She Sold Sprinkles 13 Years Ago. She Still Had to Watch It Close.

Candace Nelson didn’t set out to invent a category. She and her husband Charles had both worked in finance before the dot-com crash pushed her toward pastry school instead, and after a stint making custom cakes from their San Francisco home, they opened Sprinkles Cupcakes in Beverly Hills on April 13, 2005 — widely described as the world’s first bakery to sell nothing but cupcakes. The bet worked past the point most bakery owners plan for: Sprinkles expanded nationally, later introducing the Cupcake ATM, a vending machine that dispensed its cupcakes 24 hours a day, a gimmick that turned into one of the more recognizable retail novelties of the decade.

In 2012, Nelson sold the company to private-equity firm KarpReilly, according to Fox Business and Restaurant Dive, and stepped away from any ownership or operational role. It’s the same basic shape as Elizabeth Stein’s sale of Purely Elizabeth to Ferrero — a founder handing a company she built to a much larger buyer — except Nelson didn’t stay on. She went on to build other things: the Neo-Neapolitan pizza chain Pizzana, the sweetener line Phenom Flavors, and an investment vehicle called CN2 Ventures, per Nation’s Restaurant News. At its peak under its new owners, Sprinkles still grew — to roughly 20 traditional stores and two dozen ATMs across Arizona, California, Washington D.C., Florida, Nevada, Texas and Utah, Today.com and Fox Business both reported, with franchising added in 2022 and an international location in South Korea by 2024.

Then, on December 31, 2025, it ended. Sprinkles shut down every company-owned bakery and ATM nationwide that day, Restaurant Dive reported, with a spokesperson saying only that the company had made “the very difficult decision to transition away from operating company-owned Sprinkles bakeries” — no reason given. Nelson, who by then had no stake or say in the business, said she found out just two days ahead of the closure. “Two days ago, I learned that Sprinkles Cupcakes, the company I started in 2005 and then sold to private equity in 2012, will be closing its bakery doors today. Just to say that out loud is completely surreal,” she wrote, according to both Today.com and Fox Business. She added: “I thought Sprinkles would keep growing and be around forever. I thought it was going to be my legacy.”

It’s a different kind of ending than Audrey Gelman watching The Wing collapse — Gelman was still CEO when her company came apart amid staff complaints, while Nelson had been out of the building for thirteen years by the time hers did. But both built something that stopped existing, and both had already started building again before that happened: Gelman with The Six Bells, Nelson with Pizzana, years before Sprinkles’ new owners made their call. Nelson’s statement didn’t ask for the company back. She thanked the “fans, customers and community who showed up, celebrated with us, and made Sprinkles part of their traditions,” per Fox Business, and said she’d always be proud of what she built — even after watching someone else decide when it would stop.