For the Finest Sprinkles and Cookie Decorating Supplies, Drive to Daly City

For all those baking cookies this holiday season, the time has come to rummage for cookie cutters, food coloring and sprinkles. Friends often ask, where’s the best place to get decorating supplies? Well, allow me to share what sprinkles queen Gillian Shaw Lundgren of Black Jet Baking Co. once told me: The best resource isn’t in San Francisco. It’s just south in Daly City. Sugar ’n Spice might be the largest and oldest baking supply store in the Bay Area, open at this location for 29 years, with a history dating back 50 years.

In a strip mall just off 280, pull up to a faded storefront with a gingerbread man over the door. Step inside for an explosion of more than a hundred different varieties of sprinkles. “It’s kind of an experience,” Shaw Lundgren confides. “You’re sort of stepping back in time to a different way that people used to do pastry. Everybody that’s in there is excited to be in there.”

At the heart of the business, there’s a mother-daughter duo. The mother is Jeanné Lutz, who’s “kind of old school and Italian,” according to her family, and worked the register well into her 80s. She went to UCSF, became a nurse and got into baking as a hobby in the ’60s. Lutz opened the original Sugar ’n Spice in 1973, as a tiny shop at 33rd Avenue and Balboa Street in the Richmond District. At one point she had three locations across San Francisco, San Mateo and Petaluma. She closed the original following a fire in 1994 and initially planned to retire.

The daughter is Joey Rogers, who often rings up purchases with a fabulous manicure. She graduated early from high school at 14 years old and completed the baking and pastry program California Culinary Academy before attending UC Berkeley and becoming an accountant. “I hated it,” Rogers says. So, she quit and returned to baking and teaching instead, even traveling to cake competitions in Las Vegas in the ’80s. Her pastry students would ask for supplies, and she knew all the vendors. But it wasn’t until her mother closed her stores and came down with cancer that Rogers finally felt inspired to carry on the family business. She opened her own shop — also called Sugar ‘n Spice — at the current Daly City location in 1994.

Today, Sugar ’n Spice prides itself on being a one-stop shop to cover all your baking needs. You can find essential ingredients, including flour, sugar and chocolate. Decorations to take creations over the top, such as sprinkles, food coloring and more. Trusty tools from every size of round pan to every shape of cookie cutter. Plus packaging, with cake boxes, cookie bags and ribbons to tie it all up in a bow.

In particular, shoppers drop jaws in the sprinkles aisle. Rogers stocks 102 different varieties of sprinkles, swapping them seasonally, so there’s always a new thrill. They range from tiny nonpareils the size of seeds to cupcake toppers shaped like Easter bunnies or Santa’s face. The mixes tend to be the most popular — like the Thanksgiving mix, which tosses together autumnal brown, orange and gold sprinkles, punctuated with mini pumpkins and maple leaves.

Black Jet’s Shaw Lundgren has been a fan of the shop for over a decade, especially before she opened her own storefront. At that time, Amazon Prime didn’t exist, Michaels didn’t offer much and her business was too small to order wholesale. Sugar ’n Spice offered a few cake boards or boxes, without having to order a hundred. Even now, Shaw Lundgren swings through for small quantities of sprinkles, especially seasonal shapes like footballs. “It’s really reasonably priced,” she says. “They’ve figured out how to sell to home bakers, where you don’t need to buy a ridiculous amount.”

Across the Bay Area, there are a few other baking supply stores, including the Cake Works in San Jose, open since 1975. Nancy’s Fancy’s in Santa Rosa carries baking supplies, folded into a wider selection of party supplies. Several others have closed over the years, including Spun Sugar in Berkeley, which shuttered in 2022.

But Sugar ’n Spice still bustles through the holidays, doing ten times its usual business in November and December. It welcomes home bakers and pastry chefs alike — including a few from fancy hotels, though Rogers declined to drop names. Certain regulars have been coming for decades or generations. They still remember taking classes with Rogers’ mother and now send their kids to her camps.

More beginners walk in at this time of year. “Everybody who never goes into their kitchen during the rest of the year, they’re in their kitchen now,” Rogers sighs. Many flash an Instagram photo of a cake or cookie and ask, “How do I make this?” Rogers does her best to guide them in the right direction. She says one really buys cookbooks anymore. They go straight to YouTube and make a dozen mistakes before signing up for one of her classes. “I don’t say that you can’t learn something on the internet! But everybody’s not a visual learner.”

From her vantage point across the counter, Rogers likes to ask what you’re making. She loves to see photos of customer creations. “No matter what you’re trying to do, whether it’s the first time, this is the place to come to get your stuff,” Rogers says. “There are so many more possibilities here than you would find at the grocery store.”

Sugar ’n Spice is located at 2965 Junipero Serra Blvd. in Daly City.