Sprinkles is closed but not forgotten
Sprinkles, originally named Sprinkles Cupcakes, closed without warning on Dec. 31. Founder Candace Nelson broke the news in an Instagram post. She had no ownership stake in Sprinkles when it closed, having sold the cupcakery to private equity in 2012.
“After thoughtful consideration, we’ve made the very difficult decision to transition away from operating company-owned Sprinkles bakeries,” owner KarpReilly told KTLA. The investment company has not posted an official statement.
Opened in 2005, Sprinkles is the first U.S. cupcakes-only bakery known to this writer. At Sprinkles, cupcakes were refashioned into a stylized, gourmet luxury product worthy of a Beverly Hills boutique. This immediately caught the attention of celebrities, including Barbra Streisand. She sent a box to her friend Oprah, who put them on TV in early 2006. The Oprah effect propelled the cupcakery to worldwide fame and the rest is history.
Sprinkles’ influence is all-encompassing. Today, it’s unremarkable to encounter a cupcakes-only bakery and to learn of its premium ingredients. Credit Sprinkles for mainstreaming these options, which were not the norm when Sprinkles opened.
What does the closure mean? This question demands a book-length analysis.
Why the outpouring of emotion at the news? Consider this from the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer: “Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving, and identity.” Cupcakes trigger emotion and evoke a person’s sense of selfhood. They are irrational, habitual, crave-worthy icons of cultural identity.
To contextualize Sprinkles’ closure, here is longform food for thought.
The origin of Sprinkles
A pastry chef captured lightning in a bottle and the world has never been the same.
The couple behind Sprinkles Cupcakes, Candace and Charles Nelson, were first-time entrepreneurs in their 30s. Many thought they were delusional to open in body-conscious Los Angeles at a time when low-carb diets were trending.
Come opening day, they sailed into uncharted waters. “We had no idea what to expect,” says Charles Nelson in a YouTube video. “We opened up. People were lined up down the sidewalk. We had made like 200 cupcakes, thinking, ‘Oh, wouldn’t that be so great if we sold 200?’ Literally, they’re gone in like two hours. We have no idea what to do because we’re using six-quart mixers in the back. Each batch makes two dozen and people were ordering two dozen per person. All we hoped and dreamed was people would be here and now we have nothing to sell them. By 1 p.m. we put a sign up that said, ‘Sorry, sold out.’”
The cupcakery got an invaluable signal boost from DailyCandy, a pioneering e-newsletter sent to tens of thousands of lifestyle aficionados. Its newsletters covered one and only one item per day. There was an “it” business or event du jour, a singular sensation deemed worthy of patronage. This is not to say there was one featured item plus other news. There was the one topic and no other content. DailyCandy L.A. featured Sprinkles on opening day, April 13, 2005. It was impactful, an early case of Sprinkles’ capacity to garner key media coverage.
“When I’ve done a review of a book, it’s gone from [being ranked] 8,000 on Amazon to No. 19,” DailyCandy founder Dany Levy told the Wall Street Journal in 2001. “Or if I do a restaurant, once a restaurant got 700 calls in one day. Or sample sales have been just mobbed.”
In her book Sweet Success: A Simple Recipe to Turn your Passion into Profit, Nelson writes that the DailyCandy coverage “struck a serious chord—curious tastemakers around LA came out in droves.” Sprinkles sold 2,000 cupcakes in its first week and became a celebrity mecca, weathering a whirlwind in its first year.
This was new territory for the Nelsons in every sense. The couple were San Francisco Bay Area investment bankers who became cupcake entrepreneurs amidst the “quarter-life crisis” that befell Candace Nelson.
