The Porto’s story began in Manzanillo, Cuba, when Raul’s mother, Rosa, lost her job as a home economics teacher and began selling cakes from home. “In Cuba, folks worked at places resembling work camps and the pay was minimal, so my mother began to bake and sell cakes and pies in order to help pay the bills.” Rosa had a well-established business by the time the family left Cuba six years later.
In the United States, Rosa resumed her home-bakery business. And her sales picked up where they left off. “Two years later, she couldn’t do it out of the house anymore. I mean, we would have 15 to 20 cars a day driving up to the house to pick up their cakes!” laughs Raul. So the family opened a little bakery in a 300- square foot locale. And thanks to Rosa’s homegrown clientele, the bakery was busy from day one, serving around 50 customers per day.
While Rosa took care of the bakery, Raul’s father, Raul Sr., worked at Van De Kamps , a big bakery in Los Angeles. “Mom would drop us off at school and then she would go take care of the store," explains Raul, Jr. "After school, my sisters and I would take the bus back to the bakery and we would stay there the rest of the day, until 7 or 8 o’clock at night. We would do our homework at the bakery and also help mom out however we could. We also spent most of our weekends there helping out.”
Although the business needed the help of Raul and his sisters, Raul’s parents didn’t allow their kids’ education to suffer. “My parents, like in most Latino families, always put our education first. They would remind us constantly that the bakery is only a job and our education was much more important.
By 1980, the bakery had really taken off and Raul Sr. quit his downtown job to work full time with his Rosa. By then, Raul and his sisters, Betty and Margaret, had already finished high school and had begun to increase their responsibilities at the store. “But we kept up with our studies," Raul says. "Betty has a Masters in Political Science from UCLA, Margaret has a degree in Accounting from Cal State, and I also have a Business degree from Cal State.”
The growing business eventually moved to a 2,000- square foot facility in Glendale. Six years later the business had grown so much that they had to relocate to a space double the size of the previous one. “At that point it became a real business and we had to hire employees. Also, my sisters and I were done with college so we began to work full time at the bakery. When we were going to college, we didn’t really think about working full time at the bakery, but we really enjoyed the business.”
Raul and his sisters’ business skills really paid off, because in 1993 Porto’s Bakery had to relocate to a whopping 20,000-square foot facility!
The business now employs 60 full-time workers and offers an extensive line of products. Porto’s also has added a party supply store, but its biggest attraction are still its cakes, pastries, and house specialties.