She was a girl of 14 when she convinced her parents to let her travel abroad to attend World Youth Day, but little did she know beforehand the two-week trip to Italy and France would have such a profound effect on her future.

Sarah O’Brien said she remembers selling chocolate bars to raise money to help pay for her way, and remains convinced the only reason her parents let her jet off to Europe with her high school’s youth group was because Pope John Paul II would speak at the global gathering.

It was serendipity, perhaps.

“The memory that is imprinted on my brain is Paris, waking up and walking around and being totally jetlagged and basically following my nose to a bakery that was putting croissants out on their counter,” the Brookfield native said.

And before the group’s early morning flight back to the U.S. departed, “I went past that bakery and banged on the window. They sold me six croissants, which I proceeded to eat myself on the flight home … so, I was fully obsessed,” O’Brien said. “I had never seen a croissant, heard of a croissant. I think I thought it was a crescent roll that came out of a Pillsbury can.”

Sure, her family cooked and baked from scratch, said O’Brien, who, at 10, learned to bake from her grandmother, but they weren’t making croissants. It wasn’t until Paris that she got to taste French pastry — “a little engineering marvel with flour and butter,” she said.

The seed was planted.

Years after she followed her nose, O’Brien followed her heart and founded Little Tart Bakeshop in Atlanta. She now owns and operates three of the French-inspired bakeries as well as two soft serve ice cream shops, Big Softie, all in Atlanta.

October marks her 13th year in business. In August, she was given the Youngstown / Warren Regional Chamber’s 2024 Valley Champion Award.

Her journey from Brookfield to Atlanta included layovers at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she studied comparative literature and creative writing; in Iowa for a master’s degree in poetry; and twice more in Paris — once as a junior at Brown to study abroad and later for a teaching assistantship after her time in Iowa.

It was while in graduate school she noticed herself becoming the person who arrived at workshops with giant plates of cookies, and it was around this time she started to read books about food, about eating locally and about knowing where food comes from, she said.

Also while in Iowa, she said she worked for women who weren’t trained cooks or bakers, but incredible self-taught bakers and businesswomen. That experience, she said, proved she, too, could be successful and make a living in baking.

When 2007 rolled around, she returned to France to teach.

“That was when, I was explicitly like, I know how to get back to France. I will get a yearlong visa to teach English, but what I’ll also do is work in a bakery, so at that point it crystallized into I want to figure this out, I love to bake, maybe I could own my own cafe,” O’Brien said.

She convinced bakers at Au Levain du Marais in Paris to let her stage.

“I didn’t have formal training. I think it was for me, I got to be in the kitchen and it solidified for me that I love this, I want to do this,” O’Brien said.

She said she was drawn to Atlanta because of the region’s long growing season, which now enables her to get locally- and regionally sourced ingredients pretty much year-round, and excellent produce and meat. Best friends from Brown University were there, too, and they, before O’Brien relocated there, tried to persuade her to make Atlanta home.

When she did, O’Brien said, she took a clerical job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention while getting settled.

Simultaneously, she began planning for Little Tart, which started at farmers markets before she opened her first storefront in 2011. Two more Little Tart stores and two Big Softie stores, including the latest that opened in August, followed. Little Tart also still sells at three farmers markets.

She’s built a loyal following.

“It’s a very tricky business. I never once have been, like, this will be easy, because it’s never ever easy, not for a minute,” O’Brien said. “But I feel really supported by the city and I feel incredibly lucky that I have just an incredible team around me.”

The stores employ about 80 people.

The items they make are all from scratch.

“Trust me, my team is like can’t we just buy lemon juice? I’m like no, we are juicing the lemons,” O’Brien said. “We do everything from scratch, which is how I learned to bake from my grandma.”

The name Little Tart came to be, she said, after she toyed around with a few different names, but wanted in the end “something easily pronounceable and just a little bit cheeky,” she said.

“Plus, I don’t like my pastry too sweet, and tend to prefer things that have enough salt, and are a little tart,” she said, adding that in her travels she saw a cafe called La Petite Tart, which lodged in her brain and surfaced when she was trying to pick a name.