If you want to drive from Miami to Key West, or any point along the way, you drive on the Overseas Highway. A gorgeous journey filled with beautiful views, sunny skies, and tropical dreams.
For two thirds of the route you are basically island hopping over open water from key to key all connected by numerous bridges. The trip isn't hard but it isn't fast. Mostly one lane in each direction with a lot of traffic.
Marathon Key is about 115 miles into your trip south. Located near Mile Marker 59 is Sweet Savannah's Bake Shop & Ice Cream Cafe. A perfect place to take a break, stretch your legs, and treat yourself to ice cream, a cupcake, or the Best Key Lime Pie in the Keys.
Katalin (Kate) Koler graduated from the Univ. of Toledo in 2001. Working her way up in the restaurant business, in 2004 Kate was recruited to the Florida Keys to manage a popular ocean front restaurant. In 2006, her husband decided to purchase the local paper and needed help running the family business.
While dying a slow death behind a desk, Kate dreamed of opening a small cake shop. In 2011, Sweet Savannah’s Bake Shop and Ice Cream café had its grand opening.
Featuring ice cream, bake goods, cupcakes and custom cakes. Sweet Savannah’s Key Lime Pie has been named the Best of Marathon for 9 years. Sweet Savannah’s team and cakes have been featured several publications such as The Knot Florida, Florida Keys Weddings and Southern Bride.
In 2020, Kate decided to scale back from the larger weddings and focus more on small intimate affairs, the shop and most importantly her family.
We recently had a chance to talk to Kate and learn more about her landmark shop in the midst of a tropical paradise.
TFRLT:
Thank you, Kate. I appreciate your time and your willingness to talk with us. Tell us a little bit about Sweet Savannah's. You don't have to give us the whole life journey to Marathon, but you had a partner at one point, how did you get involved with it? How did you make that kind of transition? How long have you been doing this?
KK:
In 2004 I had been recruited to move to Marathon to be a manager of a restaurant. And in 2006, my husband bought the local newspaper and asked me to come aboard and run the office portion of it. I really am not an office person. I'm not a sitting on a desk person. I worked in restaurants. I have an art history degree, so I basically had to work restaurants or bartendend on weekends.
TFRLT:
That's very understandable.
KK:
A friend of ours wife was interested in going into business. She wanted to open a cake shop to do cupcakes, so we decided to go in business together. She kind of had the ball rolling already but she wanted to have a partner. So she and I teamed up and in 2011 we opened up Sweet Savannah's.
TFRLT:
Is that where the name came from, your partner?
KK:
Yeah, so Savannah was her dog. Her dog had recently passed away and she just wanted to honor her. It was a little shop down the street. It was ice cream and we did baked goods.
We baked everything in house and then we started doing cakes. I wanted to do cakes. I knew that's the route I wanted to go before I even partnered up with her.
TFRLT:
Wedding cakes or just birthday cakes, or just cakes in general?
KK:
Cakes in general. Any type of cake. We started out small and eventually we worked our way up to wedding cakes.
I told her I want to do that, and I started taking classes in Miami to learn how to decorate cakes. I kind of felt like I knew it was something I could do. I have an art background and looking at it I could see how it's constructed. I just kind of figured it out.
KK:
So I took these classes and learned and then we went from there. We opened up the shop and I started doing the cake portion. My partner was more of the administrative end.
TFRLT:
So there you were. Just the two of you elbow deep in the flour and doing all the baking and running the business?
KK:
Yeah. In fact, the first few months, <laugh>, we had to figure out some things pretty quickly. But we would open the shop, we would get in there at seven o'clock in the morning and wouldn't stop baking until six o'clock at night.
TFRLT:
Wow.
KK:
We realized that wasn't working. It was exhausting. Then we met a gal who was working for another restaurant who actually had a baking background. She went to culinary school and her focus was baking.
So we hired her on and she was game changer for us. She taught us how to do things a lot quicker. Just the idea of how to prep the day before. Now it basically runs itself. My crew knows exactly what we need to do and what needs to be done at what point. What days we bake cheesecakes, etc. We have it all on a schedule.
TFRLT:
Oh, that's fantastic. So how long did it take to get to that point where you felt like it could run itself?
KK:
I wouldn't say we really able to hire a full crew. We had to do a lot of trial and error. The first year we decided, midway through, we were gonna start doing morning pastries. We had someone that was willing to come in at four in the morning to do that for us and open up super early in time to make them.
But, when she didn't work, either Kate, my partner's name was Kate as well, either Kate or I were the ones taking that 4:00 AM shift.
TFRLT:
That sucked.
KK:
Yeah. <laugh>. If she called off, it was Kate or I going in. So we realized, probably a year into it, that it just wasn't worth it. We're in a small town and, if it's not high season, then, it's like you're really relying on the people that are here. It just wasn't enough money for it to make sense. So that's kind of where we came up with the idea of let's just be a bake shop and not like a traditional bakery.
We stopped doing breads and things that you would expect from a traditional bakery. At that point we decided we're just gonna be a bake shop, sweet shop. We started opening up at 11. That really made it doable. It was like, okay, we can totally do this because we can come in at seven, get everything done that we need to get done to open up.
TFRLT:
It makes it livable
KK:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
TFRLT:
How has it changed from what your original vision was? I mean, do you think it's drastically changed?
KK:
Just been larger.
TFRLT:
It's larger than you anticipated?
KK:
Yeah, it's just been a lot larger. I have a large retail component to it now. We're a gift shop as well. We always had some retail kind of geared towards children. But when we moved into that larger space we kind of got more into the retail.
