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BAKER MILLS CONTACT INFO |
THE STORY | KODIAK CAKES | PRODUCTS & GIFTS | ||
| RECIPES | CUSTOMER LETTERS | MEDIA COVERAGE | |||
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Cooking up a Healthy Business |
Homemade from a Box Mixes for Everything from Cakes October 24, 2001 Six years ago, brothers Jon and Joel Clark, along with sister Christie Winterton, took the old family recipe for thick, fluffy flapjacks and transformed it into a just add-water mix called Kodiak Cakes. Now the Utah siblings and their company, Baker Mills, are cooking
up more than just breakfast, using their all-natural, whole-wheat
hot cake mix as a base for homemade cookies, cakes and muffins. Doctoring boxed mixes with extras from the pantry - from pudding to cocoa to lemon extract -has become a convenient and reliable way for busy cooks to quickly make almost-from-scratch baked items. The possibilities for using mixes seem endless, especially after looking at the pages of Anne Byrne's popular cookbook, The Cake Mix Doctor (Workman, $14.95). The book began as a newspaper headline in the early summer of 1998. As the food editor of The Tennessean, in Nashville, Byrne wrote a story about how to jazz up cake mixes using ingredients from the pantry. She offered readers some of the recipes she had saved through the years and invited them to send in their recipes. She received more than 500 responses. And the idea for the book was born. In Utah, Stephanie Ashcraft of Provo self-published her own book, 101 Things to Do With a Cake Mix. Known as the "cake lady," Ashcraft gives classes at some of the Macey's grocery stores. Both books include recipes for doctoring cakes by adding pudding, extra butter, eggs, chocolate, extracts, spices and dried or canned fruit. Besides cakes, there also are recipes for using a cake mix to make cookies, fruit crisps, cheesecakes and even a gingerbread house. The popularity of Byrn's book, which spent several weeks on national best-seller lists, speaks to today's harried cooks who yearn for the baked goods of their youth, but who lack energy and time. "Baking need not be an ordeal calling for a multitude of pans, an open calendar and a refrigerator stocked with gourmet ingredients," wrote Byrn. "It can take place on the spur of the moment with a cake mix and a modest pantry." But when it comes to frosting the cake, she always shares her mother's advice: "You can get away with baking a cake from a mix," Byrne wrote, "but you absolutely must make homemade frosting." Baker Mills is tapping into the same trend. Winterton said the Kodiak Cakes mix, which is sold in more than 500 supermarkets and specialty shops, is always on hand so she can make hot cakes and waffles for her family. "But one day, I just started making other things with it," she said. So far Winterton has come up with more than a dozen recipes for everything from cookies and cakes to muffins and scones- all of which use 1 to 2 cups of the mix. The recipes, which were tested at high altitudes, are available on the company Web site at www.kodiakcakes.com. "Bisquick pancake mix has always been used for other things," Winterton said, adding that customers are more likely to buy the mix "if it can be used for other things." The Salt Lake City based Baker Mills bills its Kodiak Cakes as more wholesome than typical pancake mixes because it is made with whole-wheat flour, honey, egg whites and non-fat dry milk. Many people with diabetes find it fits their diets because it doesn't have a high sugar content. "We had a lot of naysayers who said it would be too expensive and it would never sell," said Jon Clark. But today the mix is sold in specialty shops around the country and grocery stores in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Washington, and California. Gross sales from 1999 increased from $50,000 to $155,000, Clark said.
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