Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Klegman and Elina Tilipman.
Elina and Sarah, please kick things off for us with some background on your story.
Elina spent most of her life in Berlin before moving to LA, and Sarah was raised in the midwest and moved to LA after film school. Elina’s first career was as a music manager for a while, touring bands and doing generally badass, artsy stuff all over the world.
Sarah’s first career was as a comedy manager and producer, representing stand-ups and making comedy content. We met around 2014 at a mutual friend’s brunch where Sarah was showing off pictures of challah she had baked (she grew up baking challah at home with her mom in Michigan).
Never having baked challah before (because she only found out she was Jewish when she was 12) Elina offered to pay for Sarah’s brunch in exchange for Sarah teaching her how to bake challah, and never one to say no to a free brunch and new friends – Sarah said yes.
We met up to bake challah, and Elina asked about the weirdest challah Sarah had ever made. Not satisfied with the answer, we decided to try some weird challah recipes of our own and began experimenting. We shared photos of our bakes on social media and people got excited, so we opened our Instagram.
Then people asked for recipes, so we started a blog, sharing recipes. THEN people asked to taste the challah. At this point, we had both started working for a cool tech startup that operated out of a beach house in Venice – with a kitchen. Our coworkers greatly enjoyed being the guinea pigs for our challah flavors.
But the demand from our followers to taste the challah was still there, so we applied for and received small grants from Jewish organizations to host tasting events in cool parts of town (like an oceanfront beach house, or Mama Shelter hotel in Hollywood), where we’d bake 30+ flavors. That led to learning how to scale our recipes and hiring a small team to help us scale our recipes so that we could try pop-ups and bread festivals.
We knew we had something with Challah Hub, but neither of us had any interest in having a brick and mortar bakery (Sarah also has a career as a writer and storyteller, and Elina has a dope neon company). So we decided to experiment with delivery and did a partnership with Uber Eats in 2015, which went great.
Working with them was not ideal, so we built our own little delivery fleet, and partnered with a Kosher bakery in Burbank to make our recipes. Today, we offer challah delivery on the first Friday of every month, and we’re known for our wild flavors. Like mint chocolate chip, and triple chocolate. All vegan, all kosher.
Since then, we’ve collaborated on a video with Buzzfeed that got over 11 million views, shot bonus content for PBS’s The Great British Baking Show, and have been featured in every major Jewish news publication around the world.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Hah! Oh, we’ve learned SO much as Challah Hub continues growing and evolving. One of the great realizations we had when starting out was that EVERYONE starts somewhere, and rarely knows what they’re doing. Not to mention neither of us had a professional background in baking, experience in the baking business, or knew anything about running a culinary business… at all.
Baking means experimenting. Ask any baker about the process of scaling a recipe, and they’re likely to squint their eyes, raise their eyebrows, and shrug – or just shake their head and walk away. It’s all trial and error. Sometimes you do an experiment – like matcha challah – and it’s DELICIOUS.
Other times you try something like macaroni and cheese challah and wonder how you could have ruined two of your favorite things in the world. We had to learn everything as we did it. Working with large companies meant dealing with things like delays in payments, or kinks in the chain that meant we weren’t able to provide the best customer experience possible.
Kosher certification would have been a whole other hurdle, but luckily our partnership with the incredible humans at Continental Kosher Bakery in Burbank made that easy. But it’s hard selling bread. People love looking at the pictures we share on Instagram, and they love coming to see us at pop-ups, and boy do they love tasting our challah, but we’re still learning how to market in a way that results in sales.
To give you an idea – when our Buzzfeed video got over ten million views, that only resulted in 10 new customers. So people love us, and they love our product – we just need to get better at marketing that side of our company. Oh – and finally, the biggest struggle: gluten.
The question we get asked the most is “when will you have gluten-free challah?” and our answer has always been “never, because we only make absurdly delicious challah, and we haven’t found a way to make absurdly delicious challah without gluten.” But we’ve got some things cookin’ for 2019… so who knows what we’ll do with or without gluten this year!
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Challah Hub creates and delivers unique, delicious, vegan, kosher challah, all over Los Angeles. We’re known for our fun branding (we’re bright pink, and say arguably appropriate things in our IG captions), and our fun flavors.
Like mint chocolate chip. We’re proud of building something from nothing, and building the challah-plane as we’re flying it. We’re proud that it’s just been the two of us building this crazy thing. We’re proud that we’re able to offer vegan challah – that even the pickiest carnivores love, too.
We’re proud that since we haven’t taken on investors, we’ve been able to do it all on our own terms, which is why our branding is fun, and our flavors are weird. We’re also really proud of the work we’ve done in the community. We’ve hosted a number of charity bakes at the Downtown Women’s Center, where we gather groups to bake as much challah for the women there as possible.
We also travel to Jewish festivals all over the world and host baking sessions (last year, Sarah went on a speaking and challah-ing tour to London, Paris, Atlanta, Cape Town, and Johannesburg). We’re proud to be Jewish, and proud to be doing something that modernizes this ancient, delicious tradition. And we’re also proud that we’re getting LA to eat carbs.
What were you like growing up?
Sarah was a fast-talking, story-telling, spotlight-loving kid, with a really big heart and a love of carbs. Not much has changed.
Elina doesn’t remember much of her childhood, besides spending most of her time practicing piano, or spending hours biking around the city with friends.
Pricing:
- Plain Challah – $10
- Chocolate Chip Challah – $12
- Turmeric Challah – $15
- Challah Towel – $18
- Challah Cover – $18
Contact Info:
- Website: www.challahhub.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/challahhub/
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/challahHub/
Image Credit:
Jackson Davis for Challah Hub and Unkosher Market, Chocolate Chip Challah: Sally Claire Gilles
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
