From Instagram to Freezer Aisles: The Rise of Montreal’s Bomboloni Boss
For Christina Pomponio, it took hustle, heart and a year of dogged patience.
Now, the Montreal-based pharmacist-turned-entrepreneur is celebrating the sweet reward: Bomboloni Boss—the Italian dessert brand she co-founded and grew from an Instagram business into a frozen product line—has landed its first national grocery deal.
On July 30, 2025—almost a year to the day after she first contacted Sobeys’ frozen bakery category manager — the purchase order came in, putting the brand’s frozen bomboloni (Italian filled doughnuts) in the freezers of 700 Sobeys stores across Canada (excluding Quebec, where it had already secured a separate deal). That earlier milestone came in April, when Metro signed Bomboloni Boss to a one-year exclusivity agreement (excluding independents), following a successful 10-store pilot. The frozen bomboloni are now available in nearly 200 Metro locations across Quebec.
Pomponio credits unwavering confidence in the product—and an eye for the long game—for helping her stay the course. “Deals like this take time,” she says. “You have to keep gently pushing, follow up and, most of all, believe in your product.”
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The brand was born in September 2020 as a lockdown side hustle. Pomponio—then a student at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy—teamed up with family members to start selling bomboloni. Using an Italian family recipe they launched on Instagram and baked to order from a temporarily closed hotel kitchen. Relying solely on word of mouth, they sold 200,000 pastries by summer 2021 and pivoted the burgeoning business to a café in Dorval, Que.
But Pomponio knew it wasn’t the brand’s future. The café risked diverting the entrepreneur's attention from bomboloni toward developing other menu items to compete in the market..
“Looking back, I wish I’d stuck to my vision and closed the café sooner,” she admits. “But I was caught up in just wanting to make it work.”
By 2024, she hit reset. The team perfected frozen recipes for three flavours: chocolate fudge (a nut-free spin on the café’s hazelnut), dulce de leche (a café bestseller) and pastry cream. Next up was finding a place in grocery. Before to long, the grocery store where Pomponio shopped with her mother during childhood and now shops herself, agreed to carry the brand. With their support, new connections and opportunities opened for Bomboloni Boss.
“That’s where we learned about expiry dates, lot numbers, labelling and ticketing,” Pomponio says. “Customers had to hunt for us in the back corner of the freezer, but they found us. Sales were strong, and re-orders kept coming.”
Encouraged, the team created sell sheets, targeted larger grocers and moved production into a 6,000-sq.-ft. industrial kitchen—not out of immediate necessity, but to be ready for bigger orders.
Pomponio couriered samples to Sobeys’ frozen bakery category manager and followed up occasionally, especially when she had new sales metrics to share. Still, months passed without the manager trying the product.
Then an e-mail arrived: the category manager couldn’t find the samples. Pomponio immediately shipped another box, this time attaching a photo of the packaging to make it easier to spot. “You have to remember these managers juggle so many products—you’re not always their top priority,” she says. “When the manager finally tried them, she told me they were amazing.”
That feedback gave Pomponio the green light to push harder. “Knowing she loved them meant I could be even more persistent,” she says. “Also, we’re both companies—even though they’re huge and we’re small, we both have businesses to run. So you can be upfront and ask, ‘Is this something you want to move forward on? Or should I explore other opportunities?’”
Along the way, Bomboloni Boss made smart pivots. Packaging was redesigned with clearer prep instructions for thawing, microwaving and air frying. The package "always said ‘Great for the air fryer,’ but now it includes step-by-step instructions,” she says.
Bomboloni Boss added a four-pack SKU alongside the original six-pack, giving customers a way to try multiple flavours without overcommitting—while avoiding the manufacturing challenges of mixed-flavour boxes.
Momentum isn’t slowing.
In June, Pomponio left her pharmacist job to run Bomboloni Boss full-time. One of her tasks has been overhauling marketing. “When we were selling in a café, it was about showing the experience inside the store. Now that we’re in grocery stores, we have a new marketing strategy to connect with customers as they walk by the frozen aisle and entice them to look for it."
Also coming up: an exclusive new flavour for Metro and the launch of a second frozen product—almond cookies—hitting stores Sept. 12. “They’re really delicious,” she says. “I’m excited to see how customers respond.”
