste it and really give a true rating,” laughs Whitney. Once they discovered the perfect blend, which consists of three different kinds of cinnamon and adds a depth of flavor to the rolls, they were ready to officially launch.
Cinné had its first official market pop-up at the Second Saturday Market in January of this year. “We did a push to all of our friends who have said that they love our cinnamon rolls, like, ‘Okay, we’re setting up. Show up.’ And they did,” says Marcel. A quick look at the records on Marcel’s phone confirms that they made 19 sales that day, selling around 60 rolls.
Their custom flavors were a huge draw. “Malva was the first flavor we tried. I wanted to do something that kind of paid homage to the South African culture,” says Whitney. The roll contained apricot jam folded into the dough, cream cheese icing, a thick apricot sauce and was finished with a caramelized apricot slice and a hibiscus drizzle.
Customers soon realized that these cinnamon rolls were special. Alongside the signature roll, they came in flavors like lemon raspberry, creamy Biscoff, bacon espresso and caramel apple. Since then, the business has created additional flavors like banoffee, peach cobbler, samoa, caramel pecan and Oreo crumb.
The malva, however, was the first flavor that caused Cinné to go viral. “We did an event with Mobile’s Parks and Rec department, and I thought, ‘Let me capture content while I’m here,” says Whitney. “At the time, I was stressing about our social media, constantly thinking, ‘I need to get photos, I don’t have the lighting, I don’t know what I’m doing….’” At the event, Ezari began passing out samples. Whitney quickly whipped out her phone, taking raw video of passersby trying cinnamon roll samples just so she would have something to post later. One by one, those who tried the bite-sized samples soon turned into interested customers, approaching Cinné with dropped jaws, credit cards in hand. In one clip, an astonished customer says, “I’m diabetic, but can I have one of those?” handing back the sample cup and pointing to the cinnamon rolls. That night, Whitney stitched together the clips, uploaded them to Instagram and went to bed. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, it’s going to get 100 views and maybe five likes,’” says Whitney.
In the morning, she woke up to a flood of followers, likes and comments asking where the hit cinnamon rolls could be found. In a day and a half, Cinné’s Instagram account went from 40 followers to 4,000 (now, the video is sitting at over 280,000 views and the Instagram account has over 10,000 followers). “This was before we even had TikTok,” says Whitney. “It was an experience.”
It wasn’t an isolated one either. Cinné has gone viral a handful of times now in less than a year, mostly thanks to rave reviews from food influencers on social media such as Zack in the South. “There was also a random guy who came in at one of our pre-order events, and typically we don’t do walk-ups for that,” says Marcel. “He saw all these cars near us and decided to come over and find out what everybody was out here for. When we kind of died down a little bit, my wife just took some extra rolls we had over. Come to find out, he had 50,000 followers, and he did a review of us.” Their own social media videos, showing fluffy, decadent cinnamon rolls in all sorts of mouth-watering flavors bathed in natural light and cream cheese icing, also effectively push business.
A cluster of viral moments came at the perfect time for the business. Over the summer, the Josephs moved Cinné from a cottage bakery to operating in The Continental Commissary Kitchen on Azalea Road. “Just to give you an idea, we went from doing the Second Saturday Market, where it would take us about maybe two and a half hours to sell around eight pans of cinnamon rolls, to now selling out almost 20 pans in that same time frame,” says Marcel. “It picked up in July right before we were going out of town. We took six pans to the market that month, and the line was so long that we knew we weren’t going to be able to sell to everyone. It was the first time we had to turn people away. It was heartbreaking, so we just made more to meet the demand.” The traffic isn’t just locals. They regularly have customers driving from Montgomery, Birmingham, Pensacola and even Louisiana.
More demand has increased the amount of time Whitney dedicates to Cinné. The workload has grown so much that she recently quit her job to operate the business full time. “I think the first week that I was away from my job and I had to go up to the kitchen to just wash dishes, I was like, ‘I am so happy,’” she says. “I was happy to finally find something that I love to do that is connected to my love language. For me, it’s life-giving, and I get to do this.”
Cinné releases a monthly menu on social media, featuring special flavors alongside reliable favorites. They also promote the week of for their popups and pickups, and preorders for pickups open the Sunday evening before. From three-hour weekly shopping trips for ingredients to 1 a.m. Saturday wake-up times to get pickup orders ready, it’s an all-consuming operation. “It’s all house-made, like the caramel, fudge, lemon curd, blueberry compote. I make everything, except for the Biscoff, from scratch,” says Whitney. “Even the different types of caramels,” chimes in Marcel. “We have the regular praline caramel, a malt caramel, a peach caramel, a banana caramel…it’s all homemade.” Whitney has an entire binder for Cinné, full of recipes for toppings, icing, caramels and more. By now, she knows the basics by heart.
Running a booming business is doable with the help of her family. Since the start of Cinné, Marcel, Ezari and Chase were all involved. “My initial job was that I just wanted to support her because she’s a dreamer and so she has a ton of ideas,” says Marcel. “I said, ‘Hey, if you do it, I’ll support you. Just do it.’” His role has grown beyond that. From washing dishes to now making the cream cheese icing each week to handling the business logistics, Marcel works with Whitney to make Cinné a team effort. Ezari and Chase also help out, filling and rolling the dough and serving when they are open for business. Chase, thanks to his aversion to birthday cake and love of cinnamon rolls, takes particular pride in the business. “At the market, when people ask how it started, he pops out and says, ‘I’m the reason! You’re welcome,’” laughs Whitney.
The business now has a dedicated customer base, more than a dozen flavors under their belt and more dreams than they know what to do with. Despite the success, Whitney admits that she never considered herself a baker before. “Nothing about our background would have told you we were going to be here,” says Whitney. “But I’ve heard that, for most adults, whatever career they’re in that they love ends up being something that stemmed from something they may have dabbled in when they were a little kid. I remember when I was really little, I had an Easy-Bake oven. I would make these little cinnamon sandwiches. I would take sandwich bread and cinnamon, and every day, I would just sprinkle cinnamon into the bread, and the Easy-Bake would crimp it. I would just snack on it. Recently, I was like, ‘Oh, I think that’s when I fell in love with cinnamon!’”
The sweetest part of all, though, is doing it with her family. “We’re so tight-knit,” says Whitney. “For us to be able to start a business and just do this together, even for our kids, they take so much ownership. I’m so appreciative of them because if I didn’t have their support, I don’t think I would have continued. It means so much.”
Cinné • cinnerolls.com
