From teen baker to bakery boss, Danielle Sepsy builds Hungry Gnome

Danielle Sepsy’s path to The Hungry Gnome began in a Long Island kitchen, where a 13-year-old baker brought scones to local coffee and bagel shops and earned the nickname “Scone Queen” after her parents said her scones were the best they had ever tasted. She did not start with outside investors or a polished storefront. She started with sample trays, homemade business cards and a product good enough to get taken seriously by neighborhood cafes.

That early hustle eventually grew into a New York-based wholesale and online bakery built around scones, biscuits, muffins, banana bread and related baked goods. Sepsy has said the turning point came in 2020, when she lost her job and used the reset to open The Hungry Gnome in New York City. By then, she had already studied Hospitality Management at Penn State University and worked in luxury New York hotel and restaurant operations, experience that likely helped turn a home-baking story into a business with real wholesale infrastructure.

The scale today is the part that separates the romantic founder narrative from the mechanics of a food brand. Sepsy has said The Hungry Gnome produces about 12,000 baked goods a day, while other recent coverage puts daily output at more than 15,000 scones, muffins and cookies. One account says the bakery sells to more than 300 wholesale accounts, including Joe Coffee and Birch Coffee, and supplies biscuits to JetBlue flights. The bakery says it accepts order slots 30 days in advance on the first of each month, a sign of the logistical discipline needed to keep production, inventory and demand in sync.

Sepsy’s latest push into the national spotlight came with The Scone Queen Bakes, published on March 24, 2026 by Knopf and billed as a 100-recipe cookbook. Publisher listings say it includes the secret recipe for the chocolate chip scone that made her famous, while Sepsy has said the book is rooted in the influence of her grandmother Rosemary, who gave her a KitchenAid stand mixer and a Martha Stewart magazine subscription when she was eight. Watching Julia Child with her grandmother also shaped her approach, which Sepsy describes as rustic and comforting, food meant to bring people around the table. On May 9, 2026, CBS Saturday Morning featured Sepsy in The Dish segment, underscoring how a teenager’s side hustle became a bakery with national reach and a repeatable, scaled business model.