Baking it.
Christina “Chris” Martin is a pastry chef, grower, and the owner of Florosa, a bakery & flower farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. Originally from Northern California, Chris has always been rooted in local agriculture with an early love for farmers’ markets, gardening, and thoughtfully sourced ingredients into every stage of her culinary career.
She earned her Associate’s degree in Baking & Pastry from Johnson & Wales University in Providence, followed by a Bachelor’s degree in Food & Beverage Entrepreneurship completed online while working as a pastry cook in Chicago.
Her mother’s side of the family is from Nicaragua, though her passion for recipe development and process comes from her father’s love of William Sonoma cookbooks and Alton Brown.
Before founding Florosa, Chris built bakernobakery as she moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Charlottesville, with a few popups in Chicago along the way.
Chris’s pastry perspective took shape through different evolutions of bakernobakery. Her first menus focused on naturally leavened pastries, then to french technique + donuts, then landed on pan dulce and panadería culture across Mexico, Latin America, and South America.
Her work during this chapter earned features in En Forme Magazine, a cover story for Edible Blue Ridge, and a panelist position for a caterer edition of the Queer Food Foundation’s “Queer All Year” series. in 2026 Florosa was named as the "Best Bakery” in Virginia by The Local Palatte.
Outside the kitchen, she is also an ambassador for CHOW (Culinary Hospitality Outreach Wellness), a nonprofit supporting mental health and community care within the hospitality industry.
Chris has a tree nut allergy, and therefore all baked goods at Florosa and tree nut and peanut free.