Manolo Betancur believes everyone deserves a birthday cake.
“I arrived to America 25 years ago, and I didn’t speak any English, and I didn’t have any money in my pocket,” Betancur, owner of Manolo’s Bakery in Charlotte, North Carolina, tells TODAY.com.
He left his birth country of Colombia to attend college in Tennessee. Years after going to school, he got married, moved to North Carolina and, in 2005, bought his bakery.
“We are the oldest immigrant Latino bakery in the Carolinas,” he says.
Through his bakery, Betancur has sold tres leches, tartaleta and cheesecakes to his customers, while simultaneously giving back to his community. For 12 years, he’s been donating cakes to celebrate the birthdays of those experiencing homelessness in his city.
“We don’t call them ‘homeless,’” he says. “They’re our neighbors.”
Betancur says it all started when he approached Raise You Up Ministries, a nonprofit focused on the needs of chronically homeless people in the greater Charlotte area, to ask them where they were getting cake for people’s birthdays, and offered to donate from his bakery.
Now, he serves vanilla sheet cakes — some with caramel, some with peaches inside — whenever a birthday comes up.
“To me, that was the coolest idea ever, because nobody thinks about their birthdays,” Betancur says.
This year, Betancur and his employees delivered their 300th cake, marking a hard-fought milestone. He thinks back to one experience that makes it all worth it.
“Somebody from the nonprofit approached me one day and said, ‘Manolo, are you the cake guy?’” he says. When he nodded, the employee told him that the last person he delivered a cake to cried and said it was the first time he had a birthday cake in his life.
Betancur says, “That (was) the most important cake in this bakery.”
