When first-time customers visit Sticky Fingers Bakery, a small, independent enterprise in Washington, D.C., some are so taken with the melt-in-your-mouth cinnamon rolls and gourmet cupcakes, they often ask the owners where they might find other locations of the store.  

“Are you in Northern Virginia, or Baltimore?” they’ll ask, referring to the surrounding area.

“No,” the owners will say. “But we are in Seoul.”

When longtime friends Doron Petersan, 35, and Kirsten Rosenberg, 38, opened their shop three years ago, expanding to another country wasn’t on their menu, particularly since their bakery isn’t your typical garden variety.

It is 100-percent vegan, meaning no animal products or byproducts are used in the preparation of foods. While vegetarians omit meat from their diets, vegans go one step further and make sure that their food does not contain animal-derived ingredients like eggs, butter or milk.

A bakery that uses no butter, milk, or eggs strikes some as paradoxical, but Sticky Fingers has gained a loyal following.

Top selling goods at the bakery include chocolate cake, fudge brownies and oatmeal cookie-cream bars, which take their place alongside more gourmet offerings like coconut delight cake and strawberry shortcake. Recipes are made with ingredients such as non-hydrogenated, trans-fat-free margarine and evaporated cane juice, which “mimic the flavor” of standard baking items, according to Rosenberg.

Sticky Fingers’ baked goods are not only cholesterol- and lactose-free, but surprisingly tasty. “If it doesn’t taste good, we don’t sell it,” Petersan says.

So how did a niche bakery concept, which relies upon a devoted, yet local customer base and advertises largely through word of mouth, come to open up a sister store halfway around the world?

In the summer of 2004, Chung Woo-Hak, a Korean businessman, was visiting a friend in D.C. and stopped by Sticky Fingers, where he tried the chocolate cake and was impressed by the taste.

“He did not realize it was vegan,” says Kyoung Hee Kim, assistant manager of Sticky Fingers Bakery in Korea. “He did not know even the word ‘vegan.’”

When Chung, 63, returned to Korea, he coincidentally saw a documentary on KBS featuring Sticky Fingers. The program, a profile of Korean American animal rights activist Miyun Park, a D.C. resident, showed her dropping by the bakery to say hello to Petersan and Rosenberg, whom she had befriended through their days working together in animal advocacy.

Within days of seeing the program, Chung e-mailed the bakery, expressing his interest in opening a Sticky Fingers franchise in Korea with another individual, Jons Kim. Petersan and Rosenberg ignored the messages for a couple months, thinking it was a hoax.

“We didn’t really take it seriously until they said they had bought a ticket and they were coming [to Washington D.C.],” Petersan says.

When Chung and Jons Kim came to D.C. in the fall of 2004, Rosenberg said the visitors, at first, seemed to approach the vegan concept as a “diet phenomenon.” Although the bakery’s exclusion of dairy products and trans-fat-free nutritional content offers individuals a healthier alternative to satisfy their sweet tooths, the visitors were warned Sticky Fingers’ goods were by no means “diet food.”