Teenage girl saves father’s bakery from closure with single tweet

'Spread the word. One retweet could bring in a potential customer,' Jackie Garza wrote

A single tweet by a teenage girl has revived her father’s ailing bakery business after thousands of people responded to her appeal for help.

A Mexican immigrant who has been in the US for decades, Trinidad Garza, 73, opened La Casa Bakery and Cafe in Houston, Texas two years ago.

However, business slowed in the wake of Hurricane Harvey and a week ago he was on the brink of shutting up shop.

“He told my mom he was thinking about selling, and he even had an offer,” his 18-year-old daughter Jackie told the ABC13 news channel.

She added that her parents were having to throw out the bread and cookies they had made each day because no one had bought them.

Faced with her dad losing his business, Ms Garza tweeted a video of him making Pan Dulce, a Mexican pastry, along with an explanation of his situation and the bakery’s address.

“Spread the word. One retweet could bring in a potential customer,“ she said.

Since then the video has been seen 1.1million times and retweeted almost 60,000 times.

With the flood of publicity, business has picked back up and this week the bakery is selling out of Pan Dulce and other Mexican treats.

“Overnight our business doubled, it’s been going really well,” Mr Garza, who started baking when he was 12-years-old, told the Mundo Hispanico news channel.

Ms Garza set up a website and Twitter page for the bakery and has been posting updates on its sudden success. They later shared a photo of rows of emptied baking trays with the caption: “Twitter did that.”

New customers have been sharing photos and videos of their trips to the bakery.

“And it’s all because of Mexican bread - that’s what I like most, that I’m spreading my culture. I’m very proud of where I’m from and where my parents are from,” said Ms Garza.