“I always dreamed of having a real brick-and-mortar bakery,” said Sara Leand, CEO and owner of The Snackery in Rye.
Although the bakery opened in Larchmont in 2018, Leand’s dream came to a halt during the pandemic. With the lease set to expire, she closed the bakery. But she wasn’t done with the dream. After a year of testing new recipes and rebuilding, she reopened the bakery in Rye in 2021.
Treats with nostalgic twists – 21st-century versions of Twinkies, Moon Pies, Oreos, Ring Dings and Yodels, anyone? – as well as cookies, cakes, pies and breakfast and lunch items are only part of what makes The Snackery successful. Leand lists the importance of prioritizing customer service, being entrepreneurial in spirit, figuring out ways to market yourself, finding the right audience for your business and focusing on your target audience’s needs.
She also emphasized the importance of being there for your business. “No one has the heart or takes it as personally as the person who dreamed it up,” she said.
Leand has always baked. While at the University of Arizona at Tuscon, she started selling her homemade cookies on campus and at local stores. However, the business began to take up all of her time, and she stopped selling her cookies.
After graduation, she moved to Los Angeles and started working in the film industry. She became a TV executive at 25 and stayed in that role for three years before heading to United Talent Agency, developing shows with everyone from Marvel universe creator Stan Lee to Oscar-winning rapper Eminem.
In 2004, she started her own company, Organized Chaos Productions, which developed shows for MTV, Lifetime, TLC and the E! Channel. She ran the company for two years in LA and two years in New York City after moving to the Big Apple in 2006.
Cookies, however, remained a constant: “When I graduated and moved to LA, I would just bake for my close friends and always thought I would come back to it.”
In 2008, she wrapped up running her production company and started building the Sara Snacker Cookie Co., which sold to multiple supermarkets throughout the East Coast and Midwest and became the No. 2 American cookie in Citarella. She continued to run the company until 2017, when she decided she wanted to open a bakery.
In the future, she hopes to get national shipping for The Snackery’s cookies and have some products in supermarkets. She is also always looking for other potential store locations.
The sweet dream continues.
