Miss Jones Baking Co.

With financial discipline in the recipe, Sarah Jones Garibaldi, BBA ’07, MPA ’08, scaled up her childhood dream

About a decade after launching organic frosting tubs and baking mixes, Sarah Jones Garibaldi has built Miss Jones Baking Co. into a business with products sold nationwide at Whole Foods Markets, Walmart, and other major retailers.

“A lot of founders don’t understand the financials — they just have a vision and a dream,” says Garibaldi, CEO of Purple Mixer Inc., Miss Jones Baking Co.’s parent company. Her time at the McCombs School of Business, she says, grounded her in the financial discipline needed to scale up. That foundation has fueled the company’s growth, now up almost 50% year over year.

Passion in the mix

Garibaldi knew early she wanted to be a baker. “I was always pulling out a pan from a kitchen cabinet and asking my mom to bake,” she says. In high school, she began dabbling in financial modeling, calculating how many cupcakes she’d need to sell to make a living. Those early exercises helped her see baking not just as a creative outlet, but as a viable business.

While studying accounting in the BBA and then the MPA program, Garibaldi launched a baking blog, “The Purple Mixer,” named for a lavender KitchenAid stand mixer that her mother gave her. After graduation, she worked for two years in transaction services at PwC, and then she moved to California to join Apple’s supply chain strategy team, managing supplier health. The role exposed her to large-scale operations and the financial realities behind consumer products.

During this time, a conversation with a co-founder of another food company led to practical advice: Identify an unmet consumer need, make the product shelf-stable, and find a manufacturer.

During lunch breaks at Whole Foods, Garibaldi noticed a gap in clean-label and better-for-you baking options and began developing ready-to-spread frostings and mixes. As the idea took shape, she left Apple to help launch a digital media company as head of finance and operations and, not surprisingly, food editor. In 2015, she committed full time to Miss Jones Baking Co., launching her first products at Sprouts supermarkets.

Proofing for growth

Today, Walmart, Whole Foods Markets, Kroger, H‑E‑B, and other major retailers carry her products. The company now owns a manufacturing facility that also co-manufactures for other brands and recently launched refrigerated cookie doughs made with butter. “They really give you that bakery-style indulgence,” she says.

As the business scales up, Garibaldi credits her accounting background with helping her manage cash flow, inventory, and seasonality in a business that surges around the holidays. “Inventory issues and not enough working capital can kill a business,” she says. “My accounting degree has been instrumental — it’s really the reason we’ve been able to raise money.”

Most recently, she launched a new product line: bakery-style, refrigerated cookie doughs, including Triple Chocolate Cookie Dough and Everything Cookie Dough. “It’s the only product on the market that’s made with butter — everything else is made with oil — so the cookies really give you that bakery-style indulgence,” she says.

Story by Deborah Lynn Blumberg