“Growing up, I was the quintessential ‘well-rounded’ kid,” writes Nelson in Sweet Success. “It seemed like a good thing until college graduation; then it just felt like a euphemism for confused. Unlike my law school–bound or premed friends, I had absolutely no clue what I was going to do with my life. So, I did what most people without a clear career path do: just get a job. … I was recruited into an investment banking analyst program in San Francisco right out of school. … I joined a firm that helped companies raise capital through initial public offerings (IPOs) and consulted on financial transactions like mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Let me be clear: I had never even taken an accounting course. In fact, my liberal arts college idealistically refused to offer one! I was a fish out of water from day one, but it was a prestigious job where I hoped to build a solid business foundation—a smart first step into the professional world, I thought. It felt like the ‘right’ choice to make. But crunching numbers into the wee hours of the night was draining my soul instead of feeding it. I was anxious all the time, lived in fear of my bosses, and developed a pit in my stomach every time a project landed on my desk on Friday at 5 p.m.—which happened most Fridays.”
Being young and ambitious at the epicenter of the dot-com boom, Nelson went digital. “I left my financial firm and accepted a job at a start-up called Snap.com (no, not Snapchat!),” Nelson writes. “Snap.com was a web portal and its mission was to become the new Yahoo!”
At both jobs, the perks included expense accounts and company-paid dinners at the Bay Area’s best restaurants. “These experiences awakened my deeply rooted familial appreciation for good food and a thirst for more knowledge around the dishes themselves,” Nelson writes. “I began fangirling chefs, researching farms, and appreciating the importance of a well-sourced ingredient from the right purveyor. I became a regular at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, walking around smelling coffee, tasting chocolates, and devouring freshly baked goods. I started to get the inkling that this wasn’t just a hobby.”
The foundation was laid in Nelson’s youth. “I was born in Jakarta, Indonesia and raised much of my childhood in Southeast Asia,” Nelson writes on Instagram. “When I was growing up overseas, if I wanted to eat the things I loved from home (brownies, chocolate chip cookies, cupcakes), I had to learn to bake them myself. This was the start of my baking journey.”
She returned to baking when she was laid off in the dot-com bust. Jobless after a grand total of four years of post-college employment, she felt directionless. “With nowhere to go and no plan in place, I slipped into a mild depression,” Nelson writes. “My days were dictated by TV Guide, punctuated by important meetings with Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart. These shows were my refuge and inspiration—the recipes and crafts that Martha had built into an industrial complex, and the noteworthy guests Oprah interviewed, wormed their way into my subconscious. How could they not? Overnight, I went from grinding sixteen hours a day nonstop to marking the passage of time by reruns. I was paralyzed, on my couch, in the prime of my life, applying for jobs I had no interest in taking.”
Because of “all that Martha Stewart, the endless stretches of time on my hands, or my insatiable sweet tooth,” Nelson began to bake and it cheered her. Then she got educated.
“My life was forever changed when I enrolled in pastry school in San Francisco after the Internet start-up bust of the early 2000s,” writes Nelson in The Sprinkles Baking Book.
After completing the pastry program at the now closed Tante Marie’s Cooking School, she opened a custom cake business. “I sourced the finest ingredients, baked out of my own kitchen for most of the day (and night), and hand-delivered each elaborate delicacy,” she writes in Sweet Success. “Picture a frantic young baker balancing giant, multi-tiered cakes up the notoriously steep hills of San Francisco. In retrospect, it was a comical, almost cartoonish sight. But at the time, I found it difficult to laugh at my distress, as I was quite literally sweating confectioners’ sugar. … I would scale those precipitous hills and cringe as I heard the gut-wrenching thumps of decorations falling off my cakes. It quickly became clear that this was not a sustainable service. Sure, I loved baking, but these cakes were slowly killing me. Plus, it was dawning on me that people don’t often buy a whole cake. Sure, the holidays are a time of celebration, but for the rest of the calendar year, a special-occasion cake is reserved for, well, a rare special occasion.”
She realized she could apply the concept to a simpler, everyday good. Cupcakes were having a moment. Nelson found her answer. “I set out to elevate the cupcake by using the same beautiful ingredients and artfulness I had previously applied to my cakes,” Nelson says. “If I could make cupcakes that were elegant, then maybe they could stand on their own. And that’s when I became obsessed with the idea of a cupcakes-only bakery, and Sprinkles was born.”
