MOBILE, Ala. — The Mobile cinnamon roll business Cinné exists because a boy did not want birthday cake. Chase Joseph asked for cinnamon rolls instead, and his mother, Whitney Joseph, eventually decided to stop buying them and bake her own. Today her house-made rolls sell out at local markets and pop-ups, have gone viral on social media more than once, and have become her full-time job.
From a birthday workaround to a business
For years, Whitney Joseph picked up mini cinnamon rolls from Cinnabon and built a cake-like stack at home for her son’s birthday. One year, she said, the only gift Chase wanted was quality time with the family. The next year she made the rolls herself, calling it a way to share her love. Her family agreed that the homemade version beat the mall version.
She began baking more often and sharing the rolls with friends and church volunteers. They kept asking for more and urged her to sell them. Her first customer was the mother of a friend, who bought them to treat her employees. Afterward, the friend reported she never got a roll herself because everyone went back for seconds.
Joseph started with pop-ups at her church and chose the name Cinné, pairing it with what she described as an artisan, elegant look and flavor combinations customers would not recognize. She spent about six months last year on market research and on perfecting her cinnamon blend, which uses three kinds of cinnamon. Her husband, Marcel, and their children, Ezari and Chase, served as taste testers. Joseph joked that because she smells so much cinnamon, she has trouble judging it herself.
A first market, a signature flavor and a viral clip
Cinné’s first official market pop-up came at the Second Saturday Market in January. The family asked friends who had praised the rolls to show up, and they did. Marcel’s phone records show 19 sales that day, roughly 60 rolls.
The flavors were a major draw. The first was Malva, a nod to Joseph’s South African heritage: apricot jam folded into the dough, cream cheese icing, a thick apricot sauce, a caramelized apricot slice and a hibiscus drizzle. Other flavors followed, including lemon raspberry, creamy Biscoff, bacon espresso and caramel apple, and later banoffee, peach cobbler, samoa, caramel pecan and Oreo crumb.
Malva was also the flavor behind Cinné’s first viral moment. At an event with the city of Mobile’s Parks and Recreation department, Joseph shot raw video of passersby trying samples that Ezari handed out, mainly so she would have something to post. In one clip, a customer says, “I’m diabetic, but can I have one of those?” while handing back the sample cup and pointing at the full-size rolls. She stitched the clips together that night and posted them to Instagram, expecting maybe 100 views and five likes.
By morning the account had gone from 40 followers to 4,000 in a day and a half. The video has since passed 280,000 views, and the account has more than 10,000 followers. That was before the business had a TikTok account.
More attention followed. Food influencers, including Zack in the South, have praised the rolls. Marcel also recalled a man who wandered up to a pre-order event, which normally does not take walk-ups, to see why so many cars were parked nearby. The family gave him extra rolls once the crowd thinned. He turned out to have about 50,000 followers and posted a review.
Demand outgrows the cottage kitchen
This summer the Josephs moved Cinné from a cottage bakery to The Continental Commissary Kitchen on Azalea Road. Marcel said the Second Saturday Market used to take about two and a half hours to sell around eight pans of rolls. Now they sell nearly 20 pans in the same time. In July, before the family left on a trip, they brought six pans to the market and the line grew so long that they had to turn people away for the first time. They baked more afterward.
Customers are not just local. The family said they regularly see people who drive in from Montgomery, Birmingham, Pensacola and even Louisiana.
The workload has grown enough that Joseph recently left her job to run Cinné full time. She said that during her first week away from it, while washing dishes in the commissary kitchen, she realized she was happy to have found work tied to her love language of cooking for others.
How Cinné works
Cinné posts a monthly menu on social media with special flavors and standard favorites. It announces pop-ups and pickups the week they happen, and preorders for pickup open the Sunday evening before. The schedule is demanding: three-hour weekly shopping trips for ingredients and 1 a.m. Saturday wake-ups to prepare pickup orders.
Nearly everything is made in-house, from caramel and fudge to lemon curd and blueberry compote. Joseph said the only exception is the Biscoff spread. Marcel listed the caramel varieties: a regular praline caramel, a malt caramel, a peach caramel and a banana caramel. Joseph keeps a binder of recipes for toppings, icings and caramels, though she says she now knows the basics by heart.
The whole family helps. Marcel started by supporting his wife’s dream, then took on washing dishes, making the cream cheese icing each week and handling the business logistics. Ezari and Chase fill and roll dough and serve customers on market days. According to Joseph, when people at the market ask how Cinné started, Chase says, “I’m the reason! You’re welcome.”
Joseph said she never considered herself a baker. She traced her fondness for cinnamon to childhood, when she used an Easy-Bake oven to make little sandwiches of bread and cinnamon. “We’re so tight-knit,” she said, adding that she doubts she would have kept going without her family’s support.
Cinnamon rolls have been in the local spotlight lately: South AL News also reported that Dauphin Island’s Lighthouse Bakery was named home of Alabama’s best cinnamon rolls.
