A block-and-a-half-long line snaked down Snell Avenue before Panapolis Bakery even opened its fourth San Jose location on October 11, and within 90 minutes, every tray in the display case was empty. For owner Aldo Ortiz, it was the latest proof that his family’s pan dulce has found an audience far beyond the kitchen where he started.
Ortiz, who is a third-generation baker, opened Panapolis No. 4 at 5469 Snell Ave., according to San José Spotlight. Customers began lining up a full hour before the doors opened, and the queue stretched a block and a half, the outlet reports. District 2 Councilmember Pamela Campos attended the opening, telling the outlet that a fourth Panapolis location landing in her district excited her and that she planned to try the elote pan dulce and conchas. The Consul General of México, Neftali Said Pérez González, was scheduled to give remarks at the event as well, per the same account.
From a Morgan Hill Bakery Job to a Family Business
Ortiz came to the United States in 2012 at age 16, and he landed a job in 2015 at his uncle’s Panaderia Ortiz in Morgan Hill, the outlet notes. Within a year of Ortiz taking charge of production there, the bakery’s daily sales jumped from 500 baked items a day to 3,000, San José Spotlight reports. Ortiz has said his grandfather, uncles and father were all bakers, a family lineage he described to Telemundo Área de la Bahía as the reason he got into the trade himself.
In 2018, Ortiz opened the first Panapolis bakery in Michoacán, before returning to the United States in 2020 with $5,000 in savings and a son three weeks from being born, according to the same San José Spotlight report. To rebuild capital, he worked 16 to 19 hours a day across four bakeries owned by four different uncles for four months. He later rented kitchen space from his uncle’s Ortiz Bakery and bought a van, with his father helping him get the business off the ground.
A Mobile Bakery Finds Its Footing
That van became the seed of Panapolis Panaderia, the mobile bakery operation Ortiz told Telemundo Área de la Bahía had been his idea for about a year by the time he spoke with the outlet in October 2023. He and a colleague would start baking at 1 a.m. to supply both a sales point and the van, he said. Ortiz told the station that customers from different backgrounds, including Filipino and American patrons, responded well and helped spread the word on social media — a boost that, according to San José Spotlight, took his daily sales from less than $200 to more than $1,000 after one of his videos drew 9 million views…