By ANN HINCH
Assistant Editor

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — Comfort and cookies belong together, so Ellison Bakery’s main sales booth at the Indiana State Fair was ideally placed, just inside the main doors and near the benches of the air-conditioned Family Arts Building, out of the 90-plus-degree heat.

2010 was a big year for Ellison at the fair, introducing cookies under the bakery’s own name for the first time there. It was just a year ago the 65-year-old Fort Wayne business began selling its nine varieties of cookies in what Sales and Marketing Director M.J. Sparks calls a “slow roll,” in an effort to establish them gradually in markets.

Each package contains 10 good-sized soft cookies; there’s Rocky Road, with a rich cocoa flavor; or perhaps oatmeal – with or without raisins. Molasses, raspberry- or date-filled, sugar, chocolate chip (of course!). Or maybe it’s something different you’re after, such as Sparks’ favorite: Soft Apple-Raisin, a moist, gooey cookie heavy with fruit. They retail for up to $3.29 a package at stores such as Marsh and other independent groceries, and Sparks hopes to place them in Krogers by the end of the year.

For nearly half a century, Ellison baked cookies as a franchise for the Archway brand. In 1997, Sparks said the company sold the franchise back to Archway and baked under contract for another 11 years, until Archway declared bankruptcy (Archway’s debt was purchased in late 2008 and it is back in business).
“All we did was bake cookies,” Sparks said, despite the fact the bakery was founded on doughnuts and pastries in 1945.

Don Ellis and his father, Leonard – or “Pop” as he was popularly known – started the business in Don’s garage, baking daily for local businesses. In 1950, Sparks said Ellison Bakery (so named by running “Ellis & Son” together) became the first Archway franchise in the nation. He added each franchise bakery had its own recipes for the cookies; there was no standard company-wide. This is how Ellison retained the right to its recipes after parting ways with Archway.

“We had been wanting to do our own brand, anyway,” Sparks said.

The family-owned company revisited longtime formulas to make improvements and assembled focus groups and tasting panels to test the varieties it was developing. “We’re continually playing with different formulas to see what the customer will like,” said Jeremy Ellis, Research and Development quality assurance manager and Don’s great-nephew.

Ellison bakes 1.5 million cookies each day, according to Ellis, for its own brand as well as still packaging cookies for other companies. Sparks said the bakery also sells non-retail cookies to institutions such as schools and manufactures crumbly, crunchy products for the ice cream industry, such as toppings. “Most everything we do has some kind of cookie heritage to it,” he pointed out.

Ellis said the wheat flour Ellison uses for its cookies is milled in nearby Ligonier, Ind., and the wheat itself is grown in Indiana and Michigan. Some other ingredients have a Midwest origin, as well, such as some sugar from Michigan, oats from Iowa and eggs from Wisconsin and Minnesota.

“As far as some of these specialties we get, they’re not in Indiana, but we definitely try to (buy) domestic wherever possible,” Ellis explained.

The company is planning to introduce three more cookie varieties this month and three more after the first of the year, as well as some sugar-free cookies in 2011. It also bakes special holiday cookies for two months at the end of the year, including wedding cake, cashew nougat and macaroons.

Ellis said his great-uncle Bill Ellis, Don’s brother, is still with the company as chair of the board of directors. Another seven family members work in Ellison Bakery’s divisions. Jeremy Ellis explained as he was growing up, his father told him to learn every bit of equipment and how it worked in the bakery – so, he cleaned, mopped the floor, ran the scrubber “and anything else (my father) could think of.”

Ellison Bakery employs 100 people; of those, 65-70 are full-time permanent jobs, according to Sparks. Recently the company added 150,000 square feet, expanding its main bakery, offices and on-site warehouses to approximately 400,000 square feet.

Sparks said the company takes pride in the softness and freshness of its cookies, partly thanks to foil packaging that he said blocks out ultraviolet light and keeps in moisture, and partly to rotation. Archway, he said, had a 26-week shelf-life when Ellison baked for it, meaning that’s how long a package of cookies was allowed to stay in the store unsold before the company removed it.

“That’s a little bit hard to do with a soft cookie, and make it taste the way it should,” Sparks said, adding Ellison instead uses a 13-week rotation.

The company distributes to stores in several states in this region, from Michigan down to Georgia and across to Louisiana, and from the Carolinas over to Missouri. Sparks hopes to expand into the Northeast and the Southeast, fully intending to be in Florida late next year.

Then, Ellison will go West. Eventually, Sparks said it would like to become the biggest soft cookie distributor in the country – not in the world, just here at home.

“We’re not interested in competing with the Keeblers and Nabiscos of the world,” he said.