By now, most people know the background: After being an incredibly successful IHOP franchisee in Irvington, Newark and Paterson, Adenah Bayoh created the incredibly successful Cornbread brand, a soul food restaurant chain.
Most people don’t know the reason.
Bayoh said she recognized early on that IHOP’s menu did not offer all the items her community wanted — items such as grits and bits and chicken and waffles — so she added them to her menu. The success of those items helped make her stores some of the most profitable of the IHOP chain, she said.
The community was happy. IHOP, she said, wasn’t.
Speaking on a panel Wednesday at the 13th annual Business Leadership Conference by the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey, Bayoh told the crowd what happened next.
“They sent me cease and desist letters,” she said.
BINJE could not verify any interaction between Bayoh and the brand, but we do know this: Bayoh soon started her Cornbread brand.
“I was so mad, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to open a soul food brand that needs no permission to exist,’” she told the audience. “And the reason why I was so bullish on opening up a soul food restaurant, because I had this data.”
Bayoh said her soul food items accounted for 20% of the revenue of her Irvington store. It clearly was what her community wanted.
That’s why she began opening Cornbread locations in 2017. She now has four — with three more on the way, she said.
Bayoh’s community development was just beginning, she said.
Having come to the Newark with her family as a teenager to escape a civil war in Liberia, Bayoh said she knew first-hand the struggles young families can face — starting with a safe and secure place to live.
She decided to become a developer of affordable housing — the kind of housing her community desperately needed.
In 2022, she became the first Black woman in state history to receive a 9% Low Income Housing Tax Credit from the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency.
It’s like winning the Oscar of affordable housing, she told the audience.
The financing enabled her to build Southside View in Newark — but she was determined to do it differently. She knew what her community really needed.
A lot of people make money on affordable housing, just not the residents, she said. That’s why her first multi-family affordable housing complex, which opened this year, spreads the wealth around.
Southside View comes with amenities unlike any other affordable housing project, including:
- Washers/dryers: There’s more than just a hookup — there are actual washers and dryers, because a hook up is of no value if you can’t buy the appliance.
- WiFi: It’s free — because urban communities fall behind in school because of the digital divider;
- After care: Bayoh said 3-6 p.m. is the time most kids in urban areas go in the wrong direction, so she offers after care — free of charge to residents.
Bayoh credited Citizens Bank for helping to fund many of these initiatives, but she said a sense of community was the biggest influence. It also helped her at her lowest points.
Bayoh’s success story is one that movies are made of. But it hasn’t all been a fairytale. She told the crowd that the pandemic almost crushed her business interests, but that she persevered through hard work — and connecting with all of her various communities for a greater good.
She credited the work that AACCNJ President John Harmon, the Chamber and so many others have done to help her on her journey — help others understand that a Black woman can be a community champion.
Bayoh said It drives her in everything she does.
“I sit at the intersection of cultural building,” she said. “I fundamentally do believe that the part I play is: How do we bring our culture, our communities, at the front of everything that we do and every conversation that we’re having?”
