How a father-daughter team turned a 2020 side hustle into Blue Magnolia
The Blue in Blue Magnolia was a dog. Most customers didn’t know that until co-founder Nathalie Barreto told the story: the business is named for the family pup who showed them unconditional love “until his very last second on this Earth.” The Magnolia is for Oxford, Mississippi, where she went to Ole Miss, and for the years in Memphis that came after.
Memphis is where the idea started. In early 2020, Nathalie was running her own marketing agency and closing what she called the largest deal she could have prayed for, a company with more than 650 franchise locations, when the first case of Covid-19 was announced in California.
So she called her dad.
Jorge had been through a few reinventions of his own. Born in Havana, he spent 20 years in corporate America before leaving New Orleans for Destin in the 1990s. He opened Las Palmas Cafe and Bakery in Seagrove Beach, which earned four stars and a feature in Southern Living, and later started a painting company that worked for some of the region’s biggest builders. Nathalie grew up around all of it, in a family that ran restaurants and construction crews along this stretch of the Emerald Coast.
She had “this genius and brilliant idea for a business concept,” she told CanvasRebel, and that she didn’t want to do it in Memphis. She wanted to come home to 30A. Jorge said that if he liked the concept, he would partner with her.
“I crushed the branding pitch, and here we are today,” she said.
Blue Magnolia launched in August 2020 as a side project Nathalie expected to run until marketing work picked back up. Someone bought a board within 48 hours. There was no startup loan. The plan was to use the
money from the first few orders to buy the boards, cheeses, meats and wrapping, and keep whatever was left.
Charcuterie is still what Nathalie calls the company’s “bread and butter,” and the range has stretched well past cheese and salami: breakfast boards, dessert boards, a Cuban sandwich board, and charcuterie cones for wedding cocktail hours. The delivery menu covers 30A, Destin, Miramar Beach and the surrounding Emerald Coast, and the team sets up on the sand for beach days.
The in-home chef service is where the family’s restaurant background shows. The team shops local farms and markets, starts the prep in its own kitchen, finishes dinner in yours and cleans up before leaving. Menus have names like Cajun Craze, Southern Creole Boil and Fon-We-Can-Due. Havana Nights belongs to Jorge, a Cuban menu built from the city where he was born.
One habit came straight from Nathalie’s client-service years. Every order gets repeated back to the customer three times.
Readers of Perfect in Walton County have voted Blue Magnolia the area’s Best Personal Chef & Catering Service three years running, in 2024, 2025 and 2026. The company now does full event catering, afternoon tea, charcuterie classes and bachelorette weekends out of its Santa Rosa Beach kitchen.
Six years in, Jorge is cooking Havana on 30A again, a few decades after Las Palmas first fed Seagrove. Book a dinner or build a board at bluemagnoliacatering.com.
