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.