Rising like dough on a warm counter, a bakery famous for its gourmet vegan cinnamon rolls is suddenly back in the Bay Area.
Cinnaholic opened its first local store in years in April at 2505 Hearst Ave., in the Hearst Food Court north of the UC Berkeley campus. On the menu are its signature plant-based and scratch-made cinnamon rolls, which go for $7-$10.75 depending on how many of the 40-plus toppings and frostings are loaded on.
Cinnaholic was founded in Berkeley in 2010 and received a national spotlight from an appearance on ABC’s “Shark Tank.” The bakery’s founders adopted a franchise model, and dozens of Cinnaholics popped up across the U.S. and Canada. But the original location was shuttered after its building sold in 2023, and its locations in San Jose and Concord closed in the wake of the pandemic.
Until very recently, Bay Area residents hankering for a Cinnaholic had to drive far south to Visalia or Los Angeles.
The new Berkeley store was opened by a Bronx transplant who fell in love with the rolls after trying them several years back. She decided to invest in her own store, reviving the chain locally, because the “community was so sad when it shut down,” she told East Bay Nosh.
Cinnaholic co-founder Shannon Michelle Radke poses with her gourmet vegan cinnamon rolls. (Photo courtesy of Cinnaholic)
At Cinnaholic, customers can select a frosting from roughly 20 flavors such as cream cheese, caramel, maple and hazelnut. They can then add more than 20 toppings, including fresh strawberries, cookie dough, almonds, chocolate sauce, bananas and pretzels. On the menu are also vegan cookies, brownies and an immense mashup of dough called a Cinnacake that feeds several people ($65-$96).
The company says the cinnamon rolls are free of dairy, lactose, eggs and cholesterol. What makes them craveable, then? Well, on the Cinnaholic website, ingredients listed for the rolls include soy milk, organic malt syrup, nondairy butter, yeast and cinnamon sugar. For the frosting, there is vegan cane sugar, nondairy cream cheese, sea salt and something called expeller-pressed high-oleic safflower oil.
The goal of any cinnamon-roll fanatic — getting them pipin’ hot from the oven — is achievable at the new Berkeley outpost. But customers have to time it right.
In a recent review on Google Maps, one visitor complained, “This location also does the thing where they pretend not to understand you when you say you would like to wait for one that’s fresh out of the oven.” The person added that “gaslighting customers when they express a preference for one that’s fresh and hot and soft rather than old and hard but warm is a bad business move.”
To which the owner replied: “Our rolls are baked fresh throughout the day, and we continuously refresh batches to ensure they’re warm and consistent in quality. Because of how our products are prepared, we’re not able to bake individual rolls to order while maintaining that same consistency.”
Details: Open 10:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. at 2505 Hearst Ave., Suite D, Berkeley; cinnaholic.com