Most mornings around 8 at Little Miss Muffin headquarters on North Rockwell, the ovens fire up and a staff of some 38 bakers goes to work. “We bake for about 12 hours a day,” says Staci Munic Mintz, who runs the operation with her brother Kenny. As the sun goes down, the company’s seven muffinmobiles hit the streets, making overnight deliveries of muffins, doughnuts, scones, brownies, croissants, cookies, and bars to coffeehouses, restaurants, and hotels throughout Chicago and beyond.
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The muffin idea couldn’t have been better timed for his son and daughter. Staci had gone straight from college with a degree in hotel restaurant management into a corporate job with Levy Restaurants, working at properties including Spiaggia, Bistro 110, and the Blackhawk Lodge. After nearly five years with Levy she had taken some time off to travel, including a three-week stint volunteering with the Israeli army. Recently she’d returned home, and she couldn’t decide what to do next.
Staci came up with the idea of focusing on low-fat muffins, and the two went to work. “Our dad had had a full-size commercial baking setup in one of his restaurants, and we rented space in the basement,” says Kenny. “Our first generation of muffins was very standard–blueberry, lemon poppy seed, cranberry–but our customers wanted new things.”
As Little Miss Muffin approaches its tenth anniversary, the siblings are still thinking up ways to expand their business. In early November the bakery launched a line called Karma Cookies. Each one has a different Asian symbol on it, says Staci, with translations printed on the package–family, prosperity, joy, or happiness.
