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More than just icing | Amy Bouchard of Gardiner built a better whoopie pie, and the world — led by Oprah — is beating a path to her door
When the cameras rolled for the Nov. 17 installment of the "The Oprah Winfrey Show," Isamax Snacks in Richmond was already whirring. The company was on its way to selling close to $600,000 of whoopie pies and muffins last year. It opened a new retail bake shop in Gardiner in July, fired-up its first website (www.isamaxsnacks.com) days before the "Oprah" show and was braced for its most hectic holiday season yet.
Then a basketful of the Isamax whoopies made their way centerstage to meet Oprah in front of a national television audience, and things got really busy.
"It was kind of like bang, bang, bang, everything happened very quickly," said Isamax founder Amy Bouchard, explaining what at first was to be just a brief mention of the cakey treats in Oprah's magazine. But the magazine's creative director took a shine to the whoopies, called them "glamorized Devil Dogs," and groomed them for a pre-Christmas television appearance.
The company, including its baking facility in Richmond, closed early that day so that Isamax's 10 employees could be home for the 4 p.m. show. "It was exciting ˆ— like watching a football game," Bouchard said. "When we saw the whoopie pies, everyone screamed."
The appearance couldn't have been better timed. The new bake shop and Internet presence were set to build the business's increasingly profitable retail side. With five new employees and equipment in place to expand production by 20%-30%, in part as a result of a new distribution deal to BJ's Wholesale Club, Isamax was poised to push to another level.
But the 36-year-old Bouchard takes a broad view as to what that level should be. A mother of two who started selling whoopie pies in order to spend time at home in Gardiner with her children, Isabella and Max (now 11 and 18, respectively), Bouchard says she's always used quality-of-life matters to balance the work required to keep up with the company's momentum.
And there's plenty of momentum. The plug by Oprah, an increasing number of distribution deals and a push to grow the retail side of the business means it's getting tougher for Bouchard to balance the demands of Isamax with the rest of her life. But she'll also tell you it's not a bad problem to have.
Baby steps
Bouchard founded Isamax in 1994 on the urging of family and friends who worshipped her whoopie pies. She left a clerk's job at Bath Iron Works and began baking three pies at a time in her home oven, selling them to mom & pop shops in and around Gardiner.
The pies sold like, well, hotcakes, and Bouchard had soon commandeered the family's kitchen, den and dining room. "I went from a hand mixer to one of those five-quart Kitchen Aid mixers and I thought, 'Oh my god, I'm all set for life!'" she said.
Today Isamax runs two 80-quart mixers in the commercial bakery Amy and her husband, David, bought in Richmond for $125,000 eight years ago. They've put another $175,000 into it since, mostly in the form of equipment, and David left his job as an electrical designer at BIW two years ago to work full-time with his wife. The bakery turns out 6,500 whoopie pies a day in a half-dozen varieties ˆ— classic, raspberry fruit and crème, peanut butter chocolate, pumpkin, chocolate chip and chocolate mousse ˆ— supplying distributors who sell the pies to convenience stores and gas marts throughout the Northeast, like Big Apple and Dead River. Bouchard says she's continually experimenting with new recipes that are sold in the company's Gardiner store.
Bouchard said she took all the free business training she could find when she first started out, including counseling from the Small Business Administration and Coastal Enterprises Inc. She also turned down several tempting high-volume opportunities early on, concerned not to bite off more than the start-up bakery could chew. "I took baby steps all the way through. I didn't want to get in over my head and I took on what I thought we could handle," she said. "And I knew the bigger stuff could come later."
Some of that bigger stuff came last summer, when Isamax entered into an agreement with a distributor for the big-box retailers Costco and BJ's Wholesale Club. The Costco deal alone would have called for an additional 14,400 whoopie pies weekly, which Bouchard prepared for by hiring three additional bakers and spending more than $12,000 on Costco-specific packaging. When Costco learned of Isamax's size, however ˆ— it claims to avoid companies with less than $2 million in revenues, saying it doesn't want to be responsible for outsized portions of smaller suppliers' business ˆ— it pulled the plug on the deal. BJ's remains, however, and accounts for about 10% of Isamax's business. "It hit us hard when Costco fell through," Bouchard said, but she hopes the loss of a potentially large wholesale client means she can concentrate on growing the retail side of the business.
Retail now accounts for about 25% of Isamax's revenues, Bouchard said, and was a factor in the company's 15% sales boost over 2002. Bouchard can't say exactly what her 2003 revenues will be, and says she's been so busy during the holiday season that she simply hasn't had time to check.
Richer, moister, cakier
Terry McGuire of Pine State Trading Co., one of Isamax's distributors, said his company this year has delivered 23,719 cases, or 142,314 individual Isamax whoopie pies, up from last year in spite of a more carbohydrate-wary audience. "It's our number-one pastry item here," McGuire said.
It's easy to taste why. If there is one fundamental difference between Isamax and much of the competition, it is that most whoopie pies tend to be all about the icing, resulting in a product where the cake is overpowered by a slab of intensely sugary filling. By contrast, an Isamax pie is cakier ˆ— richer, moister, more brownie-like ˆ— and the icing isn't so sugary: a whoopie pie with value added.
In spite of the value, whoopie pies did not, when Bouchard committed to starting her business, appear to be an idea whose time had come. She set off in an era when the snack food industry ($68.6 billion in 2002) had begun moving in a massive, tectonic shift toward lower-carb, lower-calorie, seemingly more natural and healthy fair. An estimated 61% of Americans are overweight, and the connections between obesity and chronic disease are becoming increasingly clear. The Institute of Medicine's Food and Nutrition Board in 2002 called for the public to halve its intake of carbohydrates and restrict refined and added sugars to 25% of total calories.
Even snackfood heavyweights like Frito-Lay are taking the advice, swapping the old hydrogenated oils for trans-fat-free corn oil in Doritos, Tostitos and Cheetos. Whoopie pies ˆ— rife with sugar and shortening ˆ— clearly run against the grain.
But while competitors often list more than 80 ingredients, the labels for Isamax's whoopie pies are comparatively easy to digest. Bouchard's classic whoopie pie charts 25 ingredients, and nine of those are included in the flour and cocoa. Her Raspberry Fruit & Crème Whoopie lists only 15 basic ingredients. Even so, Bouchard says there is no way to construe the treats as diet food. "I just tell everybody, 'We don't hold back on any sugar and it's all fattening,'" she said, noting that a standard-issue Isamax whoopie pie packs 600 calories. "So just have a whoopie pie and go for a walk."
Isamax will get its workout this year trying to balance retail sales with the high-volume grind of wholesale. Bouchard said she wants to see Isamax grow to 75% retail, while holding its current wholesale relationships steady. She includes direct mail, phone and Internet sales, along with the new bake shop, in her retail mix. The Gardiner shop retails Isamax whoopie pies for $1.05, while high-volume wholesale customers pay less ˆ— in some cases substantially less ˆ— than $1 per pie.
Bouchard said she'll sort through the opportunities and strategy for the upcoming year after the rush of the holiday season subsides. But she already has a few things in the works: In the spring, Isamax whoopies are slated for an appearance in Oprah Winfrey's magazine, O, and Bouchard said she recently received a call from the Florida-based baking show "Great Taste" about making an appearance.
"It's sometimes hard to split yourself into pieces ˆ— it'd be great if I was more than one person sometimes," Bouchard said, about the challenges of running a growing, dynamic company with a hot (and filling) product. "But I wouldn't have been doing this for 10 years if I didn't love it."
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