Dad's Cookies is finally putting down roots. After using a food truck to meet customers where they were, the Clovis-born bakery is opening a permanent storefront at 760 Fulton Street in downtown Fresno, with an October 3, 2026 grand opening planned.
The new shop sits inside The Garage, a converted auto-repair building now divided into five retail spaces near Chukchansi Park, according to the Fresno Bee. Valley Nook Cafe is also listed as a tenant. The storefront is planned as a permanent location.
Sanchez started Dad's Cookies in 2020 after being laid off from his job during the pandemic, a career shift that took him from audiology to baking 5.5-ounce gourmet cookies, according to background from the Clovis Culinary Center. That partnership eventually led to an official Fresno State cookie combining pistachio, white chocolate and a red velvet brownie core. The bakery operated out of a Clovis gas station before scaling up through the Clovis Culinary Center's 24/7 commercial kitchen, a municipal incubator founded in 2018 that has helped launch more than 130 food businesses and generate roughly 1,000 Fresno County jobs, per Western City Magazine.
From Cottage Kitchen to Commercial Storefront
That path from home baking to brick-and-mortar reflects a broader regulatory pattern in California. The state's Homemade Food Act legalized home-based bakeries like Dad's Cookies in its early days, but strict limits on temperature-controlled ingredients eventually push growing food businesses toward licensed commercial facilities, the same Western City Magazine report notes. Dad's Cookies is transitioning from a food truck to a commercial storefront.
The bakery isn't leaving its roots entirely behind. Its food truck will keep operating at Fresno State football games.
Espresso, Dirty Sodas and a Porch for Dogs
The new storefront will do far more than sell cookies. The shop will also house what The Business Journal described in February as Downtown Fresno's first dedicated dirty soda bar, serving nonalcoholic custom drinks made with soda guns, syrups and creamers in a style borrowed from Utah's specialty soda shop scene, according to The Business Journal.
The storefront will expand the bakery's downtown presence. The family-run operation includes Jordan Sanchez, Lance Sanchez's nephew and the company's general manager and operations lead, and Haivyn Sanchez, who is active in the company and has a social-media-and-marketing degree.
A Neighborhood Betting on Foot Traffic
The storefront's timing lines up with a much larger transformation along Fulton Street. On Fulton Street near Chukchansi Park, the City of Fresno broke ground in August on The Park at South Stadium, an eight-story mixed-income complex that will add 174 apartment units by June 2028, according to KVPR. The more-than-$81 million project secured bond financing, a local housing fund contribution and other loans, per reporting from The Business Journal, after failing at least twice and being discussed for several years.
The housing push is part of Mayor Jerry Dyer's broader campaign to bring 10,000 new residents into Fresno's urban core, backed by $250 million in state infrastructure and housing investment, according to the same KVPR report. Whether downtown foot traffic grows fast enough to sustain small storefronts like Dad's Cookies ahead of the apartment project's 2028 completion remains an open question for the corridor, but for now the bakery is betting on the neighborhood.