Opening Sprinkles Cupcakes
The Nelsons’ first move was to relocate. “In 2003, with the dream of opening a risky new venture, Charles and I left San Francisco—where the economy was still suffering from the dot-com bust—for Los Angeles, where the economy was more diversified and still thriving,” Nelson writes in Sweet Success. “I began toiling away in our West Hollywood apartment kitchen, baking a new kind of gourmet cupcake. As word got out, orders poured in—first from friends, and then friends of friends, and then complete strangers. Word spread to the point where I stopped being able to trace the source.”
When the Nelsons looked to rent a retail store, they faced resistance. Prospective landlords had a hard time believing in the viability of cupcakes. “‘What else will you sell?’ was the constant refrain. Some even hung up before I had a chance to answer,” Nelson writes. Trying again after the landlord initially said no, the Nelsons leased a 600-square-foot storefront two blocks west of Rodeo Drive on Little Santa Monica Boulevard, a Beverly Hills thoroughfare.
The landlords weren’t the only skeptics. On the surface, it was valid to question whether the local culture would intake hedonistic calories. “As Charles and I drove around Los Angeles, we noticed something other Angelenos conveniently overlooked: multiple strip centers featuring myriad burger joints and donut shops,” writes Nelson in Sweet Success. “We suspected there was an appetite for more than just green juice in this town—and, it turns out, we were right. How could we see it when others couldn’t? Well, we were literal outsiders, and that perspective served us well.”
Before opening, Nelson worked industriously to market her cupcakes. “I did whatever it took to get my product in customers’ hands,” she writes. “I drove all over town, delivering handcrafted cupcakes for baby showers and birthday parties. I set up cupcake ‘stations’ at local trunk shows and craft fairs. I gave away samples, ordered business cards, and eagerly tried to get both into people’s hands. … I brought cupcakes to hotel concierges as well as local fire and police departments and donated them to charitable events.”
The momentum yielded a first celebrity patron when a Tyra Banks Show producer called to order cupcakes as a 30th birthday gift for Banks. Nelson’s cupcakes later appeared on the TV show.
When it came time to construct the cupcake shop, Nelson prioritized the architecture and interior design. Every touch point had to pique curiosity with elements of novelty and surprise. “The look has been integral to the brand’s success and it was highly deliberate,” she says. “There were a lot of things at play. One was, we were the first cupcakes-only bakery. So this was a new idea, and for a cupcake to be able to stand on its own, it has to be really special. So it starts with the recipes and the ingredients, but beyond that, it needs to be an experience. So we put a lot of time and energy into the look of the cupcake as well as the display case as well as the overall store. For one, we wanted to fly in the face of what people consider to be traditional in terms of a bakery design, which is, you know, pink and frilly and doilies and sort of Grandma’s kitchen, because we were a new idea and we wanted it to reflect that. So we kind of said, ‘We’re gonna do what people don’t expect from a bakery and make it almost like a boutique.’ It’s a chic, understated, very sophisticated but playful look with a neutral backdrop and warm wood, punctuated by color but not in a way that’s overwhelming. And something that didn’t feel overly feminine. Our cupcakes were modern and chic and special, and the environment should reflect that as well.”
Some early food bloggers wrote about their Sprinkles discoveries. Pat Saperstein reported on the cupcakery two months after its opening. She was critical of the strawberry and red velvet cupcakes, but praised the architectural design. “The store is darling—a modernist cupcake nirvana,” writes Saperstein on Eating L.A., which she identifies as the city’s first and longest-running food blog. “This place is all about the concept.” Saperstein, a Variety editor since 1996, also cites Sprinkles in a June 2005 interview on Good Food, a KCRW public radio program hosted by Evan Klieman.
