Confections of a Cake Lover’s last day of business in its Chestnut Street storefront is Nov. 14. In the coming months, Sarah Chapp and her award-winning craft bakery will be hitting the road in a strawberry-pink food truck. The move to a mobile business model focused on catering orders, Chapp explained in a Nov. 4 interview with The Campus, was initially driven by changes in customer traffic, with fewer people stopping in for single-item purchases while large orders for special events held strong.

“As I’m sure you can imagine, most everybody at this point can’t come in for the everyday treat because they need to buy groceries,” Chapp said. “But people still wanted to utilize us for those big milestone events, birthdays, weddings, whatnot. So when my mom passed away in March, I then was wondering, ‘OK, how can I grow the business?’ And I opted to invest into a food truck, which was something she was in support of, you know, leading up to it, and my family was as well.”

According to Toast, a common point-of-sale system, most bakeries will see profit margins between 3% and 5%. Grubhub reports that food trucks, with their low overhead and labor costs, often see significantly higher profit margins between 6% and 9%.

Delivering sweet treats directly to special events showed Chapp that she didn’t necessarily need to hold regular hours at a permanent location in order to run a successful business or connect with her customers.

“That is where the money is, that is where we are having the most fun,” Chapp said. “It is amazing to be able to go out and to meet new people. I can go set up for a couple of hours, make a livable wage and then go home and be with my family.”

Baking is an incredibly physical job, and Chapp said she had planned for many years to scale down her operations as time wore on. Rethinking her downtown store became an accelerated priority as she sought ways to manage her fibromyalgia, a chronic condition that causes pain and fatigue, and felt her priorities shift in the aftermath of her parents’ deaths.

“When you are so invested in your business and the success of it, you are willing to put your health on the line,” Chapp said. “You are willing to make those sacrifices. And for me, it’s, yeah, my parents passing away was when I was like, ‘It’s not worth it anymore. It’s not.’ Because the memories I have of my parents are not how much money they made in their jobs, or, you know, what clothes they bought me because they could afford it. It wasn’t that. It was the trips that we all went on as a family. It was the dinners, the nights of sitting outside, but I can’t do any of that because I’m just so — it is so painful and I’m so exhausted all the time.”

She hopes that, in addition to having more control over her schedule and workload, the seasonal aspect of food truck service will make it easier to balance her work, her health and time spent with the important people in her life.

“It (the food truck) allows me the flexibility because there is a downtime with the food truck world, being that it’s winter and that’s the time in which my symptoms flare up the worst,” Chapp said. “So it allows me to take time off to address what’s going on with my body, to manage my symptoms better. And, you know, I get to then also be with my family up in New York.”

When she’s not spending time with family, Chapp plans to reconnect with her community closer to home.

“There’s no way I could have ever said fully goodbye (to baking), but what people don’t realize is they’ll probably see me more because I’m not holed up here (in the store), right?” she said. “I’m going out. You’re going to see me. You’re going to see me driving around. And a huge part of who I am is I am all about community service and I have had to give up community service positions in the community because of my job and my health. I want to be able to get back out into the community because, to me, I can be so much more impactful as a human to give up my time towards the betterment of Meadville than providing cakes and cupcakes.”

Confections of a Cake Lover had announced last month that New Year’s Eve would be the business’ last day at 272 Chestnut St., but Chapp later decided to move the date to Nov. 14.

“The time has come for me to stop working from 8AM-5PM x 6 days a week and begin the transition to a much slower pace sprinkled with rest and treatment strategies to manage my symptoms,” Chapp wrote in a Nov. 7 post on the Confections of a Cake Lover Facebook page.

When she spoke with The Campus, Chapp explained that her staff had already found their next jobs and she had begun selling off equipment she won’t need going forward.

“I’ve reached out to other local bakeries who I’m friends with, and I reached out to Save Room for Dessert, Grammy Stephie’s, Warner’s Bakery,” Chapp said. “Like, all my business friends to see if they want first dibs, and then I will make it public for whomever wants to come in and buy equipment.”

“I’ve only cried three times in this,” Chapp said about the process of moving out of the Chestnut Street store. “The first being my staff — I loved my staff more than anything in the world, and I — just not being with them, right? The second was one employee who is one of my best friends, said, ‘You finally get to be with your family.’ And then the third was my sister saying, ‘We get to make up for lost time.’ With our parents passing away, life’s just too damn short, and it’s put us in perspective so much about what is important in life and, unfortunately, it’s not this. It’s not. It’s being with your family, creating those memories, creating those connections, building a better community, building a better relationship with your spouse, your child, your friends.”