The video shows a nondescript gray SUV with yellow plastic bags taped on the windshield parked in a grocery store lot somewhere in the Bay Area. The rear door is open; inside, dozens of Porto’s boxes waiting to be sold.
Porto’s, for the uninitiated, is a beloved, family-owned Cuban bakery chain in Southern California. Their cheap and cheerful baked goods, packed inside signature goldenrod boxes, are fixtures at Christmas parties and birthdays from Burbank to West Covina. The most famous Porto’s treat is their cheese roll, a flaky puff pastry pastelito filled with sweet cream cheese. Actually, maybe it’s the round potato croquette filled with beef piccadillo known as the potato ball. You know what: It’s all good.
Sometime this summer, I started seeing clips of a man selling fresh Porto’s out of his car in the Bay Area. These videos are easy enough to find, so I won’t link to them to not put the seller at risk.
The response to these videos, plastered across social media, is a mix of delight and befuddlement. Some are impressed or intrigued: “Can’t knock the hustle,” “WHERE??” Others are suspicious: “I don’t trust anybody selling food from their trunk!” “Not fresh.”
Word of the Porto’s guy has spread through community Facebook groups, Instagram stories, and Reddit threads. He’s become a fixture, both as a legitimate plug and as social media fodder, among internet personalities in the Bay Area. Former KTVU journalist Stanley Roberts has posted about him across platforms to his thousands of followers. He’s been spotted in various parking lots all over the Bay Area’s myriad suburbs. Everyone, it seems, is wondering who this guy is.
I found him.
Naturally, he did not want his name or his usual vending spots to be publicized given the gray area nature of his hustle. But he agreed to chat, as long as I didn’t snitch.
He prefers the pseudonym Juan Portos. He’s 40, and splits his time between San Francisco and Southern California. He’s been delivering Porto’s from Los Angeles to Northern California for about two years. At first, he said, it was as a favor to friends who lived in the Fresno and Bakersfield area. Now it’s a business.
Juan figured there was demand elsewhere if his friends were already interested. So he’d buy a few extra boxes while in SoCal and shop them around nail salons, barber shops, and Mexican restaurants. That didn’t quite take, though he did find a few regular customers that way. He is not active on any social media; his business is entirely word-of-mouth, he says.
People already familiar with Porto’s, thanks to loved ones bringing them up, or from social media buzz, started to see these familiar yellow boxes inside a van and were drawn in.
Business was steady in central California; Juan could feasibly drive to and from the region in a day. He amassed regulars who would text him their orders. But sometime earlier this May, he decided to move his shop further north. He has family in the Bay that he can stay with, plus the nine-county region has a much bigger reach and a lot more places where he can sell.
That plan worked out. Perhaps it’s worked out a little too well.
Juan is vague about his process, perhaps by choice. Four times a week, he meets his brother at a halfway meeting point between Los Angeles and the Bay — usually in San Jose or Fresno — where he picks up regulars’ orders and extras to sell from his trunk. Business is good enough that he’ll take extended breaks after marathoning these Porto’s runs.
“I’m not in a condition to be selling every day,” he texted in Tagalog. “Sometimes, I’ll take three weeks, a month to rest.”
The boxes of goods currently range from $10, for boxes of plantain chips and other smaller items, to $30, for baked goods. A dozen cheese rolls from Porto’s, his (and arguably Porto’s) best-selling item, go for about $30. (The store sells them for $22 on delivery, so not a horrible mark-up when you factor in time and California gas prices.) He brings about 30 to 40 boxes every day he sells, many of which are earmarked for regulars who pre-order; he usually sells out within a few hours.
Juan knows that the social media attention drums up business, and he doesn’t mind it. After all, that’s how I found out about him. That said, he admits it can get invasive at times. Some social media personalities have interviewed him, showing face and all. Others, he said, have recorded him without permission. “That’s just how it is,” he lamented. “There weren’t any influencers when I started doing this.”
Juan isn’t alone in the Porto’s resale hustle. There are other small-scale Porto’s vendors across California: Social media posts show some in Palmdale and in the San Diego area. Porto’s spokesperson Jennifer Wells told Gazetteer that the bakery is aware of third-party resellers, and does not “authorize third-party reselling” even if they “appreciate the enthusiasm.”
The company is also aware of the fervent demand for Porto’s here. That said, Wells emphasized that there are no plans in the foreseeable future to expand to the Bay Area beyond its pre-existing frozen shipment service, Porto’s At Home.
Still, I can’t knock what he does, despite Porto’s tepid disapproval of it. What Juan is doing is not unlike something that my family did growing up. It reminds me a lot of the unspoken custom of lugging back boxes of Porto’s in your car trunk or as your personal item during a flight. That last bit of Porto’s portage is enough of an established thing that the bakery has acknowledged it.
During my family’s visits to the Bay as a kid, I sat, more often than not, next to a pile of freshly-ordered Porto’s pastries for my auntie in the East Bay. That’s how Juan Portos got started, after all. He was just clever enough to turn it into a hustle.