Joshua Lurie of Food GPS wrote about the cupcakery soon after it opened, focusing on the interior design and the creative menu. “Two blonde wood shelves display row-upon-row of cupcakes,” he writes. “Sure Sprinkles sells traditional vanilla and milk chocolate cupcakes. But Candace has taken the art to another level with flavors like ginger lemon, lemon coconut, orange, strawberry, banana, pumpkin, and chai latte. And I don’t use the word ‘art’ lightly. The cupcakes are phenomenal, uniformly moist, the icing thick and creamy. My three early favorites are pumpkin featuring pumpkin cake topped with pumpkin cream; peanut butter chocolate starring peanut butter cake with chocolate chips baked in, milk chocolate icing, and chocolate sprinkles; and ginger lemon, involving ginger cake with lemon butter cream frosting.”
Pretty soon Sprinkles would make regular appearances in the entertainment tabloids and glossy women’s magazines. It was the budding romance between actors Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes that unleashed a torrent of publicity. Holmes liked Sprinkles and Cruise liked Holmes. Sprinkles became catnip for the couple dubbed TomKat. “Every time this Hollywood legend would send his new crush a box of Sprinkles Cupcakes, it became hot gossip magazine fodder, which was essentially a lot of free national press,” writes Nelson in Sweet Success. “I still don’t understand how I found myself swept up in the tornado that was TomKat fever, but the golden couple of the hour had become synonymous with Sprinkles Cupcakes, and we were off to the races. For months, TomKat couldn’t get enough of our product, and the media could not get enough TomKat, fighting over each other to grab both of their attention on the red carpet using Sprinkles Cupcakes as bait. Remember, this was the height of paparazzi chasing starlets like Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears all over Los Angeles. Paris Hilton celebrated her birthdays with Sprinkles. A photo of Jessica Alba walking out of Sprinkles with her bag of cupcakes was splashed across gossip rags.”
Nelson recounts the first time Holmes namedropped Sprinkles to the press. “Picture me between rushes at the bakery, only stopping at home to quickly take our dog, Honey, for a walk,” she writes. “As I hurried poor Honey to do her business during my break, my cell phone started blowing up. Had I seen it? Was I so excited? Could I even believe it? The ‘it’ was Katie Holmes gushing about Sprinkles on a national entertainment show during a press junket. She called it her favorite little secret in Beverly Hills.”
The ante was about to go up.
When Oprah calls
“Several months into the TomKat blitz and eight months after opening, we had just made it through our first holiday season, which was unlike anything we had experienced to date,” Nelson writes. “That holiday season of 2005, Sprinkles Cupcakes was the ‘gift to give’ for many of the top studio execs, agents, producers, and celebs in Los Angeles. We were completely exhausted and looking forward to a little lull in January while everyone was grumbling through their New Year’s juice cleanses. It was late afternoon; we had turned off the ovens for the day and were cleaning up when we got a call from Harpo Studios. Yes, as in Oprah. I know everyone likes to claim that they’re an Oprah fan, but I really was a mega fan, religiously watching the Oprah Winfrey Show for years. She had, after all, inspired me from my couch in San Francisco to get off my tush and into the game. Now, Oprah herself had told the producers she wanted Sprinkles on the show. Could we have 350 cupcakes for their Chicago-based studio audience the next morning? No matter the logistical nightmare that would ensue, there was only one answer: ‘YES.’”
The producer said they’d send a courier to take the cupcakes to the airport, where they’d fly in the cargo hold. No way, thought Nelson. The cupcakes wouldn’t survive. She’d deliver them personally.
“So, I fired up the ovens and Charles and I booked a red-eye to Chicago, boarding the plane with as many cupcakes as we could carry,” she writes. “We stacked boxes into the largest shopping bags we could find and carried as many as we could, which meant we literally brought nothing else. Thank goodness it was midnight as we went through security because we had to remove every single box of cupcakes from their bag to be sent through the X-ray machine individually. It took forever. We repeated the same nerve-wracking choreography as we loaded into the cabin, removing each box and placing it carefully in the overhead compartment. If anyone looked annoyed or frustrated, all we had to do was say the magic words, ‘We’re going to Oprah!’ It’s amazing how fast that line can turn eye rolls into high-fives. We arrived before Oprah, just in time to perfectly hand-plate all 350 cupcakes and to catch her walking in for hair and makeup (followed by Mary J. Blige, who was the guest performer that day—as if the day could get any better).”
