![Closed location of Sweet Lady Jane Bakery in Santa Monica.](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2town_opener-bakeries-MAIN-H-2024.jpg?w=1024)
Closed location of Candy Girl Jane Bakery in Santa Monica.
THR Photograph Illustration: Retailer: Chris Gardner
After an enormous wave of restaurant closures in Los Angeles in 2023, together with The Palm Beverly Hills, Woodspoon, Animal, Off Vine, Mohawk Bend, Kinn, Café Tropical and Craft, Hollywood has been dealt one other blow: the lack of a few of its favourite delicacies. The expiration of two beloved bakeries, Candy Girl Jane and Milk Jar Cookies, has saddened many within the business and raised questions concerning the sustainability of Los Angeles small companies.
“No. No. No. heartbroken,” Blake Vigorous posted on Candy Girl Jane’s Instagram web page after saying that the legendary celebrity-loved bakery, based by Jane Lockhart and well-known for its scrumptious Triple Berry Cake, would shut all six of its places on Dec. 31 after 35 years in enterprise. “Gross sales usually are not sufficient to proceed doing enterprise within the state of California,” the bakery’s publish mentioned. Lockhart couldn’t be reached for remark.
“It was simply stunning,” Lisa Olin of Los Angeles’ Cake Monkey Bakery says of Candy Girl Jane’s closing. Candy Girl Jane devotees embody Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez, Kourtney Kardashian, Kurt Russell, Ellen DeGeneres, Jennifer Aniston and Demi Moore; In 2014, followers Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen even invested $2 million within the bakery.
On Saturday, court docket paperwork reviewed by the Los Angeles Instances revealed that the well-known bakery has been going through a class-action lawsuit for wage theft for nearly seven months. The corporate additionally reportedly suffered from mismanagement.
Jane Lockhart, founding father of Candy Girl Jane.
David Livingston/Getty Photos
And January 15 would be the final day to benefit from the sweets on the two places (Miracle Mile and Encino) of Milk Jar Cookies, whose followers embody Margot Robbie, Wanda Sykes, Seth Rogen and Danny Trejo.
“I am devastated, frankly. That is actually not how I noticed my firm,” says Milk Jar Cookies proprietor Courtney Cowan, a former tv producer. “What we do, we do with numerous ardour and objective. For us, it has all the time been about extra than simply cookies. “We’ve got actually ingratiated ourselves with the neighborhood and we’re all very, very unhappy.”
Producer Brett Gursky, a Milk Jar Cookies and Candy Girl Jane fanatic, provides, “There have to be somebody within the business who likes these truffles and cookies and may are available and save these locations.”
Additionally in December, Diamond Bakery, a mainstay of Jewish desserts and bread within the Fairfax district since 1946, introduced it was closing (though its recipes had been offered to wholesale bakery Bread Los Angeles).
Small companies in Los Angeles are going through an avalanche of issues. Nonetheless reeling from the COVID shutdown, landlords say they face maddening constructing allow holdups, skyrocketing rents, minimal wage hikes, rising meals prices and homelessness points.
Hollywood strikes harm, too: “When these orders cease and evaporate for six months, that has a big impact,” Cowan says. “We absolutely assist the strike as an idea… I personally went to the picket strains many instances and handed out cookies. We provided reductions and I believe it was one thing actually essential and essential. However what I do not assume is true is that in any labor dispute both facet can refuse to speak for weeks whereas a metropolis disintegrates beneath them.”
And bakeries face their very own distinctive challenges, with skinny margins and the necessity for fixed replenishment: “These are perishable merchandise,” Olin says. “It is not a clothes retailer or a restaurant the place a buyer is available in and says, ‘Oh, I wish to order this,’ and also you make it to order; You have to have your field full. “That’s what a bakery is.”
Cowan now hopes to assist different small enterprise house owners thrive in Los Angeles. “I’ve numerous issues I wish to carry to the town council, to the mayor’s workplace, so I would begin with that and make some noise,” he says. “It might be too late for my enterprise, however I’ve numerous colleagues hanging on by the identical thread, and I am not being poetic once I say it is horrible, and small companies want folks’s assist.”
January 13, 12:45 p.m. Up to date with information of the Candy Jane Bakery wage theft class motion lawsuit.
A model of this story first appeared within the Jan. 10 subject of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click on right here for subscribe.