After my business partner left, I really kind of went full force. Then even more during Covid because I had lost our ability to do the cakes and lot of the wedding cakes and the big venues that we were doing. I wanted to make up that revenue.
So I really weren't full source in the retail aspect of it. We just added a lot more to our menu. I mean, it's just a lot more that we offer. We started out with 12 ice creams and now I have 28. We offer a huge menu of desserts. We have a huge gluten-free selection.
TFRLT:
Is all the ice cream made in house?
KK:
No, actually, I have a guy in Homestead that makes the ice cream for me. It's not a box ice cream. It's not like your Hershey's or Bluebunny. It's a family owned business in Homestead, and he makes it all from scratch. It's great ice cream.
TFRLT:
You've had the same supplier since you started. You've expanded the flavors. Does he make flavors that you dictate, or are you taking from what he can offer? How, how much input do you get on that? And how much do you experiment with the different flavors?
KK:
No, he'll do both. I do both, actually. I should say. I will feature a flavor here and there. Like, we did a red velvet. We sent him up our red velvet cupcakes and he made an ice cream out of that. He'll take requests. I have a caramel apple pie ice cream coming in next week. I like for him to do guava cheesecake. Guavas huge here so he started making that.
TFRLT:
Do you have any that you've retired or that were surprising that they didn't work out?
KK:
No. I kind of switch them up depending on the time of year. In summertime I need to bring in more kid friendly flavors like cookie monster or cotton candy, that kind of stuff. There's a flavor that is very popular with the large Cuban population here. Monte Cato is a Cuban ice cream flavor that I carry throughout the year because my Cuban clientele loves that.
TFRLT:
How about the cakes and cupcakes? Do you do the same kind of variety with the cupcakes?
KK:
Sure. We have a selection of cupcakes on a daily basis that we always have like your classic vanilla, classic chocolate, our sweet and salty, which is a chocolate cupcake with a salted caramel ganache center and a dark chocolate buttercream and sea salt on top. We have red velvet. Kind of your classic cupcakes.
We carry those every day, and then we rotate each day. Depending on what day it is we'll have different cupcakes. It might be on Saturday, we do Pina Colada or Wednesday we do a S'mores cupcake.
Our bestselling cupcake by far is our Key Lime cupcake, because anybody who comes to the Keys wants to have Key Lime something.
TFRLT:
Between the ice cream and the cupcakes and the cakes, do you feel like you come through in the flavor selection and what you offer? Is it Kate Koler who's personality is speaking through the ice cream and the cakes?
KK:
I would say it's more of my baker's now. I let them do a baker's choice, and I let them come up with cupcakes that they'd like to feature. It's a lot of fun to kind of see what they come up with. You know, what Kate Koler likes doesn't necessarily excel <laugh>, I have to remember we're in a tourist town.
TFRLT;
That's a great point.
KK:
You have to kind of cater to the tourists. So I, for a long time, had like a cayenne chocolate cupcake that I put out there, and I loved it. I just thought it was great, but, it wasn't a big seller. I mean, the people who liked it loved it.
I bake less these days and do more of the administrative end of it. I would come up with different flavors, but now I let my crew come up with them. They've come up with Tropical Passion Fruit. That's one that they've recently done. We're doing a Dark and Stormy cake ball, which I'm excited about. It is going to be a rum ginger cake with rum and dark chocolate.
KK:
So they are my creative souls now.
TFRLT:
That's good, right? I mean, that's sort of a small business goal. To let it grow and you don't have to be there at seven in the morning. Not that your hours change but so you're not so beholden to it. You've got a family. But was that hard to let them have that kind of control?
KK:
Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Especially my personality, 100% <laugh>. But now that I let them have it, I'm like, yeah, this is great. And, you want your people around you to take ownership. I want them to want to be there and be excited to be there. For them to have a say in it.
TFRLT:
Certainly if they feel invested, that's just healthier for you, for your company, you know, for the business.
TFRLT:
How much does the seasonality affect the business? I know you said that it's getting a longer, the seasons are getting longer, but do you have to grow and shrink staff over the course of the summer and between summer and winter, or not so much?
KK:
I'm pretty lucky. I don't shrink my full-timers. We figure out things to do. Of course, my high schoolers, usually during our time where it's slower season, they're actually busier with school. So whether it's homecoming or things that are going on, football games and whatnot.
So it kind of works into my favor with that. I definitely hire seasonal people. I use a lot of the turtle research center. They'll have interns that come in and so they need to make extra money.
Honestly, in the last two and a half years, we didn't have an off season. Like everybody was coming here during covid years because Florida was one of the only places open. <laugh>
TFRLT:
Storms aside and seasonality aside, just how tough is it operating a small business on an island?
KK:
There's challenges, <laugh> <laugh>, but what we're facing now, actually, our seasons have become longer. In one aspect, it's great. But what's kind of happening, I guess, really in so much of the country is that Airbnb and vacation rentals have really taken over. So now it's finding staffing and being able to staff it.
TFRLT:
Because they can't live there because the rent prices them out?
KK:
They can't afford it. It's ridiculous. In fact, we ended up buying a place about a year and a half ago, just so I could have one side for a manager, and my husband has the other side for a manager in his business. I supplement the rent just so that I know that she can afford to live there. Rents are never under 2000.
TFRLT:
That's crazy. Everything you're doing sounds amazing. You have a beautiful shop and amazing sweets.
I appreciate your time. For sure, anyone traveling through the Keys needs to stop at Sweet Savannah's. Thanks so much for your time, Kate.
KK:
Okay. Anytime. I'll talk to you soon.
Hey, don't get hit by a bus.
TFRLT:
Don't get hit by a bus. That's right. <laughs>
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