Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
OREM — Back in 1981, Nancy Whitney and her husband were attending general conference in Salt Lake City when they caught a craving for something sweet.
"I think it was called Granny's Buns or something, and it was down in the basement of this mall. ... (We) got a whole bunch of those and took them up to the room," Whitney said. "We got home, and I thought, 'You know, I should be able to make something like that.'"
So she got to work on her own cinnamon roll recipe, tweaking it until she got the dough just how she wanted it.
"The bread in the cinnamon roll is everything," she explained.
From her own kitchen, Whitney brought her recipe to her church gatherings, baking cinnamon rolls for events, fundraisers and everything in between.
"We would start cooking at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. We would cook all night long, and the kids would come in in the morning, get the finished product and go deliver and bring the money back for the fundraiser. We did that twice a year for I don't know how many years," said Whitney, who is affectionately known as "Meemaw" by friends and family.
Even though she knew her cinnamon rolls were widely beloved, she had no idea then that her recipe would snowball into Sunshine Buns, a successful delivery business run by her daughter and her daughter's best friend.
And now, through the determination of Whitney's daughter Chrisi Hammer and Hammer's best friend, Kass Martin, Sunshine Buns on Friday opened its first brick-and-mortar location in Orem.
Here's how it happened and how Sunshine Buns is "delivering sunshine one bun at a time."
'We should do this'
Like a lot of businesses, Sunshine Buns started with a conversation between friends. And Martin said she is not one to say "no" to things that excite her.
Martin and Hammer were on a double date with their husbands in September 2022 when the idea came to turn Whitney's recipe into a business.
"I don't even remember who said it, but it was just like, 'We should do this,'" Martin said. "If we can't get Meemaw to do it, she said 'no,' she has denied us a number of times, then what if we just did it?"
In between acts of the play they were seeing, Martin leaned over to Hammer and uttered the fateful words, "Sunshine Buns: Delivering sunshine one bun at a time."
With that, they had their business name and tagline.
After a bit of work refining their own baking skills, they were ready to test their product and did so by offering daily orders and deliveries in the Saratoga Springs area starting in November.
"We're like, 'Oh, probably no one will order.' We were very wrong,'" Hammer said, adding that she and Martin each made two dozen rolls in the morning in preparation for the delivery service going live.
"We went live, and we sold, I don't know, 18 dozen in one day. We're just doing this from our house, you know. We thought we were just going to give it a little go. So we had to turn off orders almost immediately."
What the duo initially planned to do only once a week quickly turned into something they were doing every day except Sunday, leading them to eventually rent an industrial kitchen space to prepare bulk orders.
With the business being highly successful, Martin and Hammer in the summer of 2023 decided to take the next step, securing a brick-and-mortar store in Orem that opened Friday, around a year later.
The storefront, located at 1086 S. State in Orem, will be serving up "Meemaw's Original" cinnamon roll, along with a host of other cinnamon roll variations, including peanut butter and jelly, cookies and cream, Biscoff and strawberries and cream, to name a few.
Creating community
Martin and Hammer said they want the Sunshine Buns location to have a homey feel, almost as if customers were a guest in Whitney's kitchen.
"Other dessert places ... it's not really a come and stay awhile type of energy, and we really wanted to stick out for that. We wanted it to be a place where you can go there for a date night, a girls' night, a baby shower, a friend is visiting, a family night," Martin said. "We want it to be that kind of place where people can come for that sunshine. Not just come in and leave, but to kind of feel that energy."
Hammer said they want Sunshine Buns to feel different than a "churn and burn for cash type of place."
Additionally, Hammer said she knows what it's like to be a young person in Utah County.
"I remember when I was a single mom ... I was back here in Utah. I was 26, so I was young. The singles in Provo would hang out at Yogurt Land, in the parking lot, because there was nowhere for them to go, and I think that still applies. I would love a place for these 60,000 college kids to go and hang out," Hammer said.
'It just makes me smile'
Whitney said she's always looked at cooking and baking as a way to "bless the lives of others."
Still, she couldn't have imagined her cinnamon roll recipe growing out of her own kitchen into a successful delivery business and now, a brick-and-mortar store.
"It's just a real joy to see something from so far in the past really have any impact or any meaning at all to anybody," Whitney said. "It just makes me smile every time I think about it and every time I drive past it."
She added about Hammer and Martin: "They have surpassed the master. They have a beautiful product, and honestly, I go to them for cinnamon rolls now."