On her show, Winfrey sang Sprinkles’ praises and said it was her friend, Barbra Streisand, who introduced her to Sprinkles. After tasting the cupcakes, Streisand sent a box to Winfrey, who spread the gospel to her studio audience. The fateful Breakfast with Oprah episode aired on February 1, 2006.
The upshot was a “line that wrapped all the way down our block and around the other side. And it remained that way for months. Overnight, our little bakery had become a sensation with brand recognition around the world. The Oprah Effect was incredible: Our sales reached new heights of up to twenty thousand cupcakes a day in Beverly Hills!”
The cupcakes were an affordable luxury for everyday people and a status symbol for the elite. “You wouldn’t believe the parade of people who waltzed through our doors in that first year: It ranged from perfectly manicured Beverly Hills socialites to celebrities with full entourages, rock stars, sports greats and top managers, agents, assistants, and even Saudi princesses,” writes Nelson in Sweet Success. “Honestly, it was jaw-dropping at the time and remains that way today. We had every studio’s holiday list and were on speed dial for all the private plane catering companies. In short, we had a front-row seat to how the 1 percent lived—with cupcakes.”
Actors and entertainers took the initiative to make public endorsements. “Without any soliciting at all, we found ourselves with several high-profile celebrity spokespeople: from Blake Lively expressing her love for Sprinkles Cupcakes on a national morning show to Ellen celebrating with vegan red velvets on her talk show, Pamela Anderson dropping a mention on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Russell Crowe gushing on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Britney Spears, Selena Gomez . . . the list goes on.”
Prospectors seeking gold hopped on the bandwagon and opened cupcakeries, in some cases changing careers. The New York Times identified a “rash of white-collar professionals in Los Angeles [who] have traded corporate jobs for lives as flour-coated entrepreneurs. In the past year, about a dozen boutique bakeries serving expensive versions of all-American desserts like banana pudding and $3 red velvet cupcakes have popped up around the city, many run by second-act bakers.”
The new bakeries sent out a flood of press releases. “Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer-winning food critic for LA Weekly, said hardly a week goes by without a box of cookies or cupcakes landing on his desk from a new place he’s never heard of,” writes the Times. “‘And they’re not just cupcakes,’ he said. ‘They’re cupcakes with publicists.’”
This was in mid-2007. Months later, another press release would arrive from Crumbs Bakeshop, which was opening its first location outside of New York. It rented a storefront on Little Santa Monica about three blocks or 1,000 feet from Sprinkles. Their queues sometimes intersected. Eater LA headlined it the “cupcake war of Beverly Hills.”
Then a TV producer took it to the next level.
Sprinkles stars in Cupcake Wars
One day in the late 2000s, a woman got a revelatory idea after seeing a series of cupcakeries on Little Santa Monica. “She passed us and she passed another cupcake shop, and she passed another bakery just down the way, and she said, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s a goddamn cupcake war out there,’” Nelson says. “So she pitched the idea to Food Network, and they really liked it, and originally it was supposed to be a docu-series, but then they came back and said they wanted it to be a competition.”
The producer got the green light from the Food Network to film Cupcake Wars. The show features professional bakers competing for the top score and a $10,000 prize. Nelson was a judge beginning with the show’s 2010 premiere and continuing through more than 100 episodes spanning six years. “On every episode, I was positioned as the preeminent expert on cupcakes, and I presided at the judges’ table, tasting, reviewing, and voting for my favorite cupcake. With each new season, our production studios improved, the sets became more elaborate, and the guest judges became increasingly famous. I was on a hit show! I started getting autograph requests, being recognized at the grocery store and fielding offers to walk red carpets. All this translated into a halo effect for Sprinkles, positioning our company as the unequivocal leader in the field.”
In addition to the Food Network, the Sprinkles name was appearing on TV shows and movie screens. At the same time, the cupcakes were regularly pictured in women’s and lifestyle magazines as a celebrity must-have.
