It’s a still and bright Wednesday in Santa Ana, murals decorate rusty buildings, coffee shops plague Instagram’s explore page, and taquerias dot almost every corner of downtown. At 1pm Millennials dash to the specialty eateries in the bustling 4th Street Market, a rising communal food hall.
When entering the 30,000 square foot culinary space, there are 15 different artisan food vendors — everything from Vietnamese Pho to decadent gourmet sandwiches. The market has been open since 2015 and for most of the restaurateurs here, it’s the first time they have a storefront to call their own.
Beyond the aromas of freshly brewed coffee and sweet crispy waffles, is the East End Kitchens. There are ten fully equipped incubator commercial kitchen spaces designed for artisanal and small-scale food production, personal chefs, and caterers. Inside the kitchen, 95.9 FM radio is blasting contemporary Christian music and a bear of a man focuses on mixing two cups of secret flour with sugar, eggs, and butter in a stainless steel bowl. The spiritual music along with mixing cookie dough serve as a therapy method for Jason Mercado, who’s dressed in a black chef button-up and chef beanie.
Mercado is the CEO and currently a one-man team at Sweet Mission Cookie Company. He’s been in the kitchen since 9 am and has already baked his way through several sacks of his special flour and ten cookie trays. By the time he finishes and cleans, he will have made at least 75 dozen cookies.
Mercado rubs his scruffy beard and walks over to the oven where he turns the dial to 275 degrees and adds a sprinkle of cinnamon, vanilla, eggs, and chocolate chip to a bowl. He scoops raw cookie dough with a stainless-steel ice cream scooper and begins using it to measure uniform pieces of the mix that will soon become the warm and buttery cookies that saved him from homelessness. Mercado read about the market’s development plans in 2013 and met with the manager to talk about the East End Kitchens.
In another bowl, he’s whipping together a batch of his favorite and award-winning Hawaiian Cooler cookies which won the Taste of Success competition hosted by Entrepreneur Works in Philadelphia.
“The cookies are sweet and salty at the same time,” says Mercado. “I mix lemon, coconut, white chocolate, and macadamia nuts. The white chocolate is sweet, lemon is tart, coconut acts as the stabilizer, and macadamia nuts is the salty component.”
Mercado insists on mixing each individual cookie batch by hand. “You have that extra love and flavor and you can just taste the difference between hand versus commercial mixers.”
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Before Mercado settled in Santa Ana, he packed his bags several times and moved from Salem to Austin, then to Atlanta, followed by Philadelphia, and finally to California. In Texas, he developed a self-described functional drug addiction to cocaine that saw him spend time in jail for three months and drain his modest finances.
“When I lived in Texas, I hung out a lot with the club crowd. I had an apartment, and we had an after-hours party at our place that got busted by the cops. Everyone in the apartment went to jail for drugs, including me.”
After moving to Philadelphia, he managed several coffee shops over the course of 12 years, helped create menus, trained new employees, worked grand openings. Mercado later became a manager at his local Starbucks but explains the company opened too many stores too quickly and either shifted people to different stores or laid people off.
“I was kinda shocked because sometimes we think we have job security. I thought for sure at Starbucks, but that wasn’t the case. It also put me in a panic because I knew right then, I was going to be homeless, and I didn’t know what I was going to do next. It taught me to always have a ‘what if’ or a ‘just in case’ plan because I didn’t have either one of those.”
Mercado knew that homelessness and addiction was not where he was meant to be or where he was supposed to stay. “I knew there was something bigger than this, another answer to my life, another way out. In order to avoid drugs, Mercado became a chef for the Occupy Philadelphia movement. Although he wasn’t politically motivated, it was his only method for survival. While living as an Occupier, Mercado’s friend, told him about an entrepreneurial education class with Philadelphia nonprofit called Entrepreneur Works, which offers classes on how to start a business.
“I didn’t have the money at the time, to take classes, but something told me, ‘Just sign up.’”
The director of entrepreneurial services encouraged him to write an essay to earn a scholarship. With some luck and persuasive writing, he secured the scholarship and was able to get his 11-week class fees waived. During his time there, he learned about business development, marketing strategy, and budgeting.
The birth of Sweet Mission Cookie Company came to life in Philadelphia after during his entrepreneurial classes and was originally called Just Cookies because that was all Mercado knew how to bake.
He never enrolled in culinary school but likes to tell people he graduated from the Food Network and is self-taught. “A lot of times, people eat a cake or a cupcake and they say, ‘oh it’s good.’ But there’s something about cookies that make people smile, and has the capacity to change their day.”
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Mercado wanted to embark on a new journey and be part of something bigger than himself. With only a one-way bus ticket, a backpack of clothes, a duffle bag filled with food, and $60 in his pockets, he was on his way to Santa Ana, CA. A new place he imagined would be populated by bleached-blond hair beauties with blue eyes. A place where everyone surfs and calls each other “dude.” A place where people are completely laid back and worry free. When he got off the Greyhound bus, he was hit with reality and learned Santa Ana was nothing like what he saw about California on TV.
