Capturing the scent of groves

Clementina Eley remembers walking to school in Santa Ana as a little girl and smelling the oranges growing in nearby groves.

To her, the fragrance was a staple of California. It is also one that the now-55-year-old Fullerton resident misses, since those once-fruitful groves have been replaced with strip malls and other signs of local unrelenting development.

Eley said she and friend Diane Parent, whom she met while their children were attending Laguna Road Elementary School in Fullerton, decided it was time to “bring the zest back” to Orange County. So in 2011, they came up with Orange Clementine.

The bakery creates cakes, cookies and other confections using real California citrus, specifically oranges and lemons, from the women’s backyards.

“When we go to events and farmers markets, it tends to be the older generations who look at our products and get carried back with nostalgia immediately,” Eley said. “It really was the heyday of citrus. It’s part of the history of this area.”

The women bake their goods in an industrial kitchen in La Habra but have no storefront. They peddle their items wherever they can and also sell online.

Last year, they focused on seven farmers markets each weekend as well as 21 food events throughout the year.

“We kind of felt like the Beverly Hillbillies for awhile,” Eley said, joking. “We’d pack up our truck or van and off we went.”

The women first created their orange cakes and eventually added individual-size cakes, sugar cookies and shortbread cookies to the mix.

And oranges and lemons are just the primary ingredients. Their other all-natural ingredients include apricots, poppy seeds and pistachios.

All of their ingredients are California-grown, which fulfills their mission to spread a little of The Golden State through sales nationwide.

“We are really looking to build a big business that can represent California,” Eley said. “One of the things we wanted to do was take that whole citrus industry that was a part of our culture, that we remember from growing up here, and turn it into something people can enjoy and send all over the states.”

Parent, 58, of Fullerton, said the business goal is not to have a retail storefront but to build Orange Clementine’s online presence and continue to sell primarily that way.

“I would love to be the premiere online California shop,” said Parent, who owned the now-closed Koji’s Japan at the Block of Orange. “Younger people don’t go out to shop anymore. They go on their phones or on their computers to get everything. We should be their second pick after Amazon.”

Some of their biggest customers are corporate offices. They said the Anaheim Convention Bureau is a year-round client.

The treats come in either decorated packaging or wooden crates that help make them presentable as gifts. Eley and Parent consider the holiday season to be Orange Clementine’s peak time — Eley said it’s typical for her to process online orders for more than eight hours a day during the holiday season — but they say their products are popular throughout the year as birthday and new-neighbor presents.

The women, who have filled every function from CEO to dishwasher, said they would like to build up a team to help with the day-to-day operations.

“I tell people we’ve been in business five minutes because the first four years flew by since we were so busy,” Parent said. “It’s perseverance, hard work, dedication and a cocktail every once in a while just to keep you going.”