Marifel Osera wants to fill her Puyallup grocery store with the smell of fresh bread and simmering rice porridge every morning, and she is racing a Christmas deadline to make it happen. The owner of Sari-Sari Store off Meridian Street has launched a GoFundMe campaign to help convert part of her shop into a full sit-down cafe called Meryenda Cafe, serving Filipino breakfast, desserts and baked goods to a community that has been asking for exactly this.
Osera has owned Sari-Sari Store with her mother since 2020, when she left an administrative job at AT&T and used her severance pay to open the shop, according to The News Tribune. She started the business, located at 10312 120th St. E., Suite 4, after struggling to find traditional Filipino cooking ingredients near her home, a gap she filled by stocking staples like ube extract and longanisa, according to a TNT Diner Facebook video. Now she is hoping to add a cafe inside the grocery store, serving longanisa with rice and eggs, rice porridges and soups, a breakfast menu, and Filipino desserts and shaved ice.
A Pop-Up Test Run and a Scrapped Plan
The idea got a real-world trial run this summer. Sari-Sari held a pop-up inside the store from the end of June until July 18, selling iced desserts and Filipino hot foods, though the pop-up reportedly drew a smaller crowd than previous ones, per the same News Tribune report. Osera and her mother had originally planned to add a second kitchen to the building, but the project required extensive plumbing and venting work, and the owners scrapped that plan after a plumbing consultation alone came back at almost $1,500.
Instead, the new plan converts the existing meat market kitchen into a deli kitchen, with an L-shaped wall and a doorway connecting the two spaces. The GoFundMe campaign, titled Help Us Open Meryenda Cafe and launched last Thursday, is meant to cover the cost of closing off part of the existing building, building equipment, construction labor and permits, which alone are expected to run about $2,000. As of the campaign's public totals cited in the News Tribune's reporting, it had raised $1,315 toward a $20,000 goal.
Health Department Review Comes Before Building Permits
Before any construction can start, Osera must submit an application to the county health department, and the building department will only review the project after that health department processing is complete. That sequencing is not unique to her business: Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department rules require existing food facilities that are changing their menu or equipment to submit a Plan Review Packet for approval before making alterations, according to the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department. Commercial building permit guidance for the area similarly notes that establishing or remodeling a restaurant space requires permits that cannot be approved over the counter and need health department sign-off first, per Tacoma Permits.
Osera hopes to start new kitchen construction next month, aiming to have Meryenda Cafe operating before Christmas. The name reflects a Filipino food tradition: “meryenda,” or merienda, refers to a midday snack eaten between lunch and dinner in Tagalog, a daily ritual of sharing light bites that functions as a kind of informal fourth meal and social pause, according to Green Sea Shells. Osera also plans to serve halo-halo, which translates to “mix-mix” in Tagalog, and to make fresh bread in the store every day.
Family, Employees and the Reason It Has to Work
Osera moved to Tacoma from the Philippines in 1997 and relocated to Puyallup in 2011. Sari-Sari's staff is entirely Filipino, and some employees have worked there since the store opened, including family members of Osera's; many work part-time while attending school, including one University of Washington student who works Saturdays to afford tuition and another employee who can only work part-time because of an autoimmune disease. Osera told the News Tribune, “It's kind of easier to accommodate when you work in a smaller place and you have certain needs, health wise.”
Business at Sari-Sari has been significantly slower than any other year, Osera said, and she has been direct about the stakes of the cafe conversion, saying it needs to thrive because her daughters need her. The pressure comes as Puyallup's food and grocery landscape shifts quickly around her. Tagalog is the primary household language in 1,237 homes across the Puyallup and South Hill area, the second most common non-English language after Spanish, according to Data USA, and Asian American residents made up 5.7% of Puyallup's population, or roughly 2,434 people, in the 2020 Census per the City of Puyallup.
Bigger Competition Is Also on the Way
Osera's timeline puts her in a race against a much larger project. South Hill Mall has scheduled an autumn 2026 opening for the South Hill Asian Center, a 31,000-square-foot international market with an eight-vendor food hall, a development Hoodline first reported back in March. It's part of a broader pattern of Asian food and grocery expansion in Puyallup, a city whose population reached roughly 44,000 residents in 2026 with a median household income of $97,826, according to the City of Puyallup. That growth has already drawn other new sit-down concepts to the area, including a coffee shop's first brick-and-mortar cafe format that Hoodline covered in February.
Whether Osera can raise the rest of her $20,000 goal and clear the county's sequential health and building reviews in time for a pre-Christmas opening remains an open question. Annual food establishment permits in Pierce County run from February 1 through January 31 and cannot be transferred between owners or locations, meaning the timeline and paperwork for Meryenda Cafe are tightly bound together. For now, Osera is counting on community support and a menu built around family recipes to get Sari-Sari Store's newest chapter across the finish line.
