Daniela Stephanz Anderson is an Italian/Austrian American who learned to make her traditional Laugenbrezeln (Tyrolean-style soft pretzels) as a child in the alps of the Sud Tirol, where her Italian mother and Austrian Omama (grandmother) were born and raised near the Brenner Pass on the border of Austria and Italy. Daniela owns a specialty tour company based in the Dolomites and offers workshops taught by celebrities in their niches embedded in out of the box immersion tours around the world. Her cooking school vacations in northern Italy have won several awards over the decades.

In the Spring of 2020, Italy was placed on lockdown due to the Covid outbreak and Daniela was forced to suspend her tours. She always has had a passion for cooking and baking, so Daniela decided to open a bakery offering luxury cakes, pastries and breads highlighting her European upbringing and featuring her passion for art (Daniela has a B.A. in fine art and art history).

Daniela has been perfecting her special pretzels ever since she learned to make them as a kid, sharing them with family and friends both here and abroad. They became an immediate hit with her bakery clients as well. In 2022, she branded them as The Preppy Pretzel and started offering staffed pretzel bars at weddings and corporate/private events. In 2024, Daniela decided to focus exclusively on her popular pretzels, showcasing them at farmers markets, college campuses, military bases and festivals and adding our extremely popular Preppy Pretzel Buggy to our catering/pretzel bar options.

Each one of Daniela's handcrafted, gourmet pretzels is baked with love and passion! She and her team look forward to sharing her authentic, delicious soft pretzels with you! Prost!

Daniela grew up in a family that has been very active for generations both here and abroad in helping those in need. When she wrote the business plan for The Preppy Pretzel, she was very specific that her mission in spreading her pretzel love was to give back as much as possible to the community.

Our mission statement: "to give away more than we take in, to feed the homeless and know them by name, to feed all those in uniform, to hire those who have a difficult time finding a job (mental/physical disabilities, age, housing challenged, etc), and when the pretzels hit the financial success of our dreams, to provide housing, counseling and jobs for kids who age out of foster care."

We currently employ several unhoused individuals in the Washington D.C. region to help at markets and events. We feed dozens of people facing food insecurity weekly in the neighborhoods where we sell our pretzels. Pretzel sales fund food distribution, tents, sleeping bags, phones, backpacks and other supplies to those in need in Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia. We work with local food kitchens and would love to get involved with more, We have a team of friends who have asked to help in our initiiatives called The Pretzel Angels.

We feed police officers, EMTs, security guards and anyone in uniform. If you happen to be in the area of one of our weekly markets, please stop by and get a hot, fresh pretzel! To those who serve, thank you so much for all you do!

If you know of individuals facing challenges or would like to be one of our Pretzel Angels, please get in touch with us!