By Darlene Donloe
Contributing Writer
SOUTH LOS ANGELES — In 1992, Brian McMillan lost his banking job. He had no plan, no loan and a friend who wouldn’t stop asking for cobbler.
“He came by once a week,” McMillan said. “I’d bake him one. I was baking anyway.”
Thirty-three years later, McMillan hasn’t stopped baking.
He sells 1,000 peach cobblers a week out of a Jefferson Boulevard storefront and a truck, supplies Albertsons and Vons across L.A. County, and tests every new recipe on two critics who live at home: his 14-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter.
McMillan, 58, was born in Cleveland.
“Food is outrageous in Cleveland,” he said. “Most people don’t know that, but it is.”
He landed in Los Angeles as a boy and never left. By the age of 7, he was cooking and had already become an entrepreneur. By 10, he was baking pies for the holidays.
The layoff from his banking job changed everything. He was out of work, at home, making the same cobblers he had made since he was a kid. A second friend was selling bean pies outside a church on Sundays.
In 1993, McMillan loaded 150 cobblers into his car and headed to West Angeles Church of God in Christ on Crenshaw Boulevard.
He made $200 in a couple of hours and sold out. He did it again the next weekend. During the week, he would bring 50. Three dollars a pie.
Then came the Smart & Final parking lots. Managers let him set up.
“I got 20 restaurant accounts from being in front of Smart & Final,” he said. “I was baking from home.”
From there, his product went from being sold outside Smart & Final to being sold inside Smart & Final.
A buyer moved it into Albertsons in 1997. When Albertsons merged with Vons, the doors opened wider.
“A lot of good things and achievements happened to me,” said McMillan, who keeps an appreciative spirit about his success. “People can buy my desserts at stores and have them on their table.”
Today, Kobbler King sits in Albertsons and Vons across L.A. County.
He also runs a dessert truck. He caters. He ships.
During the 2020 COVID shutdowns, when restaurants folded, his business grew.
“People stayed home and continued eating,” he said. “Since our products were already in stores, it made it convenient for people to buy them.”
McMillan prides himself on never having to take a loan.
“I always used my own money.”
Everything is his. Except one.
“I’ve taken one recipe from my mom’s friend, Ola Mae, her sweet potato pie,” he said. “She’s the best home baker I’ve ever seen. She’s 86. She has bake-offs with her girlfriends.”
The rest — the butter pecan, the lemon ice box, the matcha waffles, the banana pudding that moves 1,000 units a week — those are McMillan’s.
He is self-trained. His only restaurant job was at King Fish on La Brea and Florence avenues in Inglewood.
“They taught me a lot as far as volume and speed,” he said.
He took the lesson.
“We take 1,000 to every event,” he said. “And we sell out.”
Ask his favorite cobbler, and he refuses to name one.
“All of them. I create everything equally,” he said.
Ask what makes a flavor “Kobbler King” worthy, and he answers with a shrug: “Just by the sales. I track the sales. I might discontinue if they don’t sell. Banana pudding and sweet potato are outstanding.”
He’s the only bakery he knows that uses real butter in everything.
“I spend money to make money,” he said. “Butter is in everything I do.”
McMillan said his “prices are economical.” There are four sizes: small for $12, medium for $30, large for $60, and extra large for $300, feeds 50 people.
Next up for the Kobbler King is a heat-and-eat biscuit line — sweet potato, honey butter, blueberry, strawberry — dropping in a month. One minute in the microwave and five or six minutes in the oven.
“No store has them yet,” he said. “I want this product to go national.”
Before it hits shelves, his kids taste it.
“Before I present a product, I always run things past people,” he said. “I like to run things by my kids. They’ll tell me the truth.”
McMillan’s first brick-and-mortar shop was in West Hollywood. It failed. In 1996, he moved to Jefferson Boulevard. He’s been there since.
He has lived in South L.A. for years. Adams and Arlington to 92nd and Normandie.
“I’ve been in L.A. for about 50 years,” he said. “It helped me develop and acquire different restaurant accounts. I was one of the first people selling desserts to a lot of Louisiana Fried Chicken locations in South L.A., along with places like Jim Dandy and other restaurants. Living there helped me know what restaurants to target.”
He also hires from the neighborhood. He donates, and he overbakes on purpose.
“Sometimes I overbake, and I give the pies away,” he said.
During the Altadena/Eaton fires, he took his dessert truck to feed 200 cast and crew of the CBS sitcom, “The Neighborhood” on Thursdays and Fridays.
“‘The Neighborhood’ people called and wanted me to feed the production cast,” McMillan said. “I was happy to do so.”
Gentrification has rolled down Jefferson. Businesses come and go. McMillan doesn’t.
“I grew up on Adams and Arlington, and I’ve watched as gentrification has changed a lot of businesses,” McMillan said. “I’m not leaving.”
McMillan loves to reinvest in the community by hiring from within the area “whenever possible.”
“A lot of the employee base comes from the community,” he said. “One thing I hear a lot is that my business has become generational. I talk to people whose mothers and fathers used to come here before they passed away, and now their children come here because they grew up with our desserts in their homes.”
He calls it a generational business, and he means it.
McMillan isn’t afraid of hard work. He admits that he works extremely hard. He learned it from his mother, a disabled Vietnam-era Marine veteran.
“You’ll never hear me say business is bad,” he said. “As my mother would say, ‘If your business is doing badly, you’re not working hard enough.’ You’re not marketing. Sometimes you have to go out and get the money. It’s not going to come to you. I refuse to fail.”
He tracks everything. He ships. He creates. He listens.
“God sends people into your life with information, and if you don’t listen, you’ll miss the message.”
Ask what success means now, after 30 years, versus when he was outside West Angeles, and he doesn’t hesitate.
“It means a lot more to me now,” McMillan said. “I have a broader horizon. I think differently. I want more. I want to franchise. I want it all. You should never have to limit yourself. I’ve been blessed a lot.”
McMillan is proud of what he has achieved.
“I’m always proud that I have my own business and it’s successful,” he said. “This is exactly what I’ve been doing since I was young. It’s a blessing, and I get paid for it. If I die today, I did what I wanted to in life.”
The line still forms before 9 a.m. A grandmother buys a small peach pie for $12. A USC student gets banana pudding. A man in a bus driver’s uniform orders the extra large — $300, feeds 50.
McMillan hands it over, same as he did in 1993 when it was $3.
The neighborhood has changed. The price has changed. The butter hasn’t.
Darlene Donloe is a freelance reporter for Wave Newspapers who covers South Los Angeles. She can be reached at ddonloe@gmail.com.
