To Linda Cao (B.S. ’07), dumplings are the ultimate comfort food. She learned to make them as a child and turned to them when life would get stressful. And life during the pandemic was stressful. Not just for them. That was when she and her husband, Peter Bian, had an altruistic thought. Why not drop off dumplings to friends as a care package?

They did. And the feedback was not subtle.

“Our friends were like, ‘Oh my gosh, these dumplings are amazing, you should turn this into a business,’” Cao remembers.

An appealing thought. But Cao had a demanding job as the director of global influencer strategy at Aveda, and her husband ran an MRI company: Time was precious. But they couldn’t resist.

They started small. They would make batches of frozen dumplings in their Minneapolis condo, get the word out on Instagram, direct consumers to a website where they could place orders, and make dumplings available for pickup from their garage on Saturday mornings. They called the venture the Saturday Dumpling Club, which has since evolved into the Saturday Dumpling Company. They would make 5,000 dumplings a week and quickly sell them out.

“Peter would equate it to a Nike sneaker drop,” she says. “We would make a limited supply and they would be gone within minutes.” It was an exciting, exhausting time.

“I still had my day job and was getting up early to talk to our partners in Europe and staying late for calls,” Cao says. “After hours I was Peter’s midnight kitchen elf.”

Bian did most of the cooking, specializing in Northern Chinese–style dumplings, while Cao handled most of the marketing and social media strategy—in which she was well trained, having worked in a variety of strategy roles in Twin Cities creative agencies. She’s leaned heavily on the education she received at the Carlson School of Management.

“What I appreciate most about my time at the U was how well-rounded the business program was,” she says. “I majored in marketing, but also took classes in finance and accounting and operations, which gave me a broad understanding of how all the pieces of a business fit together. That exposure has proven incredibly valuable.”

It didn’t take long for the couple to realize the business’s potential for growth. They just needed to read the glowing reviews customers wrote on foodie sites and pick up the roses that food journalists threw at their feet.

They migrated to a commercial kitchen, which they used to scale up production and introduce new menu offerings, like pork and cabbage dumplings and chicken soup dumplings. Then in 2024 they took a big swing: They moved into a standalone restaurant in northeast Minneapolis.

Seats filled. Momentum grew. As did their ambitions: Today their dumplings can also be found at the food hall Malcolm Yards and in a new restaurant in south Minneapolis.

The secret to the brand’s success is easy to analyze, Cao insists. “There was such a huge white space for dumplings in the Midwest,” she says. “Peter and I love traveling, and we would always seek out dumplings when we were in L.A. or San Francisco or New York—places with a major Chinatown. But that didn’t exist in Minneapolis.”

They’re working hard to build one.

“We want to continue to shape the narrative of what Chinese food can be here,” she says. “We’re second-generation Chinese-American kids and this is our home.”

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