“Sprinkles Cupcakes was written into television shows like Entourage,” writes Nelson in Sweet Success. “In fact, there’s a memorable scene in which Ari Gold, bigwig agent, comes rolling through the office boasting, ‘I brought Cristal and Sprinkles Cupcakes, your favorite.’ We popped up on the small screen, with a prominent role in The Girls Next Door, a reality show about Hugh Hefner’s three main girlfriends living it up at the Playboy mansion, and were even mentioned on the big screen in Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”
Sprinkles introduces the cupcake ATM
Necessity is the mother of invention, the proverb goes. Motherhood was indeed the source of Sprinkles’ next headline-grabbing innovation, a vending machine that became known as the cupcake ATM.
“Five years into our Sprinkles journey, I became pregnant with our second son,” writes Nelson. “Late one evening—well into that pregnancy—Charles and I returned home from a party and all I wanted was a cupcake. Not just any cupcake—one of my cupcakes. I was customer zero, after all. Despite having almost constant access for years, I still devoured them with gusto. … People were amazed that I wasn’t sick of them. And no time was that truer than during both of my pregnancies. On this evening, I was well into my third trimester and the craving was intense and only a Sprinkles dark chocolate cupcake would do. Easy enough, right? Well, not exactly. I had already eaten all the cupcakes at the house (yes, I kept a stash at home), and it was well past Sprinkles’ closing time. … [M]y husband and I started playing with ideas and what ifs. What if you could get a cupcake at any time of night? If you did, then you could monetize twenty-four hours a day. We were already paying rent twenty-four hours a day for a storefront but only open for a portion of that. This went on and on . . . until we landed on it. Yes, it was late at night in the middle of a pregnancy-driven chocolate cupcake craving that the idea for a cupcake vending machine was born.”
The cupcake ATM debuted adjacent to the original Sprinkles’ Beverly Hills store in March 2012. To keep the cupcakes fresh, it was refilled several times daily and unsold cupcakes were removed each morning. Initial demand exceeded the machine’s capacity. Parts melted down and a technician had to stand sentry to troubleshoot.
“Our weird little invention wasn’t just the internet conversation du jour, it also became the ultimate punchline for some very famous late-night comedians like Jay Leno and Craig Ferguson and inspired a ‘Top 10’ list by Dave Letterman,” Nelson writes. The ATM “even had its fifteen minutes of fame on hard news—Wolf Blitzer of CNN reported on it in his nightly show! And it made it into the plotlines of TV shows such as 2 Broke Girls and Bunheads. That ‘crazy idea’ became a media sensation, tourist attraction, significant revenue driver, and incredibly prescient form of contactless delivery.”
Behind the scenes, the Nelsons were formulating a dramatic change for Sprinkles. In 2012, they sold the company to a private investment firm, KarpReilly, for an undisclosed amount.
In the following years, Nelson would write The Sprinkles Baking Book, which became a New York Times bestseller upon its 2016 release. She was an executive producer and judge on the Netflix show Sugar Rush from 2018 to 2020.
Celebrities love Sprinkles
As time passed, celebrities continued to namecheck Sprinkles. Actress Emma Roberts’ idea of the “perfect cupcake” is teased on the cover of the December 2017 Shape magazine. In the inside article, Roberts defines perfection as a Sprinkles cupcake. Katie Holmes posted a 2018 Instagram picture of herself with a Sprinkles in each hand as she gazes at six dozen more laid before her. Actress Reese Witherspoon contributed a recipe to The Sprinkles Baking Book, visited a Sprinkles with Nelson in 2022, and wore a Sprinkles t-shirt as she frosted cupcakes with Nelson for a 2025 International Women’s Day post.
K-pop singer Taeyeon displayed Sprinkles to her followers, numbering about 16 million at the time of her 2019 post. More than 741,000 people liked the post.