In recent years, an influx of businesses catering to young millennials is signaling an identity shift as “hipper” establishments continue to open on 4th Street, which for decades has catered to Spanish-speaking immigrants — many of them new arrivals from Mexico who came to shop for the kinds of goods and services they could find in their homeland. Whether they were looking for special dresses for a quinceañera, or wanted to purchase a Mexican meat specialty at a carniceria, Santa Ana has it. Mercado is an African American man working in a city where over 70 percent of Santa Ana’s population is of Hispanic or Latino origin.
After a few years of working and living in Santa Ana, Mercado says people in Orange County think of the city as an eyesore because of its high homeless population and low median income. But he has hope and sees it as an up-and-coming city. “4th Street market kinda makes Santa Ana the hub, a hip place to hang out. It’s welcoming and very diverse.”
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I first met Mercado at the Santa Ana Salvation Army Hospitality House. Standing at six-foot-three he introduced himself and walked me through the halls of his first home in California–the only 24–7, year-round unrestricted men’s emergency shelter in Orange County.
“I told the Salvation Army Shelter directors that I’m going to start my cookie business and they looked at me and said, ‘really?’ because they get people coming in here all the time talking about they’re gonna do this and do that, so I think there was some doubt. At that point I was already determined that I was going to start the business.”
Today, Mercado works there as a full-time chef while serving as mentor to homeless people living at the shelter who are in the exact position he was in just four years ago.
Homelessness is nothing short of Southern California’s most urgent public crisis — driven by mental health issues, rampant substance abuse, and skyrocketing rents. Mercado’s story illustrates the difficult circumstances people can face when struggling to find employment, pay rent, and make ends meet. Last year, Downtown Santa Ana’s Civic Center was declared a Public Health Crisis as the number of homeless in the area rose to nearly 500 people, a 20 percent increase from 2013.
As Mercado tells it, the goal of Sweet Mission Company is to work with those who have faced challenges in life — ex-felons, recovering addicts, at-risk youth, homeless individuals — and teach them about entrepreneurship and help them get back on track. “I want to inspire people to look beyond their situation, empower them to follow their dreams and encourage them to never give up even in the face of adversity.
“I tell people that cookies are round, and the goal of Sweet Mission Cookie Company is to teach people how to be complete in life,” says Mercado. “To teach you that, okay, you had a past, a background, and maybe it wasn’t the best, neither was mine, but look at what I’ve been able to do, and just stepping up to the plate, and realizing that there needs to be a change in my life.”
Benjamin Anozie, the shelter’s manager, says having many of his staff were at one point, guests at the shelter who have turned their lives around.
“In some cases, just having someone on staff who can understand and empathize with a new visitor can be a key source of encouragement to help them change their lives,” said Anozie. “We give them positions here and sometimes the people who are coming in recognize and know some of the staff from the streets, and so it’s like ‘you’re here,’ and so this place actually works. They really have the intention of building us up and helping us out.”
While living at the Salvation Army shelter, Mercado recognized that despite his living circumstances, it was not a reason to stand still and not move forward.
“Being surrounded by people that were like me, and coming out of that dark area, I get to tell them that not long ago, I was out here with you, but I changed my whole mindset and my belief system to get out of the area I was at, and now I can be an inspiration to others. I want to teach people that just because you’re down on your luck at the time doesn’t mean you can’t do your own thing.”
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Mercado goal is to eventually own his own bakery storefront and continue his mission of giving homeless people jobs. All of his marketing is done through Facebook where he provides information about the company’s mission to empower and inspire individuals with his story — the nucleus of Sweet Mission Cookie Company.
Four months after arriving in California, Mercado received a phone call a coordinator for the Oscars after-party who found his company through Facebook and asked him to cater. “I was invited to do an Oscar post-party at the W Hotel in Hollywood. I was shocked but had my guard up at the same time. I was skeptical because I had just moved here now I have someone asking me to make cookies for an Oscars party out of nowhere. I was like whaaaaat. It kinda threw me off because she never had my cookies before and I’ve never met her until the day of the Oscars post-party.”
Later that year, Sweet Mission Cookies was booked for the BET Awards.
“That was like my big break in California. That meant that all the work I did up until that point, it was finally paying off. That helped me get some big name brand recognition and that was what moved me to my next level.”
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Mercado baked his first batch of Toll House cookies at 11-years-old with his mom, and has not stopped since. “I was very close to my mom. She considered me as the brain of the family. As I was growing up, I was the problem solver and my mom depended on me a lot.”
“My first batch of cookies was nothing spectacular. In fact, I burned the first batch because I wasn’t paying attention to the time.”
He gave baking another shot. His first ‘client’ was his stepfather.
“My stepfather said man these cookies are good. Once he said that, that was the icing on the cake. I was like I’m a baker. I know how to bake. And I always go back to that memory.”
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“At first I created the business to make money to have a place to stay. Now, success is being able to continue to live out my dream and expand my cookie business. I want to use this business to help other people like myself who have been down on their lives or face adversity.”