My frozen dumpling company brings in millions per year

Dumpling Daughter CEO Nadia Liu Spellman didn’t grow up in your average family-owned restaurant.

Her parents ran Sally Ling’s, a popular fine-dining Chinese restaurant in Boston. For decades, she watched her mother and father serve and host celebrities like Julia Child and Yo-Yo Ma.

That upbringing taught Liu Spellman the value of sharing authentic Chinese cuisine and inspired her to open her first Dumpling Daughter storefront in 2014. Based on her family’s recipes, she now sells dumplings, which are made in a factory and frozen fresh, in her restaurants and grocery stores.

Those frozen morsels, plus additional products sold on Amazon, brought in over $4.5 million from November 2022 through October 2023, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Liu Spellman says her three restaurants, all in the Boston area, are responsible for most of that income and sell up to 4,000 dumplings per day.

Dumpling Daughter is intentionally less glamorous than Sally Ling’s. Liu Spellman modeled it after her father’s advice. He told her if she entered the food industry, she shouldn’t “open a high-end restaurant. [Instead] make a business model where you can sell a lot, but you don’t always have to be there,” Liu Spellman, 41, tells CNBC Make It.

Here’s how Liu Spellman used her parents’ advice to launch a restaurant chain and why she branched out to build a more profitable brand:

Despite their success, Liu Spellman’s parents didn’t want her in the dining industry. The restaurant burned out their relationship, and her father urged her to find a career that allowed her to be a “self-sufficient woman,” she says.

She moved to New York City, and worked in finance for five years. Despite her demanding job, she realized she preferred cooking and being in restaurants over the office.

“As you get older, you think about [the] highlight moments of your childhood, and in a way, I really wanted to relive those moments,” Liu Spellman says. “I also wanted to pay respect to my…