Actress Blake Lively is pictured with eyes intently locked on Sprinkles. The post is captioned “Why can’t I quit you?” and it received 1.2 million likes. Lively has a longstanding relationship with Sprinkles and was integral to the company’s New York opening. “I remember watching Live with Regis and Kelly in amazement one morning in 2008 as Blake Lively shared her passion for Sprinkles and her wish that we would open an outpost in New York City,” Nelson writes in Sweet Success. “She had already been a vocal fan at this point, and it occurred to me that Blake needed to have her very own Sprinkles Cupcake. As she was an accomplished chef in her own right, it made so much sense! Later, when we debuted our NYC bakery, I approached her with the idea of creating a new flavor for our menu with proceeds going to support the charity of her choice. Blake was inspired to create not just a delicious new flavor but an experience in a bite. After months of experimenting, the scrumptious s’more cupcake was born, and Blake chose Oxfam, a charity close to her heart, to be the recipient of the proceeds. Fans of both Blake and Sprinkles came out in droves to raise tens of thousands of dollars for Oxfam.” Lively’s s’more cupcake also made it into The Sprinkles Baking Book.
In 2017, the Nelsons opened another restaurant for their celebrity and civilian fans, Pizzana. They classify it as a neo-Neapolitan pizzeria. Actor Chris O’Donnell and his wife, Caroline, are co-owners along with the Nelsons. Its executive chef, Daniele Uditi, starred in Best in Dough, a Hulu show produced by Candace Nelson.
Entrepreneurial emphasis
Nelson mentors women entrepreneurs and invests in start-ups through the venture firm she and her husband run. In 2022, she authored her Sweet Success business book.
She had a massive platform to show her business wit when she was cast as a Shark Tank guest investor. She appears in season 15, making her debut in September 2023. In episode 1, she invests in entrepreneur Kristen Dunning and her personal care company, Gently Soap.
Having exited Sprinkles, Nelson conducted a challenging exercise to diversify her public image. She outlines her metamorphosis in “How the Cupcake Queen Broke Free of Her Brand,” a 2024 Inc. magazine essay. “I’ve shifted my content to reflect my growing interests,” she writes. “The cozy kitchen settings that characterized my earlier posts have been replaced with motivational quote cards, videos from women’s networking events, and deeper insights into my entrepreneurial journey. Shifting my focus from Instagram to LinkedIn, I’ve begun offering guidance on mindset, networking, and funding in an effort to appeal to a more business-oriented community. Gradually, my inbox has transformed from a collection of recipe requests to assorted inquiries about mentorship, investment opportunities, and speaking engagements. Small business owners and entrepreneurs have reached out to express how I inspired them. HarperCollins Leadership approached me to write a book about my journey called Sweet Success. The icing on the (cup)cake? The offer to be a guest Shark on the latest season of Shark Tank – not in my capacity as a celebrated baker, but as a seasoned entrepreneur and investor.”
Nelson’s reinvention from cupcake baker to business leadership expert has been nonlinear. In a full-circle moment, she returned to the small screen in late 2025 to produce and judge Next Level Baker.
As for Nelson’s early-aughts delusion to open a cupcakes-only bakery, the numbers answer the question. Sprinkles in 2024 amounted to “200 million cupcakes sold / 20 stores / 30 ATMs / 1,000 employees.”
Passion for Sprinkles Cupcakes
Behind the numbers is a borderline carnal desire like Rachael Victoria’s. Victoria is an Irish Independent reporter who penned a love note to New York, with a vital role for Sprinkles. “When I say that the red velvet cupcake from Sprinkles has lived in my mind rent-free for the past three years, I’m not exaggerating,” writes Victoria in a recap of a 2022 trip. “During my last visit to New York in February 2020, mere weeks before everything changed, I took my commitment to the next level and carried one all the way home to Co Laois.”
Behind the numbers is every testimonial issued following news of Sprinkles’ closure. Nelson is reposting some on Instagram.
On the passion-reason spectrum, cupcakes are creatures of passion. The loyalty to Sprinkles may prove stronger than the calculations of capital.
In 2022, a Sprinkles executive told the trade press the company was “headed for monumental growth in the next five years.” While the pendulum is no longer swinging in that direction, it’s premature to issue a death certificate.
Andrea Adleman | Cupcakologist 