A block-and-a-half-long line snaked down Snell Avenue before Panapolis Bakery even opened its fourth San Jose location on October 11, and within 90 minutes, every tray in the display case was empty. For owner Aldo Ortiz, it was the latest proof that his family's pan dulce has found an audience far beyond the kitchen where he started.
Ortiz, who is a third-generation baker, opened Panapolis No. 4 at 5469 Snell Ave., according to San José Spotlight. Customers began lining up a full hour before the doors opened, and the queue stretched a block and a half, the outlet reports. District 2 Councilmember Pamela Campos attended the opening, telling the outlet that a fourth Panapolis location landing in her district excited her and that she planned to try the elote pan dulce and conchas. The Consul General of México, Neftali Said Pérez González, was scheduled to give remarks at the event as well, per the same account.
From a Morgan Hill Bakery Job to a Family Business
Ortiz came to the United States in 2012 at age 16, and he landed a job in 2015 at his uncle's Panaderia Ortiz in Morgan Hill, the outlet notes. Within a year of Ortiz taking charge of production there, the bakery's daily sales jumped from 500 baked items a day to 3,000, San José Spotlight reports. Ortiz has said his grandfather, uncles and father were all bakers, a family lineage he described to Telemundo Área de la Bahía as the reason he got into the trade himself.
In 2018, Ortiz opened the first Panapolis bakery in Michoacán, before returning to the United States in 2020 with $5,000 in savings and a son three weeks from being born, according to the same San José Spotlight report. To rebuild capital, he worked 16 to 19 hours a day across four bakeries owned by four different uncles for four months. He later rented kitchen space from his uncle's Ortiz Bakery and bought a van, with his father helping him get the business off the ground.
A Mobile Bakery Finds Its Footing
That van became the seed of Panapolis Panaderia, the mobile bakery operation Ortiz told Telemundo Área de la Bahía had been his idea for about a year by the time he spoke with the outlet in October 2023. He and a colleague would start baking at 1 a.m. to supply both a sales point and the van, he said. Ortiz told the station that customers from different backgrounds, including Filipino and American patrons, responded well and helped spread the word on social media — a boost that, according to San José Spotlight, took his daily sales from less than $200 to more than $1,000 after one of his videos drew 9 million views.
The momentum helped fund a run of brick-and-mortar openings. When his uncle sold the original Ortiz Bakery building in 2023, the new owner resold it directly to Ortiz, San José Spotlight reports. Panapolis No. 1 sits at 784 N. 13th St., and in late 2025 Ortiz spent a month converting a former Chinese restaurant at 1492 Almaden Expressway, Suite A, into Panapolis No. 2 — working 15-hour days with a single helper to get it ready, per the outlet's account.
A Taco Bell Turned Pan Dulce Shop
Panapolis No. 3 opened in July at 792 E. Julian St., in a space that had previously housed a Taco Bell and then a ramen restaurant, the same report states. Ortiz distributed 5,000 fliers to promote the opening and shifted products in from two other bakeries to keep up with demand; the location's customer line ran three hours long and the shop sold out four separate times that day, according to San José Spotlight's reporting.
Across its four locations, Panapolis now sells roughly 4,000 to 5,000 baked items a day and produces around 40 to 50 different varieties, the outlet notes. Ortiz told the paper he works 14 to 15 hours for most of the day; the bakery opens at 4 a.m. and closes at 9 p.m. Looking ahead, he said his ambitions go well beyond San Jose: “I would like to have 100 bakeries here in California in five years,” he said, per San José Spotlight.
San Jose's Food Scene Is Booming — Unevenly
Panapolis's expansion lands amid a broader surge in San Jose's food economy. The city has issued 933 business tax certificates to restaurants, street vendors, cafes and bakeries since 2022, with downtown's District 3 seeing the most new openings at 231, followed by District 7 with 146, District 5 with 112 and District 6 with 105, according to a separate San José Spotlight report. Restaurants posted the highest sales tax revenue in city history during the first three months of 2025, surpassing pre-pandemic levels by 21%, and nearly 100 businesses used the city's Streamlined Restaurant Program during the 2024-25 fiscal year — a process that let Sumi Sushi near San Jose State University get its permits approved in just four months, the outlet reports.
Not every food business is riding the same wave, though. Bui Vien, a Vietnamese street-food restaurant in San Jose's Little Saigon neighborhood, told San José Spotlight that its profits dropped 30% to 45% over its last three months, a reminder that growth across the city's food scene has not been even. For now, Panapolis's pan dulce empire keeps growing one sold-out opening at a time.
