‘Ma’am, this is a Starbucks’: Iowa Alum a Star on Coffee TikTok

PHOTO COURTESY IVY MARKETING GROUP Social media influencer and entrepreneur Stefania Marzelia recently launched Sips, a company that makes coffee syrups with simple, limited, and organic ingredients.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, after leaving the University of Iowa campus to return home when classes went virtual, Stephanie Zullo (22BA) started scrolling TikTok. As she watched videos parodying various service industries, she thought about all the stories she had from her days as a barista. One day, Zullo decided to make a video about it.

Sporting a green apron like she was at Starbucks, she pretended to talk into a headset at a drive-thru. “No,” she said, “we cannot do 25 pumps of sugar-free mocha.”

Though clearly satire, she knew other baristas would understand it wasn’t that far off from reality. She posted the TikTok.

The next morning, a friend texted her, “Your TikTok has 80,000 views on it.”

“I opened up the comments, and it was all these baristas,” she says, asking for more barista-related stories and content.

She began making short videos, inspired by real interactions from her time working at a Chicago coffee shop: customers ordering while talking on the phone, customers insisting their order was wrong when it was not, customers refusing to order off the menu.

Zullo, whose social media alter ego is Stefania Marzelia, says she tries to make videos that are comedic, transparent, and open. “It's been great, the community that I’ve built so far,” she says, “and, fingers crossed, it keeps growing.”

After initially posting on TikTok, she’s expanded to Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Threads, and Pinterest. Her audience has now grown to nearly 1 million followers across platforms—and a new business.

As a barista, Zullo says she often put away the coffee shop’s weekly stock, noticing many ingredients in the products included dyes, additives, and preservatives.

“You can’t even pronounce half these ingredients,” she says. “It was just so gross.”

Focusing on clean ingredients, she began sharing beverage recipes in her posts, eventually also creating syrup recipes. The enthusiastic online response to her recipes inspired Sips, a company she launched in October 2024.

“Whether you want to be an entrepreneur or do something different, it’s so important to find mentors. And professors are the best mentors.” —Stephanie Zullo

Syrup offerings include Madagascar vanilla bean, warm brown sugar, tiramisu, and hazelnut toffee. Coffee roast options, such as Gold Coast Medium Roast and Maplewood Cold Brew, are named after Chicago neighborhoods. She also plans to add matcha to the mix.

The company has grown in just a few short months; when she began the business, she shared commercial kitchen space in Chicago entrepreneur incubator The Hatchery Chicago. Already, she has her own private space there.

Zullo, who grew up in Crystal Lake, Illinois, and now lives in the city’s West Loop, graduated from Iowa in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in enterprise leadership. She credits Iowa business professor Joseph N. Sulentic (88MBA) for helping her think big and advises students to build rapport with their professors. “It makes all the difference in your professional career,” she says. “Whether you want to be an entrepreneur or do something different, it’s so important to find mentors. And professors are the best mentors.”

This year Zullo hopes to expand into local markets, maybe even creating a coffee cart to bring to farmers markets and other summer events.

“We just have so many ideas,” she says.