As a child, Reba Wilson loved baking. She would make chocolate chip cookies with her grandmother, a Francophile with a fondness for Julia Child, something that might have helped Wilson set the stage for her own affection for food TV. “When the Food Network became a thing, I was all in,” Wilson says. “I watched all the cake shows.”
The now-54-year-old remembers a moment as a young adult: “I wanted ice cream with caramel sauce, but I didn’t have caramel sauce – I realized, ‘I know how to make it.’”
Wilson continued her self-guided learning while raising three sons and working from home packaging and shipping mail-order prescription glasses. She’d bake cakes for birthdays because it was fun. When her eldest (now 29) turned 7, she ventured into fondant for the first time to make a cake in the likeness of R2-D2. She realized she could keep upping her baking skills.
Starting a business was never on that list of skills, but when cottage food permits became available and her children were older, she decided to formalize her cake-making hobby. “I was like, ‘I can be legit,’” she recalls.
Wilson found a following with devoted early customers (one birthday girl inspired a raspberry lemonade-flavored cake called “the Lila”). But some weekends would be busy with cake orders, while others were slow. Seeking a steadier plan, she started selling Tuesdays at the Old Monterey Marketplace. Then her husband, Mike Abbruzzese, a former caddy at Pebble Beach, suggested she scale up into a shop. “I blame him for everything,” Wilson says wryly.
The first brick-and-mortar Sweet Reba’s opened in Carmel’s Crossroads Shopping Center in 2018. Sales were three times what Abbruzzese and Wilson had projected. “It was just so busy, we couldn’t keep up – we would sell out and have to make it again,” she says.
In late 2025, a downtown Salinas location followed with a much bigger kitchen – now the cookie dough and bars are made in Salinas and delivered to the 480-square-foot Carmel spot throughout the day where it is baked fresh continuously. (This model of constant baking, rather than an early-morning bake, is Wilson’s scheduling preference. As a self-taught baker, she makes her own rules: “We don’t do things normally, because I never worked in a bakery before.” )
Now she goes through 300 pounds of flour and sugar each per week, 180 pounds of butter and more than 1,000 eggs. “It’s an absolute juggernaut,” Wilson says. But she continues to have doubts: “I still have horrible imposter syndrome.”
Her guiding principle remains something based on intuition. “I know what I like to eat. That is my litmus test,” she says. “If it’s dry, this is not working. We tweak things all the time.” On a recent day, she’s directing the staff to change the application of a cinnamon crumble glaze to a bar – a contiguous glaze doesn’t stick properly, “so instead we need to have it streuseled around so there is more surface area,” Wilson determines.
Some tweaks take longer. She needed more than 10 years to perfect her brownie recipe, inspired by boxed brownie mix. The result is chewy more than cakey, and very chocolatey without being too sweet – and very satisfying.
Classics reign supreme. The gooey chocolate chip cookie is the bestseller, but rotating cookies of the day also regularly sell out.
Opening the Salinas location has meant the addition of a savory menu. An electrical fire in February in Carmel meant a months-long closure which, ironically, became a blessing, giving the team a chance to get things under control – oddly similar to the Covid-19 shutdown early in Sweet Reba’s first storefront venture.
The savory menu includes breakfast burritos with eggs and tater tots for just $5.50, and simple turkey-and-cheese or ham-and-Swiss sandwiches, also for just $5.50. Wilson attributes her success to this approachable, affordable fare. “It comes back to treating our customers with respect,” she says. “Their pocketbook is just as tight as ours.” For that reason, she also avoids upcharging on wedding cakes.
Even now that it’s her job, Wilson still loves baking – after a day of work, she goes home and watches the Great British Bake Off to relax.