GRAND FORKS — For some bakers and chefs in Grand Forks, a food review social media page has been an unexpected but welcome way of spreading the word about their businesses.
Laurore Surpris, known as JuneEats, is a Fargo-based content creator who has gained popularity over the last year by reviewing restaurants, food trucks and bakers. Most of the reviewed businesses have been located in Fargo and Grand Forks, but Surpris has reviewed places elsewhere in North Dakota and Minnesota as well.
Ayleanna Aldridge has been running Chestnut Bakery out of her Grand Forks home for about six months; as a single mother of four, she said it was difficult to hold other jobs because she would sometimes have to leave early if her kids needed to be picked up or if they were sick.
“I’m very good at cooking and very good at baking, so I said, ‘I think I’m the next woman in this family that needs to start a business in this house,’” she said. Aldridge is the fourth generation in her family to own her home and the third woman in her family to run a business from there.
In North Dakota, the Cottage Foods Act allows people to sell certain homemade goods directly to customers so long as the customers are informed the goods were made in a kitchen not inspected by a health department.
Some of Aldridge’s rotating menu items include focaccia, banana bread pudding, chocolate chip cookies, cake and tarts.
Aldridge said her mom and sister had been encouraging her to reach out to Surpris for months before she actually did so, saying she was too nervous at first. When she did email him in late August to invite him to review her baked goods, he happened to be in Grand Forks that day and posted the review later that night.
“The review was phenomenal, and he was rating like eight to nine,” she said. “I’ve watched his reviews since he started, basically, and I know that those are good numbers for him.”
After Surpris reviewed her business, her preorder list for the next weekend jumped from around five to 36. On her first open day after the review, she had a line of walk-up customers.
While the initial influx of customers has waned slightly in the last month, Aldridge said business is steady and she is still getting repeat orders from people who say they found her through Surpris’ content.
“That’s going to give me the opportunity to grow a little bit, get a better system of payment, a better system for ordering,” she said. “And then slowly as things progress and I’m able to save up a little bit, I would like to open a small little bistro downtown.”
Other cottage bakers have seen similar increases in attention from Surpris’ reviews. Jamie Newhouse started GiGi’s Sourdough Kitchen in July, building a room inside her garage to turn into her store.
“I’ve been thinking about it for probably a whole year, and I kept convincing myself out of it,” she said. “And then I was talking with my husband about it one day and I’m like, ‘I think I really want to do this.’”
She started by baking sourdough bread but has now expanded to offering cinnamon rolls, cake pops, bars and other treats. She recently started offering soup mixes to pair with her sourdough loaves as well.
Jamie Newhouse shows off her home bakery display for GiGi’s Sourdough Kitchen. She built an extra room in her garage to create the small storefront for her baked goods.
Jordan Rusche/Grand Forks Herald
Surpris’ review on Aug. 30 was a surprise to Newhouse. She was traveling when he posted his review and didn’t have reception until later, so she didn’t realize what had happened right away.
“All of a sudden, I have 552 notifications on Facebook,” she said. “I was delighted to see that he had stopped in and did a pretty incredible post. Since then, the business has really grown every single week.”
Newhouse said the day Surpris visited her shop was the first day she completely sold out of baked goods. Traffic to her business has at least doubled since then.
As she looks forward to the future, Newhouse said she would like to eventually run a year-round online bakery and have her home shop open in spring, summer and fall as the weather permits.
“I love doing it,” she said. “It’s a lot of work — it really is more work than I ever could have imagined — but I love it.”
Another Grand Forks baker, Renee Daniels, was one of the first cottage bakers Surpris’ reviewed back in February. Her business, Cozy Rolls, was again featured in April.
Daniels sold her first cinnamon roll in November last year to one of her husband’s coworkers, who encouraged her to start selling them regularly. Around December, she did a “buy one, get one free” event that brought even more attention to her business.
Renee Daniels started her business Cozy Rolls around the end of last year and has developed a following for her sweet and savory flavors. She has been featured twice on JuneEats’ social media.
Jordan Rusche/Grand Forks Herald
“It was mayhem, especially for just starting out,” she said. “But it did really good, and it put Cozy Rolls on the map.”
Her menu consists of various flavors of sweet rolls, including caramel, cinnamon, Oreo, strawberry and banana, and some savory rolls like cheese and pepperoni-pizza flavors.
Daniels said she invited Surpris to review her rolls, and the positive feedback she received from him has resulted in people ordering items from based on the review. While some of that traffic waned over the summer, which she thinks is likely because of the farmers market and college students leaving during break, she still has rarely gone a day without baking something since February.
She added there were a few negative comments after the review was posted from people claiming she had paid for Surpris to give her a favorable review, but generally the response has been positive. She expressed her gratitude to the Grand Forks community for its support of Cozy Rolls.
“I think that one of the bigger elements that has kept Cozy Rolls consistent is this community,” she said. Daniels previously lived in southern California and said it’s unlikely a similar business would have done as well there. “Being here where people actually want to see you do good, I think that Cozy Rolls’ success is 50% me and 50% you all.”
Daniels said she isn’t interested in a brick-and-mortar storefront in the future, but she would like to open a food truck at some point. She envisions taking it to UND or some of the local factories between class and shift changes.
“Everything, I feel like, is falling into place like it’s supposed to,” she said. “I don’t have too many goals right now; just whatever happens, happens.”
She plans to go back to school to get her bachelor’s in business, followed eventually by a master’s and a doctorate.
Cottage bakers aren’t the only small business owners who have been featured by Surpris. Erica Dunsen, also known as the Pretty Chef, is a personal chef and business owner who cooks for and helps plan events like fundraisers and parties.
Dunsen grew up in Maryland with both her grandmother and father being good cooks, and after being diagnosed with a mass on her pancreas and tumors on her spleen in 2021, she began hosting family dinners. As she got closer to a surgery date to remove the mass and the tumors and felt too sick to cook, people would send her money to hold food for them.
“That took care of me and my children after the surgery, after everything,” she said. “I always get emotional when I talk about it because I was doing it to say goodbye, but look how many people I said hello to because of it.”
Erica Dunsen’s small business the Pretty Chef doubles as event planning and personal chef services. She also has a clothing business called Mom Boss ND.
Jordan Rusche/Grand Forks Herald
After moving to Grand Forks, she started cooking for people again as a personal chef alongside her main job. Surpris had the opportunity to try her cooking in June during a fundraiser for Love in Action founder Doris Lebby.
Dunsen said there was increased interest in her business after Surpris’ review but added she also had a good following before the review as well.
“It wasn’t necessarily more opportunities, but it was just more love,” she said. “It took me months to read the comments, but when I did, I got a little emotional because I didn’t even know that many people knew me.”
Alongside her event planning/cooking business, she started another business called Mom Boss ND, selling clothing aimed at mothers, with a storefront for her clothes and for other women-owned small businesses expected to open on Oct. 30.
She also wants to start offering low-cost professional development opportunities for other women, like having books available at her store on a variety of topics related to different careers.
“The opportunities that I’ve had to be who I am today have been a blessing, and I find that I meet great people here that have that potential and those inner talents as well, but they’re getting these mediocre, like just-beginning, low-end jobs,” she said. “They’re not reaching their fullest self.”
Dining and Cooking