Popular ice cream pop-up, Ruru Baked, has finally got its own storefront and it's in one of the best neighbourhoods in the city for food. Throughout the summer, Ruru Baked was holding their scoop and pint pickups out of Empire Espresso on College Street but they have finally been able to find a suitable storefront space on Bloor West. Conzo's, Sugo, Donna's and Baddies, to name a few, welcome owner Luanne Ronquillo and her new ice cream shop to the Bloor and Lansdowne neighbourhood. Ruru Baked will be located at 659 Lansdowne, the previous address of Lansdowne Cone, which has since moved to the east end.
Ruru Baked has taken the city of Toronto by storm this summer. Although Luanne Ronquillo has been operating her ice cream pop-ups since 2017, it wasn't until this year that her business really started to take off. It has arguably become Toronto's most sought after pints of ice cream over the past five months.
Ruru Baked has a pop-up and pint drop business model. Most weeks this past summer and continuing into the fall, Luanne released a limited number of pints that customers could pre-order. She would also announce the occasional scoop pop-up via Instagram, that would allow customers to grab ice cream scoops and pick up merchandise.
Prior to the announcement of the new storefront, Luanne was producing as much ice cream as she could in her 100 square foot production kitchen, equipped with small ice cream machines. Supply did not meet demand and her ice cream pre-order drops would sell out online in less than five minutes, week after week. To say that Torontonians like her ice cream is a gross understatement.
Luanne's new location is 1,300 square feet -- a much-needed upgrade from her previous location, which was more than 10 times smaller. Luanne plans on using the space "ALL YEAR LONG," she says playfully in an interview with TasteToronto. "The place we have is quite large and it is quite bigger than we actually need. But the electrical, plumbing and of course, the location made this hard to pass up on. My spot right now is about 100 square feet, so it is quite the jump," she explains.
"I plan to increase my ice cream production by at least double. If the demand is still crazy high, which I don't think it will be once we are available all the time, I doubt we will do weekly pre-order drops any longer. But if the demand is still really insane and people want to pre-order, we will continue as is. We will keep the drop business model until we get a good handle of things and we will go from that to having the ice cream in the fridge where people can come and get what they want," Ronquillo elaborates.
"I have had Ruru Baked since 2017, so it is not a new business. The pandemic, I say this as humbly as possible, created the perfect storm and led to the success of my business. Everyone was at home and on their phones, everyone wanted to support local and boycott Uber Eats, and people were just at home and needed to stock up on comfort food. All of these things just worked in our favour," Luanne shares.
Luanne has certainly shown that perseverance, hard work and support from the community can lead to great things. At the beginning of the year, Luanne was working four jobs and was unsure of what career path she wanted to pursue. Fast forward several months later and Luanne has taken on Ruru Baked full time and is opening her very own brick-and-mortar ice cream shop.
She ends the interview by sharing that she is not working on any new crazy flavours at the moment. She is working very hard to try and complete renovations so she can get serving from her new location as soon as possible. The opening date will be announced soon but check out Ruru Baked's Instagram page for more updates.
